Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Avoiding Short-Term Thinking In A World of Big Data
My latest piece for Fast Company's Co Exist site is up here - making the argument that the coming future of big data could erode our ability to think and focus on long-term futures. It begins with an old story about how metrics can mislead us:
A few years ago, a group of economists led by Nobel prize winning Joseph Stiglitz tried to develop measurements of societal well-being beyond the standard metric of GDP, which only measures a narrow spectrum of economic activity. Beyond any of their specific recommendations, though, their report brought to light the history of GDP, a history that is incredibly instructive for the coming age of big data. The story? GDP was never meant to serve as a proxy for social well-being, but simply as a way to track economic output.
Over time, and with few other tangible metrics that give any sense of how society is doing, GDP has inadvertently become the default measurement that governments use to evaluate how much, or little, they’re doing to enhance well-being. As Stiglitz wrote at the time, “what we measure affects what we do."
You can read the rest here