Off the Books

Entropy. The word comes from physics. It measures the disorder of a system, and it has the disagreeable property of increasing on its own the moment you stop paying to hold it back.

Order is expensive. Disorder is free.

Datatropy takes its name from there.

An expert organisation is an order. It took decades to install its hierarchies of reputation, its rituals of evaluation, its tacit way of knowing who counts. All of it held because producing cost something. Producing costs less and less.

These essays are about those entities. Laboratories, expert practices, scientific, legal, medical and industrial divisions — any organisation where some part of what gets decided rests on the judgment of a few people, which is to say very nearly all of them. They share something no one has ever put a figure to: their capacity to recognise good work without being able to explain why it is good.

That capacity appears on no balance sheet. No manual passes it on. It was enough for a long time, and of late it has become the resource that decides more and more. Hence the title: Off the Books.

Two publications a year, at most. The texts are long. They do not set out to be read quickly.