The Problem of Over-Quantifying

Living in Indonesia nowadays means everything must be quantified within the growth paradigm. Nothing is wrong with quantification. In the economic discipline, quantification helps people to make a rational choice, thus, leads to efficiency. However, the problem lies when everything started to be over-quantified without thoroughly understanding the context.

Long before Indonesia started to quantify everything, the debate over quantitative and qualitative methods has already been existing among researcher and academia. I had my internship at a reputable global research institute in Germany. During my casual talk with one of the notable political science professors there, he grumpily complained to me, “those economists sometimes don’t like me. They think what we are doing here is just a narrative, not real science.”

I was only smiling listening to his complaint. Even among those smart-productive researchers, this classic debate still exists. But the question is, how if the narrative itself tells the truth but it is rampantly underestimated in the name of reliability?

It is true, while the quantitative shows the dissemination of the data and effectively explains the surface situation, qualitative explores what lies behind the wall or sometimes what the reality is. In the anecdote way, quantitative only shows quantity and numbers but the real quality is only explained by the qualitative approach.

This can obviously be seen in the country’s nowadays problems. In order to tackle the corona issues, the government has been planning to disburse billions of rupiah to boost the tourism-economic sector. This is since the virus outbreak is merely seen in the quantified-growth paradigm and that is the only possible way it can be measured.

The effect is real, poor quality in mitigating the true problems regarding the outbreak. People are confused with the country’s outbreak mitigation plan and lead to panic buying of all necessary stuff to tackle the virus. We are very poor in handling the data protection of the virus suspects and results on public shaming. While quantifying the corona effects through the growth perspective, the government fails to address the true narrative behind the wall.

The corona outbreak is not the only illustration. The emerge of gigantic omnibus law clearly simplify the complicated narrative behind all involved sectors in the name of quantified investment growth. The elimination of environmental effect assessment is proposed amid the country’s complex environmental problems, particularly in the mining and extractive sector. The corruption eradication commission is crippled while the country’s corruption perception index is ranked 85 of 180 countries and has score 40 of 100 (100 means very clean).

The problem of over-quantifying is can be exacerbated with the lack of adequate data, mislead calculation and incapability of personnel in converting all narratives into quantified numbers. The country, unfortunately, had experienced this situation.

In the poverty eradication sector, the country introduced proxy-means testing (PMT) in its poverty reduction’s targeting mechanism back in 2005. This statistical-relied approach, however, failed to effectively address the poverty issues and the mechanism was later combined with community deliberation approach.

The examples of past and current mistakes should be enough for the government to re-think their over-quantifying approach. It is understandable if the government intends to achieve rapid economic growth amongst the uncertain global economic situation. However, not all aspects of people’s life should be seen and measured through quantitative approach and excessively ignore the qualities.

The state should remember that they are not particularly a merchant who only relies on the price and profit and loss principle. The more important is to recognize where does the goods and the price come from. Failure in acknowledging this element leads to the hidden truth of unfair practice behind the price or over-exploited generated goods.

Picture source:https://sourcesofinsight.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/image47.png