We Are the World, We're Not The Numbers

"It seems to me," my father told me one day in 1970, "that a lot of the nation's ills could be cured by a ten-year cessation in the production of MBAs."

This intrigued me, since I had aspired to be one. I was accepted at MIT's Sloan School of Management, but my draft number was 54. My draft board was taking everyone through 60 who didn't have a deferment. If I had gone to grad school, I would have majored in M-16s and rice paddies. So I asked him what was wrong with MBAs.

"MBAs are trained to work with numbers," he said. "They assume that the numbers describe the real world accurately. They do things that make the numbers better and they can't tell the difference between that and making the world better."

That was just a few years after Robert McNamara, the ultimate MBA, told David Halberstam "Every quantitative indicator we have tells us we're winning this war." (For those a little rusty on history, "this war" in 1970 meant Viet Nam.)

A couple of years later, a crusty old engineer told me, "Son, never make the mistake of confusing data with facts."

A lady who had worked at the World Bank told me about a program to combat the devastating effect of rats on harvested crops in Argentina. The government put a bounty on rats -- bring in a rat body, get a dime. The rats poured in. The dimes poured out. The rats played pinochle on your snout...
Oh, sorry. The rhythm got to me there. The loss of crops continued unabated. Some smart bureaucrat (probably an engineer and not an MBA) figured out that the rats pouring in were getting smaller. Investigation showed that the campones were raising thousands of little rats to turn in for the bounty.

The numbers are not the world.


Except for 54, my draft number, which was my world, and which is also the wrong answer to the question "How much is six times nine?" (That joke is for Thomas and other "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" fans. If you didn't get it, then be grateful. Be very, very grateful.)