Derek Thompson

So I would love for you to tell people,

What is the explicit message of this product?

And then what is the kind of underground river secret message that you're trying to leave people with to tell us what metrics are doing to us and to our world?

I'm hearing you say two things.

The first is that metrics are useful precisely because they

compress complicated information, right?

The concept of heart rate variability, or my resting heart rate the moment before I fall asleep, these are useful because they can help me live a healthier life.

Metrics compress information.

That's the first thing I'm hearing.

The second thing I'm hearing, though, is that metrics aren't just useful, sometimes they're catastrophically useful.

They're so useful that they pull our attention away from the

that was our value before the metric existed, and they pull us toward this new value that is created by the convenience of the metric.

So one thing that I want to do here, I'm sorry, maybe you want to jump in right there.

You should finish, but I'm excited.

What I want to do here is force you to make the case against metrics by my defense of metrics.

So I got into journalism by initially being an economics reporter.

And there are a lot of economic statistics that I would argue have extraordinary value.

Poverty is a rate.

It is a statistic.

And I think it is a moral good to push the poverty rate down.