The Dark History of Data-Driven Decision Making

We are all familiar, if not totally comfortable, with the amount of data corporations collect on the performance of their workers. The analytics that come from this data is not only used to improve individual productivity, but also find innovative ways to make business processes more efficient.

The most obvious example is a customer service call center. Characteristics of a call center operation may include:

• The comprehensive and meticulous collection of detailed performance data such as keystrokes, call completion times and hourly, daily and weekly call quotas.

• Constant monitoring and supervision by a hierarchy of managers.

• Continual worker performance evaluation, driving a reward and punishment system, backed by data.

• Classifying and segregating the tasks assigned to workers by skill and performance levels, also backed by data.

• Specialization of business administration jobs that surround and support business operations, such as facilities, security, human resources, purchasing, accounting and legal.

If you were to guess what era first perfected this system, you might select:

• The current era where personal computers, networking, telephony converged to provide a powerful business model.

• The 1950’s and 1960’s when professional management came into its own providing theory, education and practical guidance to corporate leadership.

• The Second World War when a nation’s production of war materials, and the ability to increase production and improve quality, literally was a matter of existential survival.

• The turn of the twentieth century when industrialization took an exponential leap enabled by coal, steel, steam, the assembly line and the new science of efficiency, time and motion study.

In truth, the characteristics of data collection, data analysis, performance monitoring, rewards and punishments, specialization of support roles, and the never-ending drive for greater productivity was perfected, with brutal efficiency, much earlier than one would expect.

If you haven’t guessed by now, it was the cotton-growing, slave labor system in the United States during the first half of the 19th century. So says Matthew Desmond a professor of sociology at Princeton University and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. His article is titled "In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation." However you see the plantation system in your mind’s eye, this article will provide a new and powerful lens that focuses on a data-driven decision-making world that has many uncomfortable similarities to our own.

I’ll only provide this extensive and enlightening quote. You can read the article for yourself and decide what you think.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html?searchResultPosition=5

“Like today’s titans of industry, planters understood that their profits climbed when they extracted maximum effort out of each worker. So they paid close attention to inputs and outputs by developing precise systems of record-keeping. Meticulous bookkeepers and overseers were just as important to the productivity of a slave-labor camp as field hands. Plantation entrepreneurs developed spreadsheets, like Thomas Affleck’s “Plantation Record and Account Book,” which ran into eight editions circulated until the Civil War. Affleck’s book was a one-stop-shop accounting manual, complete with rows and columns that tracked per-worker productivity. This book “was really at the cutting edge of the informational technologies available to businesses during this period,” Rosenthal told me. “I have never found anything remotely as complex as Affleck’s book for free labor.” Enslavers used the book to determine end-of-the-year balances, tallying expenses and revenues and noting the causes of their biggest gains and losses. They quantified capital costs on their land, tools and enslaved workforces, applying Affleck’s recommended interest rate. Perhaps most remarkable, they also developed ways to calculate depreciation, a breakthrough in modern management procedures, by assessing the market value of enslaved workers over their life spans.”