There is a quiet tyranny at work in our institutions – in healthcare, education, social care, even culture and the arts. It is rarely named, let alone questioned. It wears the sensible shoes of accountability, the confident smile of cost-effectiveness, and the bland reassurance of ‘evidence-based practice’. It arrives in spreadsheets, procurement frameworks, key performance indicators (KPIs) and funding formulas. Yet behind its neutral facade lies a profound violence: the reduction of life’s value to what can be counted.
This is the tyranny of the measurable.
Excel as inquisition
“I don’t do Excel,” said Cat Hyde, co-founder of Seagulls Reuse, a Leeds-based social enterprise that works at the vibrant intersection of environmental sustainability, art, inclusion, and recovery. Cat’s aversion to spreadsheets is not about a lack of digital fluency, but rather, I suspect, a psychological resistance to the reductive contortions required to satisfy bureaucratic appetites for ‘evidence of impact’.
Seagulls is a place where people find new purpose after prison, after addiction, after estrangement from work or home. It is a site of mutual care, dignity, and imaginative reconstruction. But to survive in the contemporary funding ecosystem, it must translate its soul into quantifiable ‘social value’. How many tins of paint reused. How many hours volunteered. How many employment pathways created.
The danger is not just that something gets lost in translation. It is that what cannot be translated – joy, belonging, repair, enchantment – is rendered invisible. And in the modern system, the invisible counts for nothing.
Counting what counts
There is, of course, a place for data. We should be able to account for the use of public funds. But the problem comes when counting becomes the lens through which meaning is viewed. When metrics replace narratives so that the spreadsheet becomes the truth and the story just an anecdote. The River of Data and The Stream of Stories.
In health and social care, this logic is endemic. A community nurse’s effectiveness is measured in completed visits, not the way she looks into the eyes of a dying patient. A youth project must evidence ‘improved outcomes’ through pre- and post-intervention surveys, even if the true success was simply keeping a young person alive another week. A dentist offering free evening clinics must be ‘reducing urgent care demand’ instead of being recognised for restoring dignity and function to the mouths of the forgotten.
When care is reduced to measurable output, it ceases to be care in the full moral sense. It becomes service provision. Task completion. Risk mitigation. And something vital, something human, is amputated from the work.
When profit displaces value
Even if we accept the logic of quantification, we must ask: why is it applied so selectively? Why are some contributions required to be proven in minute detail, while others are allowed to pass unquestioned?
Take Seagulls. Their work surely reduces demand on public services: people who find stability there are less likely to end up in A&E, in crisis care or the criminal justice system. The organisation diverts waste from landfill, creates meaningful employment, builds community cohesion, and nurtures beauty and belonging. But such outcomes are relational, slow-burning and emergent – hard to measure. So their value must be ‘evidenced’ through case studies, theories of change, and social return on investment calculations, to be taken seriously.
By contrast, fast food outlets, gambling firms, paint manufacturers and airports like Leeds Bradford may contribute directly to worsening public health, ecological degradation, and community harm, yet face no such burden of proof of value. While their profits are measurable, their impacts are diverse but dispersed and the true social and environmental costs are obscured.
This is the upside-down world of quantification culture: those who mend must prove their worth, while those who wound are rewarded in GDP.
Qualities that go unrecognised
The deepest damage done by the quantification culture is not just the hundreds of hours spent writing funding bids, strategy documents or evaluation reports. It is to our moral imagination. We begin to see the world through a flattened lens. Rich, relational, multi-dimensional enterprises are reframed as delivery units. Staff become FTEs (full-time equivalents). Patients become throughput.
Beauty, wonder, care, risk, grief, none of these easily fit the cells of Excel. And we lose the moral imagination that might allow us to imagine a better way. We just shrug our shoulders and whinge about capitalism. As if this is all inevitable. But it’s been made by man. It can be undone, I suspect, by women.
According to the mathematician philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, this state of affairs is a classic one of “misplaced concreteness” – mistaking an abstract model for the real world. Once a set of metrics is created, it becomes “the reality” we manage. All that is left out is assumed not to matter.
But it does matter. Ask any mother, any support worker, any community organiser. They know the difference between a service that functions and one that cares. Between a clean performance report and a lived experience of dignity. But the system no longer knows how to listen to their knowledge.
Resisting the tyranny
So what might resistance look like? Perhaps it begins with a refusal to collude. With the courage to name the violence that masquerades as rationality. And with the choice Cat has made – to centre the story, not the spreadsheet.
It may also involve cultivating new ways of accounting, more narrative, more qualitative, more dialogic. Asking better questions:
- What changed for the people involved?
- What did they feel?
- What stories emerged?
- What relationships were restored?
These are not soft questions. They are the soil in which true flourishing takes root.
Measuring what we care about
This is not a call for chaos. There are real limits, real scarcities, and we have to make hard choices. But let us not pretend that the spreadsheet is neutral. It is a moral artefact. What we choose to count reveals what we have chosen to care about.
So let us choose more wisely. Let us reimagine evaluation not as an audit but as a conversation. Let us honour the unmeasurable, the laughter, the listening, the quiet transformations that resist commodification.
And let us never forget: not everything that counts can be counted. And not everything that is counted, counts.
