Column | Winning is addictive

I’m about to write something negative about rankings, but first for the sake of completeness: ranking (also known as: arranging) is one of my hobbies. I recently ranked all fourteen cafes I visited in Hamburg on my flip chart from nice to stupid, quite a job.

Creating a hierarchy is tempting and everyone does it, from children who write down their favorite animal in friends’ books to Mark Rutte, who last year included a visit to Groningen earthquake victims in his “top two intense visits”. It is also timeless: in ancient times a distinction was already made between cardinal and less cardinal virtues. (I, in turn, also ranked the cardinal virtues on my flip chart, but that’s besides the point.)

Rankings only become problematic when they suggest an objectivity that is not there and, on that basis, influence reality. Utrecht University decided partly for that reason, this week we will no longer supply data to the influential ranking of Times Higher Education. Another reason was the fact that rankings “place too much emphasis on scoring and competition.”

The university rankings are part of a broader phenomenon: the quantification of large parts of our lives. De Volkskrantwrote last weekend about the increasing influence of online reviews. At first they were limited to products, but now you can even provide maternity care combs. This perverts relationships between people. I think of the shy campsite owner who, visibly embarrassed, begged me for a positive Google review. And to the sellers on second-hand clothing app Vinted, who often send candy, sweet notes, perfume or heart-shaped candles. Everything for the five stars. Understandable, but I don’t want to be a Roman emperor who decides other people’s fate with a thumb; nor do I want to be in that arena myself.

Rankings such as those of universities differ from consumer ratings: the assessment is not democratized, but is carried out by institutions such as Times Higher Education. Yet there are also important similarities. Firstly, that so-called objectivity, expressed in a figure. The quality of a university, for example, cannot be captured in one score: it involves different faculties, education and research, and there are several (imperfect) measurement methods. Second, ratings and rankings always lead to stress. They turn people into competitors where before they weren’t, or weren’t as visible.

I don’t know how many books have been written about the rat race in neoliberal society, but I don’t need to read them anymore. For me, the question of why has been dealt with intellectually: people get stressed when everything is a competition, period. The main question now is: how is it possible that the diagnosis of a social problem is so obvious, and yet nothing changes – in fact, that it only gets worse?

The tricky thing about the rating culture is that we not only suffer from it, but also benefit from it. All of us, both the reviewers and the users. Those rated benefit in an economic sense: a good rating makes money. At Uber, a rating lower than 4.6 (on a scale of 5) will even get you kicked off the app, so you have to submit to customer discipline. And a positive rating also has psychological benefits: it is simply addictive to win. As long as the chance of reward is high enough, the rats will keep running.

The users, in turn, benefit too. How easy it is to check which restaurant has the best score in a foreign city, instead of going through it trial and error find out where you (not) enjoy your food. That old tactic now seems unfathomably inefficient. You are a thief of your own dining pleasure/holiday pleasure/career if you don’t look at the scores of restaurants, holiday homes and universities.

“Measure in moderation,” says Berend van der Kolk, author of The Measurement Companyin the Volkskrantarticle. Unfortunately, that is precisely the difficult part: people’s hunger for measurement is limitless. Only collective action can do something about this. That is why it is good if universities resist the rankings: it can be the start of a counter movement. But if we want to put an end to quantification, we must also be willing to give something up. Without those handy figures, we have to put more effort into figuring things out ourselves. Maybe even go to a bad restaurant once. Do we still want that?