Measuring the readily measurable

Freedom, Democracy, Justice: Isolated Nouns or Interwoven Verbs? (Part #3)

The development of indicators that endeavour to measure intangibles such as democracy, justice and freedom follows from the extensive development of economic indicators allowing analysis of economic performance and predictions of future performance for the benefit of business. These focus on the tangibles of any economy and are vital to its responsive management.

Economists have been slow, and resistant, to consider factors that are less readily measurable. Typically these include externalities, namely costs or benefits, not transmitted through prices. Strikingly these factors have included unpaid "housework" as well as the productivity of the informal (black) economy within which so many are obliged to operate to some degree -- "betwixt and between" (Living as an Imaginal Bridge between Worlds, 2011).

A valuable distinction is made between:

negative externalities, such as air pollution, anthropogenic climate change, systemic risk, overfishing, moral hazard, and waste disposal
positive externalities: incidental benefits to the environment from economic activity (beekeeping, etc), subsequent development enabled by inventions, education inhibiting disruptive social activity

The question with regard to democracy, freedom and justice is whether they are effectively commodified within the economically biased context of society as it is currently conceived. Put briefly, to what extent can each be "bought":

democracy: can be understood as being effectively bought through the capacity to buy votes, media time, opinion makers, or software manipulation of electronic voting, etc -- processes that have proven to be only too prevalent in "democratic" countries. To what extent has democracy become a media exercise in the manufacture of consent (Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: the political economy of the mass media, 1988) ?
freedom: can be understood as bought through the payments made to "people smugglers" to move people to countries held to be characterized by "freedom", or by manipulation of opinion to persuade people that they already have the freedom to which they aspire. This is most notably evident with respect to freedom of choice -- ensuring inhibition of recognition of the choices which have been rendered inaccessible (Framing the Global Future by Ignoring Alternatives, 2009).
justice: can be understood as readily bought through payments to the influential, to the judiciary, to ensure the silence of witnesses, and the like. Few would deny the capacity of the wealthy and influential to avoid exposure to justice.

However the question in what follows is whether what is bought constitutes the essential nature of the value by which people are inspired and for which they yearn. As with many more tangible products, is it the case that the commodity bought is a symbol or token of something more elusive? An old advertisement had as its value-based slogan: Buy a Buick -- Something to Believe in.

The fundamental nature of such values -- perhaps a "defining" criterion -- is then perhaps best recognized through the fact that they cannot be "bought". They are each in fact held to be "priceless", which is why they are so highly valued. The only sense in which they are "bought" is through the sacrifices by which they are acquired, defended and celebrated -- often associated with death, as is currently the case in the revolutions in the Arab world.

Such subtlety has been attentively explored in recent research on measurement of happiness -- as with efforts to measure Gross National Happiness. More conventional, but arguably of similar subtlety, is the nature of confidence as a "value" of such recently proven importance to the financial markets. In this case efforts are made to measure both consumer confidence ) and that of CEOs and corporate directors (Consumer Confidence Index; Global Consumer Confidence Monitor; Directors' Confidence Index; CEO Confidence Index; CEO Confidence Survey).

Of related interest is the Unisys Security Index -- a global social indicator regarding how safe consumers feel with respect to four key areas of security:

National security - security and epidemics
Financial security - bankcard fraud and ability to meet personal financial obligations
Internet security - spam, virus and online financial transactions
Personal security - physical risk and identity theft

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Measuring the readily measurable