English · livello B2. Leggi il testo in inglese e allena la comprensione. Il video con audio e sottotitoli sincronizzati è in arrivo sul canale YouTube.
The belief that what cannot be measured cannot be managed has produced some of the most consequential errors of recent governance. It is a belief that sounds like rigour — a commitment to evidence over intuition, to fact over feeling — but it conceals an assumption that is not itself evidence-based: that the things that matter most are the things that can be quantified. This assumption has never been demonstrated. In many of the domains where it operates most powerfully, it is demonstrably false.
Medicine provides examples. Patient satisfaction scores can be measured; the quality of a physician's clinical judgement cannot, at least not directly. The result is that hospitals optimise for the measurable and neglect the unmeasurable, which is not the same as the unimportant. A physician who takes the time to build trust with a patient may produce better long-term outcomes than one who processes them more efficiently — but the efficiency is in the data and the trust is not.
Education offers parallel cases. Student performance on standardised tests can be measured; intellectual curiosity, the capacity for independent thought, the disposition to engage with difficult material — these cannot, or can only be approximated by proxies that are easily gamed. The incentive to teach to the test is a structural consequence of measuring the test and not what the test is supposed to measure.
The sociologist William Bruce Cameron is sometimes credited with the observation that not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. The formulation is neat enough to have been misattributed to Einstein, which is itself instructive. We want our reminders to come from people who understood numbers.
This is not an argument against measurement. It is an argument for honesty about what measurement can and cannot do — for holding quantitative data in a framework that acknowledges its limits rather than treating its existence as a substitute for the judgement that no instrument can replace.
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