Because quality is unmeasurable, productivity pressure drives staffing cuts rather than quality improvement.

Evidence

But there is more to the debasement of public services than pressures and interests. A large part of the problem stems from the orientation toward measurement, precision, and scientific management itself. Consider the formula productivity = service quantity and qualitylcost. Two of the determinants of productivity, service quantity and cost, are easy to measure; the third, service quality, is virtually impossible to measure. Managers under pressure to improve productivity are likely to try to cut personnel or obtain more work from existing personnel. because these are the terms of the equation for which measures are available and which managers can manipulate. Thus staffs are reduced to bare bones without reduction in responsibilities. Thus staffs are asked to do more without increases in personnel. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1241

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A structural argument that the measurement apparatus itself — not ideology, not malice — selects which dimensions of public service get destroyed. The unmeasurable dimension is the one sacrificed.
• SEED: Angle: ‘The Metric Eats the Mission’ — how any productivity formula with one unmeasurable term guarantees the erosion of that term, from policing to teaching to social work.