How Influence Is Measured Across Different Sectors

The hardest problem in any cross-sector list is comparison. Sectors have incompatible units — capital, headcount, patients, students, audience — and no arithmetic converts one into another.

Why metrics do not transfer

Ranking by money controlled would place finance above everything and misrepresent influence in health, education, government and culture. Ranking by people affected produces the opposite distortion.

Any single metric selects a sector rather than measuring influence.

The common standard we use

Instead of a metric we apply a common set of questions to every candidate, and answer them within the context of their field.

What decisions can this person make or prevent? How consequential are those decisions for people who are not party to them? Is the influence durable, or attached to a position that could be vacated tomorrow? Does it operate on New York specifically?

These questions are answerable in any sector, and they produce comparisons that are arguable rather than arbitrary.

Position against effect

We distinguish between authority a role confers and influence a person exercises. Two people in identical positions do not necessarily have equal effect, and the difference is usually visible in what has actually changed.

Informal influence

Some of the most consequential influence is not attached to a title: convenors who assemble the people who decide, advisers relied on across institutions, organizers who can move a constituency.

This is harder to verify, and we hold it to the same evidentiary standard — we need to be able to point to something.

Where we are weakest

We are more likely to identify influence in sectors that generate documentation. Fields with less coverage, fewer filings and fewer public proceedings are harder to assess, and our lists under-represent them.

We state that rather than pretending to a completeness we do not have, and it is the reason we take nominations seriously.