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Now, call me naive—not all at once, please, settle down—but I hoped or imagined these metrics would be interesting, sneaky sorts of measurable quantities that would point towards goals like effective governance and security in unexpected ways. The sorts of things you’d expect to find in Freakonomics. Maybe the quantity of potable water consumed by schoolkids every day in a given district had turned out to be a remarkably good indicator of low government corruption. Or maybe it would be something about measuring broken windows, or aggregate non-burqa’d female faces recorded by security cameras and crunched by facial-recognition software. Andrew Exum wrote back in March that David Kilcullen had told him of a unit that was measuring the variety of vegetables on sale at the local market, to see whether farmers were growing more than just poppies. At the very least, I figured the metrics would involve numbers.
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The Economist’s blogs remain the go-to fountain of up-to-the-minute dry, droll snark. I love it.
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