Risk Metrics Project Update – November 2022

This post is an update on the risk metrics project I described a few weeks ago. You can read about the origin of the project and the intent here.

If you recall, the underlying metrics for the project had to meet the following criteria:

• Broad, not narrow (meaning the metric has widespread effects)

• Publicly available

• Easily understandable

• Updated frequently

• Commonly used

Unfortunately, for a lot of the data I looked at, I could get four out of five criteria but often one remained out of reach. Usually, this was frequency as some macro-indicators are published in annual reports, not weekly or monthly. However, for a macro trend such as literacy rates, a year-on-year measurement is sufficient, which means that the final criteria could read regular or frequent.

This newfound freedom helped me include several indicators that I thought would be useful, and I’ve compiled these below with some explanations.

And as a quick aside, thanks to those of you who voted for the usefulness of the criteria. And if you didn’t but want to add your say, you can vote here.

There are 20 different measurements in the table below, which include my rough notes on how these might be applied. There is some overlap here, and I suspect some will track each other closely, meaning we can drop the less effective metric. (That might mean the one that’s less widely available or updated less frequently.) 

Something that might seem like an omission is that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) measures aren’t included here as I can’t work out if this is one metric or a dozen. Moreover, DEI might not be tracked or available for many locations meaning that these would fail the ‘commonly used’ criteria above. Equality legislation may be a proxy, but the level of compliance would be the better measure. All of this is a knowledge gap of mine so I’ll keep working on that to see what kind of a meaningful measurement I can find.

Nevertheless, that’s the initial 20 criteria that I’m going to start compiling and standardizing. I’ll be sharing updates on these over the next few months along with ideas of how you might want to use these in your own risk assessments.

I’d love to hear your comments on the criteria above and you can vote for how useful each element would be here.

Note that this update is from November 2022, so there may have been adjustments to the list since publication. You can see all updates to the project under the Risk Metrics section here.

Photo by Crissy Jarvis on Unsplash