Global league tables are interesting, but not always reliable
MEASURING things is hard. Counting mentions of them is easy. Google’s new search tool Ngram Viewer lets users find out how often a word occurs in the millions of books the firm has scanned. It also helps analyse the salience of abstract ideas—corruption, say—in different languages and places (see chart).
Lots of new numbers will be grist to the mills of those who compile international rankings. The hunger for crunchy comparisons of everything from venality to brainpower is huge and growing, not least among media such as this newspaper. It is tempting to try and pin ideas down by turning them into figures. Such measures can be handy. But they have serious flaws.
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