Dear Keith - A fascinating piece.

Most of the things that matter in life cannot and should not be counted and any attempt to measure such noble attributes quantitatively often turns the virtue into a vice.

This is one of the major failings of neoliberalism from the Chicago school. It is exacerbated by the Harvard Business School sophism of "what gets measured gets done", especially with the deification of algorithms and big data and it eventually dehumanises society.

Just phone Centrelink or Queensland Health and after enduring relentless looped renditions of the Beethoven's Fur Elise, the first question asked is "what is your CRN?" or "what is your HRN?". The needy identified as mere numbers. Never again indeed.

When lucrative performance bonuses are at stake, what gets measured gets manipulated and the metric is managed to the detriment of genuine performance.

The undesirable consequences are all too evident as free market fundamentalism degenerates into a pernicious paradigm of gangster capitalism and noble humanitarian attributes are merely categorised as woke impediments.

The fingerprints of McKinsey & Company and many notorious corporate brigands and other obsequious acolytes, which include our federal minister for disease are inevitably discovered during the subsequent public inquiry or royal commission.
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McKinsey and so many others have (and given their eminence, I think deliberately) abused the words and ideas of 'the Father of Quality', W Edwards Deming, which are often cited as "if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it". Deming, rightly lauded for his contribution to efficient manufacturing with a human insight, had said, "It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth.” From such misinterpretations - deliberate or otherwise - foolishness flows - KJ