The Misuse of Numbers

Mass democracies such as the United States, that have embraced meritocratic criteria for elite selection and mass opportunity, are tempted develop impersonal, objective, mechanical, measures of quality. Why? The seductiveness of such measures is that they all turn measures of quality into measures of quantity, thereby allowing comparison across cases with an apparently single metric. This chapter attempts to sketch that logic and argue that it is irremediably and fatally flawed.