Take Care How You Measure Success

The Moneyball Principle

Michael Lewis’ Moneyball isn’t really a book about baseball. Ostensibly, the work chronicles the unlikely pennant run of the Oakland Athletics in 2002—how a small-market squad (payroll $40M) stayed competitive with big-market Goliaths like the New York Yankees (payroll $125M). Lewis argues that the A’s accomplished their feat through an innovative approach to statistics. This meant thinking harder about what, exactly, contributes to success and how best to measure it—and that’s what the book is really about.¹

It should be clear enough how the Moneyball Principle applies to life. Not that we should become insufferable stat-dorks—but we should consider very carefully what standards and metrics we use to evaluate ourselves. And not just individual people, but families, schools, churches, organizations of all sorts, and even countries should take this to heart.

The woes of the United States of America in the 21st century serve as a textbook example of how to fail the test. For several decades, we have lacked any coherent understanding of what it means to flourish as a country—besides for Gross Domestic Product and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It’s hard to imagine a more subtly tragic fate that can befall a people. Using bad metrics is like trying to style your hair in front of a warped funhouse mirror: to make it look right in the mirror, you will have to make it look ridiculous in reality. We tailor policies to make the lines go up, without much consideration of why—we just know that it’s trouble if they don’t. But if the lines keep going up even as life in America gets worse—as it clearly has for at least a few decades—the time has come to rethink things.