I received the following responses to yesterday’s essay on Community Values by Dee Hock.
Chris Macrae writes:
I am hugely fascinated by this topic and Dee Hock’s viewpoint. The particular section which gets me shouting hooray, hooray is:
“If we were to set out to design an efficient system for the methodical destruction of community, we could do no better than our present efforts to monetize all value and reduce life to the tyranny of measurement. Community is more than a mega-balance sheet with the value summed on a bottom line. Money, markets, and measurement have their place. They are important tools indeed. We should honor and use them. But they are far short of the deification their apostles demand of us, and before which we too readily sink to our knees. Only fools worship their tools. There can be no society without community. In fact, there can be no life without it. All life, all of nature, all earthly systems, are based on closed cycles of receiving and giving, save only that gift of energy which comes from the sun. There can be no life whatever without balanced cycles of giving and receiving. Nonmonetary exchange of value implies an essential difference between receiving and getting. We receive a gift. We take possession. It is a mistake to confuse buying and selling with giving and receiving. It is a mistake to confuse money with value. It is a mistake to believe that all value can be measured. And it is a colossal mistake to attempt to monetize all value.”
Now I agree 500 per cent with this except I want to reverse one logic. It seems to me that measurement is such a pervasive thing in large companies that the only way to interact it is (fighting fire with fire) to present a missing measurement system but one where non-monetary value exchange is included and where sustained community health is what its designed for navigating. Only by delivering this missing measurement system to corporate boardrooms, can we get it to be treated with the same pervasive attention across companies as the old measurement systems they currently operate round. (In fact once a boardroom treats our measurement system with the same seriousness as say shareholder value analysis then the fun begins in terms of how the 2 systems interact to hopefully produce higher level intelligence in boardrooms, and other spaces where the biggest investment decisions are made, including nonprofits like world bank or whoever you feel makes big public decisions but with a community accountable measurement system)
Arthur Noll writes:
I am cautious about this. That money works poorly for measuring many things I agree with. But I must go further. I cannot find anything money and markets are good for measuring. He says that money, markets, and their measure are valuable tools. I strongly disagree. They are inherently flawed measures. They only measure relative scarcity, and do not take into account the need for conservation. If something is abundant and easy to get, markets encourage people to use it, to be wasteful of it. “It’s cheap!”. Conservation, to keep a resource abundant and easy to get, is ignored. Markets are an inherent tyranny, forcing people to behave in unsustainable ways to get by. If one person is exploiting resources and underpricing you as a result, you have to follow and exploit the same or better, or go out of business. This will destroy community, as well as destroy natural resources.
Tyranny also comes with monetary measure in that people with common talents are also considered cheap. If something is abundant, it is cheap, according to markets, and we see this reality in the job market. With this measure, community is destroyed. How many rich people do you see hanging around with the poor on a regular basis? And yet the reality is that we are all dependent on each other. The smallest positive contributor to society can sometimes be just as important as the biggest, for all may fail without it. (For want of a horseshoe nail, the kingdom was lost…)
With regard to the “lost measure” you are looking for, we can find this in the measure of energy and sustainability. For example, when I write that something is easy to get, I could also say that it is energy efficient to get it. We spend a small amount of energy to get something that typically has a lot of energy in it. Cut down a tree, for example, the energy you spend cutting is very small compared to the amount of energy in the wood, that can benefit a person by being burned to keep warm, or by being shaped into shelter that holds heat. So it can be energy efficient to cut down a tree. But if we want to cut down a tree in the future, we cannot cut them down faster than they grow. We have to behave sustainably. If we want to cut down a 100 year old tree every year, we need to keep 100 trees of various ages growing to replace the one we cut. Since other creatures also kill trees at various ages, that needs to be taken into account. If we don’t pay attention to these factors, and cut too many trees, we are able to use a lot of trees today, and have very few tomorrow. The energy efficiency can go way down, we have to search further and further to get the trees we need.
These are measurements that direct us to behave much different than we have. All of the things we need have these measurements of energy efficiency and sustainability. They have been ignored in favor of living rich today and let tomorrow take care of itself. Tomorrow is here and the real price of things will be paid.
The community values of love, trust, are also measurable according to energy. How much energy will someone put into getting back something they love? That is a measure of the intensity of their love. Energy is an honest measure, the same today and tomorrow, not like the flawed measure of money. When Dee says that love cannot be measured, I have to disagree. It cannot be accurately measured in terms of money, but it can be measured in terms of energy. Sustainability is also an objective thing to measure, it isn’t some vague thing. Love is an attraction to something, it is a physical, measurable thing. Quite basically, most people have not valued community, not valued loving each other, as much as piling up wealth. It is measurable in their actions. With so much destruction, a few people are starting to sober up from the wild party of consumption, and see what they have lost. We hear words about the need to “expand the pie”, but that means expanding the earth. The earth is a finite place, we know of nothing that will expand it. We are in a trap.I’m sorry, Dee’s words look to me like a promise to have one’s cake and eat it, too. That is what people want to hear, but that doesn’t mean it can be done. Getting out of this trap is going to take a lot of blood, sweat and tears, and most people won’t make it at all. The courage to face up to the simple, fundamental mistakes that have been made, is not sufficient. We got to this point by the majority ignoring the future, or expecting miracles in the future. It was the easy path. This psychology of taking the easy path continues, it so much easier to expect a miracle, whether of technology, or of religion, than to struggle with this trap, to do the mental equivalent of gnawing off your foot to be free of it.
The love of money is the root of all evil”. Timothy 1:6″And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.” Matthew 5:29
Timothy, It is rare that I get anything new that rings a bell for me. This article did. It clarifies a problem that I have struggled with for years and made it coherent for me. In companies I have for years well understood why the management obsession with measurements to be insanity. I did not make a clear connection between this and money but now I see it.
Thanks
Barry Carter