I’ve been thinking about a pattern I keep seeing in modern organisations and across our society: the assumption that everything can be quantified as a financial calculation.
I call it Financial Derangement Syndrome.
It’s the belief that something can only have real value if it can be measured in dollars, in monetary value.
We can observe Financial Derangement Syndrome all around us. For example, when companies cut costs to improve their stock price, without regard for the downstream effects those cuts will have on less tangible pillars like morale, proficiency and even efficiency.
The problem is that money is a tool for trade, not a law of nature. Its value is shaped by human interpretation, social systems, incentives, and change. Money is not a universal measurement that exists independently in material reality or the natural world.
- A person’s worth is not how much profit they generate.
- A child’s education is not just a future ROI.
- A forest is not just the value of its timber.
- A community is not just its GDP contribution.
- An idea can be valuable even if it can’t immediately become monetised.
Metrics are useful. Finance is essential to our modern world. Businesses and governments need accounting to make sensible, sustainable decisions.
But when we confuse price with value, and assume everything has a price, we start focusing on and optimising the wrong things.
The irony is that many of the things that create the greatest long-term value, such as trust, creativity, knowledge, culture, relationships and wellbeing, are often the hardest things to put on a spreadsheet.
Money is a measurement system. Accounting helps to assign a value to material things, but it cannot always quantify everything.
Any accountant will tell you as much, and yet the default mindset in business and governance doesn’t seem to take this into account. From the 19th to the 20th century, we had a problem of the fetishisation of quantification. In the 21st century, that problem has progressed into a pattern of collective delusion.
Money was never meant to become the thing being measured.