Francis Galton, measurement, psychometrics and social progress

Modern cultures are deeply imbued with notions of measurement. Nearly all scientific disciplines depend heavily on mathematics, and the social sciences in particular have seen a rapid recent development of quantitative methodology and accompanying measurement regimes. Political debate also involves the use of measurements of all kinds and it is often assumed that the introduction of new measurements or the expansion of existing ones needs little justification. Sometimes, but rather rarely outside of the statistical and other scientific professions, discussion will revolve around the accuracy of measurements and whether they could be refined, but the default assumption is that more measurement is a good thing. A particularly interesting example can be found in current debates in the UK and elsewhere, around the opening up of government databases. Thus, in April 2010 a UK government website (data.gov.uk) made available thousands of official datasets and was warmly welcomed by many ‘data freedom’ commentators, including an anonymous news item in the Royal Statistical Society journal Significance (June 2010). Without wishing to decry this and similar developments (the author is, after all, a user of such databases), what is interesting is the almost universal assumption that the more data we have, and make public, the better. Another contemporary example is that of institutional accountability where there has been an enormous increase in performance indicators or ‘league tables’ ranking the ‘performance’ of schools, hospitals, universities, individual scientists, police forces, etc. This has, of course, been driven partly by the advent of information technology that has made the collection and processing relatively straightforward, but again relies heavily on the assumption that having more data has to be a good thing, even though debate may be needed on what to measure, how to measure it, how to process it and how to display the results. Yet measurement has not always been so popular, and 100 years after the death of Francis Galton (and also incidentally Alfred Binet) is not a bad time to reflect on how we got here, who helped us to get here and how much of it was worthwhile. In the space of a relatively short paper, little more can be done than to provide a sketch