Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate economist and philosopher who spoke recently at Tufts, helped design the Human Development Index, which ranks all countries on a single list based on life expectancy at birth, years of schooling, and gross national income per capita. Sen seemed a bit chagrined that he is famous for this. The work took him only a few hours, he said. The formula was extremely simple. He called it a “vulgar index,” because it lumps together diverse variables in a potentially misleading way. He said that he agreed to do it mainly at the urging of his very old friend Mahbub-ul-Haq, who believed that an ordinal ranking for all nations would win media attention and help to undermine the tyranny of GNP growth, too often treated as the only measure of development. Mahbub-ul-Haq was correct, because the HDI gets global attention and has even been a central issue in some countries’ election campaigns. A set of separate indicators wouldn’t get much notice.

In my own small way, I have tried to do something similar by creating the Index of National Civic Health (INCH) for the National Commission on Civic Renewal in the 1990s, which led to the Civic Health Index, which continues today. Our idea was to challenge the dominance of economic growth by adding a measure of civic engagement that could also be tracked. Like the HDI, it was a “vulgar” measure, designed for subversive purposes–or, to put our objective more positively, to provoke a good discussion.

One interpretation of such efforts would go like this: There are facts about the world. A full picture of the world would be very complicated, but we can strive for it. Once we have “the data,” we can choose what to emphasize and whether to use positive or negative adjectives to describe reality. That is a matter of imposing values, opinions, or preferences on the data. Finally, once we have an informed opinion about what to do, we can try to change the world by persuading other people to agree with us. Creating an index is an example of a rhetorical tactic that may prove persuasive. This, then, is the “positivistic” model:

facts > interpreted by opinions > transmitted by strategies > changes in the world

I assume Sen would reject this model. He knows that one can reason about values as well as data, so selecting and morally evaluating information is not just a matter of imposing subjective preferences or opinions on reality. For instance, it is right to see an increase in lifespan as a good thing (all else being equal). Further, what we call “data” is always imbued with norms. Education, for example, is a component of HDI–but what is education? Years spent in school looks like a hard number, but no one believes it’s worth measuring unless it is a proxy for education, rightly understood. In fact, you can’t even tell what counts as “school” without some basic value-judgments. Defining education requires a moral theory of the human good.

Sen knows all of the above, and I interpret his model like this:

reasoning about facts and values (taken together) >> transmitted by strategies >> changes in the world

For instance, Sen reasoned for a long time about human development–a rich and complicated topic–before Mahbub-ul-Haq gave him a strategy to influence the public debate: generating a “vulgar index.” The index changed the world, at least modestly.

I would push the critique of positivism further. A moral theory is no good unless it has beneficial strategic consequences. We can announce that everyone should be equal, but unless we have a plan for making everyone more equal without producing a tyranny or chaos, that statement is worse than no theory at all. Further, the information and ideas (including moral ideas) with which we reason come from somewhere. They are produced by people and institutions. By communicating strategically, we influence the process that produces the data and arguments with which we reason. Thus I would connect all of the following with two-headed arrows: facts, values, and strategies. And I think people in influential positions, like Amartya Sen, should be held accountable for having good strategies, not just good values and data.

(see also Why political recommendations often disappoint: an argument for reflexive social science, Is all truth scientific truth?, Bent Flyvbjerg and social science as phronesis, A real alternative to ideal theory on philosophy and Abe Lincoln the surveyor, or the essential role of strategy)