The Basics of Counting

Robert McNamara died over the weekend. He came into government from Ford, where he supposedly used the new theories of management to make the company more zippy. Regardless of the verity of that, his career in the government was considerably more problematic. He grew up in a generation that thought that numbers became real - so a lot of what he did in his role in the Department of Defense was to initiate ways to count things. He also tried to standardize - so one of his biggest fights was whether there could be a standard procurement for certain weapons systems.

In a book written several years ago - In Retrospect - the Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam - he tried to write an apologia for his six years as Secretary of Defense. Early in the book he says "To this day I see quantification as a language to add precision to reasoning about the world." It is clear that Mr. McNamara, for all his supposed intellect, never bothered to think about the odd things that quantification can do. Numbers are constructs, Hayek recognized that in the Counter Revolution of Science. McNamara created a culture where numbers became real. So if we counted the number of enemy killed in a particular skirmish we could figure out how well we were doing. The problem with that logic is that it takes no account of how important the mission was to the people we were fighting.

In the book McNamara portrayed himself as a developing dove on Vietnam. I did not find his explanation credible. His career in government is a good testament to cautions about hubris.