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"Public management by numbers" has experienced an international policy boom in recent decades, and big claims have been made about its performance‐enhancing effects. But it is hard to assess such claims systematically, even though we can find dramatic anecdotes of cases in which management by numbers seems to have had performance‐weakening as well as performance‐enhancing effects. In an attempt to build on studies that have gone beyond critiquing the statistical validity and reliability of performance numbers for public services, this article develops two hypotheses about performance enhancement, arguing that (1) the performance‐enhancing (or ‐obstructing) effects of management by numbers will vary according to whether the numbers are used for the purposes of targets, rankings, or "intelligence," and (2) the performance‐enhancing (or ‐obstructing) effects of those three applications will vary according to the culture in which they operate, working differently in hierarchist, egalitarian, individualist, and fatalist settings.

This paper assesses what happened to academic public administration (PA) in Britain in the 2000s in the light of Rod Rhodes' gloomy prognostications about the future of the subject in the late 1990s. It argues that British PA had such a good decade in the 2000s, in funding, output, academic‐practitioner interaction and institutional developments, that it could almost be said to have 'never had it so good', even if 'British PA' was probably less internationally distinctive in the 2000s than a century before. But even if the subject flourished against the odds in the 2000s, Rhodes' sombre assessment of its future cannot be dismissed. British public administration faces several potential threats in the 2010s and beyond: in funding, research, and teaching capacity. But extinction still seems an unlikely fate for British PA even when a sombre view is taken of the funding outlook and the changing balance of supply and demand.