[brendano]

Eventually I realized that the only reason the companies pushed so hard, why they insisted so strongly on rankings and scores over information and analysis, was because it made it not their problem anymore. They didn’t have the credentials to pull 50 ‘good’ countries from 100 uncategorised ones, so they used us to push the responsibility away. ‘It’s not me saying Bolivia is an 8.2,’ they could tell their boss. ‘A human rights NGO said it was. Making shoes there is totally approved.

What else would you expect the corporation to do? Eventually, someone in that organization has to make a decision, and that requires the complex information about countries' human rights situations to be summarized in a simpler way -- for which a ranking is one approach.

It sounds like they wanted the NGO to do this summarization. If the NGO didn't do it, then they'd get someone else or from within their organization to do it.

Something like rankings are inevitable. They fulfill a huge information need. The fact there are lots of poorly done rankings out there won't change that. This just means, it's even more important to make useful rankings that reflect good information.

(And besides rankings, there are perhaps coarser-grained options, like making several tiers of groupings, only asserting each is an equivalence class ... or finer-grained options, like giving each country scores in three different categories. Etc. But in all cases, the incredibly rich and complex source information has to be summarized somehow.)