CHARISMATIC MEGAFAUNA & AND DATA FETISHISM

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

-Goodhart’s Law

There is actually a problem in the larger donations/charity based, do-gooder-iverse, especially in the corners that I’m familiar with, roughly, education, youth empowerment, houselessness, that constellation of buzzwords, that mirrors one I’ve only heard described (since I have no first-hand experience in this realm) from people in the environmental charities. Namely, that there’s a marketing/publicity problem where donors, at all socio-economic levels, are drawn to charities, causes and organizations that focus on large, recognizable animals (like, say, issues surrounding the ivory trade) while efforts that are scientifically proven to be more impactful and urgent (like, say, protecting plankton diversity) don’t get the same sort of attention and therefore money. That makes sense when you realize that so much of this sort of work is geared towards providing a jolt of personal virtue to the donor. It's much more practical, when we viewed from the perspective of the individual donating (and thus operating in a market) and this is the only way were ever supposed to think about anything, to get a photo of a whale you’ve adopted rather than a technical explanation as to how your money is being used to reduce emissions slightly in some far-away region. These animals, your lions or elephants or pandas, are collectively and somewhat derisively known as “charismatic megafauna”

There’s a similar dynamic in the fields I’m more familiar with. For years I worked with kids in the foster care system who had profound behavioral problems. Seems like a pretty easy match for charismatic megafauna, people love kids, especially kids who are in a hard place. But even here the logic was at work. For years the easiest part of the job was Christmas, the typically hard-to-wrangle volunteers became plentiful, there were people lining up to sing or donate cookies, and the kids always got an almost laughable amount of presents. These kids had, almost to a person undergone some of the most horrific trauma I’ve ever heard about, so good for them for cashing-in one day a year, but the scale of the donation (it’s important to keep in mind that this is all taking place in wealthy Seattle), bikes and stuffed animals and Switches and Xbox games and remote control cars, etc., was truly astounding. And doubly astounding when coupled with the economics of the facility otherwise. The job was very hard and the pay wasn’t great and, as you might guess, the state cares very little for these children so the facility actually lost money on every single kid, every single day. Getting money donated to, say, pay people more, retain staff better, or hire more people to keep the ambient milieu calmer was near impossible and a source of constant stress for everyone (which the kids, hyper-vigilant from trauma, obviously picked up on). Unlike an orphan opening up a present on Christmas morning, the sense of feeling slightly safer because the adults around you are better equipped, doesn’t quite hit like that.

 I once received this message in a very blunt manner early on during my “career” in this field. When I was 18 I worked at Americorps, specifically City Year, in Chicago. AmeriCorps, as you might guess from the name, is actually partly supported by the government, but like so much these days, it also must raise money itself through donations and other outside support. Large corporate donors would sponsor City Year teams at specific schools and want to be mentioned in all the material and to have us plan a “service day” that their employees could attend. That trickled down to us, the City Year Corps Member, in the form of making sure all of our service days included at least one photogenic element. Typically, this took the form of a mural. I vividly remember that we once planned a day of repainting a school gym in the existing color layout, which was cracked and chipped but cool and retro and had clearly be chosen by someone, long ago, who knew what they were doing. But, were told that there’d be volunteers from one of our corporate sponsors (the vile Deloitte, if I’m not mistaken) present and they wanted to make sure there’d be a photo-worthy mural at the end. We did counter that the gym would be photographically different and improved under the original plan but they wanted something with a bit more pop. City Year, at this time, was an education-focused organization, the main thing we did was literacy tutoring for elementary school students. While there were some talented artists in our cohort, people didn’t join City Year because they could draw or create murals and we weren’t ever trained to do so. Sadly, none of the graphically talented Corps Members were on our team that day so this gym on Chicago’s Southside ended up with a comically and impressively bad Michael Jordan mural. But when you structure the parts of our world that are meant primarily to better and improve the world, the larger do-gooder-iverse I spoke of that includes everything from NGOs, to government programs like Teach For America or the Peace Corps, to nonprofits, to churches or political organizations, around the same monad/consumer framework that structures seemingly everything else in our world you end up with the metric for “success” being the jolt of feeling elicited from the donator (these sorts of organizations also offer reputation laundering of the Epstein sort at the very highest levels as well, but that’s a separate and more limited problem) and this arrangement will always and definitionally run up against the Charismatic Megafauna conundrum. 

As a brief addendum, I’ve recently noticed a twist on the Charismatic Megafauna conundrum, namely the emergence of a pernicious and shallow data fetishism. I’m sure cultural historians have and will trace the genealogy of this line of thinking, I noticed a real uptick in the Obama years, with the rise of Nate Silver being the most obvious example, but, briefly, there’s been a recent trend, to fetishize and revere “data.” Talk of being “data-driven” is mandatory at this point. If you aren’t constantly logging and analyzing data, you’re doing it wrong. While this might make sense for, say, a baseball team, in more complex realms, like say teaching, this approach can and does obscure. The problem is that there’s a seductive quality to data, it seems to promise to break complicated issues down into math that an intelligent person can interpret and grow wise from. So you don’t need to be an expert on the subject at hand, what you can be is someone who understands data and can therefore direct those with the practical experience but who lack data-fluency. The result is spending as much time doing the thing that’s your nominal job as entering or collecting “data” that is, again nominally, supposed to streamline and increase efficacy. In the Peace Corps I would have to travel for literal hours to find an internet connection good enough to fill out a quarterly form about how I spent my time. When I worked with foster children I frequently had to stay late to fill out state forms about how the children, whom the state was spending as little on as they possibly could, spent their time. At its most extreme, this data fetishism doesn’t just waste time, though that is plenty annoying, it also distorts results. For example, years after working in Chicago, I got a different job at City Year, this time in LA and this time in a management position. I was overseeing a group of volunteers who were providing direct tutoring to elementary school students. At the beginning of my time some of the teachers asked me to instruct my tutors not to pull the kids out of class to give them one-on-one instructions, but instead to sit next to the kid in the class and offer one-on-one assistance that way. Not a problem, I thought. I told the volunteers that and didn’t think about it until I was spoken to by my boss about my “numbers” and the data. Since, of course, the volunteers have to fill out forms that say how they spend their time, my team's numbers around out-of-class one-on-one instructions were dropping. I explained why and I got a great answer to illustrate why this sort of thinking is short-sighted. I was told that number needs to be high because that is what donors can see. That because these rich people weren’t teachers and hadn’t really thought about teaching, they needed to see numbers, that they could both understand and that demonstrated “impact”, even if they didn’t understand what is lost when you reduce something as subtle and complicated as learning to data. Because to the data fetishist everything can be understood if you are clever and sophisticated enough to collect the right data about it. And again, this is so seductive because it posits that you don’t need experience or specific expertise in an area to make decisions or be in-charge, armed with the right data and a data-driven mindset, you can actually be more effective than those who are engaged with the work on a real-world level. This is how you not only end up with MBAs in charge of Education programs but how you end up with everyone telling you that this is preferable to someone with classroom experience.