In Bona Fide

THE OBSESSION WITH PRODUCTIVITY IS KILLING THE WORLD

Posted in General by Ferdinand Bardamu on December 1, 2011

You can see the negative effect of our obsession with metrics and productivity in areas as diverse as academia, law enforcement to manufacturing. In every single case, they follow a rather predictable trajectory starting with an initial apparent increase in productivity followed by a slow decline and hollowing out of that institution. This trajectory is a result of fact that metrics and productivity reward people without any consideration of the effects of doing so- aka perverse incentives. As I had mentioned in an older post- this is a circular problem since perverse incentives create the need for more metrics and other measurements of productivity.

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