I gave up on finance and economics conferences years ago. New methods, new models, same permitted conclusions. So when I heard about a gathering of heterodox economists, the ones who pride themselves on rejecting the mainstream, I broke my boycott. If anyone had left the orthodoxy on purpose, it would be this room.
I wanted new ideas about how to heal the world. A brainstorm. Yes, I thought, this is finally the room where the thinkers and the problem fixers unite and talk about getting things done.
Instead I got a continuation. A very learned, very well cited continuation of what is wrong with healthcare, with Spotify, with green energy projects. And every road, no matter where it started, seemed to loop back to the same tollbooth: capitalism.
Let me be clear about one thing. I think capitalism and democracy are completely and utterly broken systems. So this is not me defending capitalism. Maybe if my idea landed a billion dollar valuation I would soften, but until that check clears, I think it is a horrible system that, much like a movie with 24 headline actors, looks great on the poster and falls apart on screen. I was just tired of watching people celebrate these systems while their pockets are being picked and their rights quietly filed away. Democracy and capitalism have a nice soothing feel to them. They numb the brain. You can lose a great deal and still feel represented.
But not one good suggestion came up. I was promised a brainstorm and did not even get a mind drizzle. I wanted bad ideas and good ideas thrown into the same pot, stirred, argued over. That is not what happened. And maybe I understand why. These are researchers who need tenure, which means they need to stay inside the playpen. Climb out and neither the orthodox nor the heterodox gatekeepers will ever publish you again. Academia has its own bouncers, and they work both doors.
Kher, I digress, as I always do.
When we teach with cases, we run a series of Whys to get wise. We do not accept the first answer that shows up looking respectable. Yet the conclusion from nearly every session was the same tired first answer: capitalism is to blame. Enough. Why is nobody willing to run the next Why?
So I ran it myself. Here is where it goes.
The Yardstick, Not the Villain
We keep saying the problem is money. That greed corrupts, that markets crowd out virtue, that if we could just care about the right things instead of profit, the machine would run clean. It is a comfortable story, because it puts the fault in a substance we could picture giving up. Swear off money like sugar and get healthy.
The fault is not money. The fault is that we run everything as an optimization problem with one number sitting on top, and money is simply the number that won the job.
Watch what a benchmark actually does. The second you crown a single measure as the thing to maximize, every other value in the system gets repriced against it. Not deleted, repriced. Clean air still counts, but now it counts in dollars, which means it counts exactly as much as someone can be made to pay for its absence and not a cent more. A teacher’s patience still counts, but the metric is test scores, so patience survives only where it moves scores. The scalar does not ask what you love. It asks what you can count, and then it quietly retires everything you cannot.
Money did not invent this. Money is downstream of it. Hand people any single yardstick and something scarce and convertible floats to the top, because a scarce convertible thing can buy movement on every other axis. Under feudalism the yardstick was land and the scarce thing was bloodline. Under the Soviets it was Party position. In a monastery it might be the appearance of holiness. Capitalism’s only real distinction is that it is honest about it. It prints the unit, publishes the exchange rate, and lets you watch the capture happen in plain numbers instead of hiding it in lineage or piety. Part of why we resent money is that it refuses to lie about what we are doing.
So the reformers who want to swap money for a nobler goal have the whole thing backwards. Pick a new single benchmark, call it wellbeing or sustainability or national greatness or follower count, and you have not left the trap. You have walked back into it through a prettier door. Whatever you elevate to the one number becomes the thing people game, hollow out, and convert into power. This is Goodhart’s law with the volume all the way up: a measure that becomes a target stops measuring anything, because everyone reorganizes around the proxy and lets the real thing rot behind it. The failure does not care which noble word you painted on the scoreboard.
Which is why the conference was aiming at the wrong wall. The interesting question was never “how do we stop worshipping money.” It was “why do we insist on one scoreboard at all.”
A human life is not scalar. You are not maximizing a single quantity when you decide how to spend a Saturday, and if you were, we would call it a disorder and gently take your phone away. We hold several goods that do not convert into each other, and we trade between them badly, locally, by feel, refusing to name a master metric that settles the trade in advance. That refusal is not sloppiness. It is the only thing stopping any one value from eating all the others.
Systems lose this the moment they scale, and here is the part I cannot wave away. A master metric is exactly what lets a large organization coordinate millions of strangers who share no common judgment. The scalar is a coordination technology. That is its use and its poison in the same motion. You cannot run a country on vibes and good intentions, so you reach for a number, and the number reaches back and remakes the country in its own flat image.
I do not have the exit. Anyone selling a clean one is just selling you the next benchmark, and I have met enough of those to know the pitch. So no, this essay is not the brainstorm either. It is a complaint about why the brainstorm never starts. Everyone in that room could see the yardstick. Nobody wanted to say that the problem is the act of measuring by one stick at all, because their own careers are ranked on a stick, and you do not saw off the branch that seats the tenure committee.
But I am fairly sure the fight is aimed at the wrong enemy. As long as we govern by optimizing a single figure, that figure will hunt down the scarcest convertible thing and hand power to whoever is holding it. Money is only the current holder. Fire money tomorrow and the throne stays warm for the next scalar in line.
The task was never a better number. It is learning, at scale, to live without one. That is the session I wanted. Nobody scheduled it.
Not a Solution. Yet.
I want to be honest about where this leaves me. I am not prescribing a fix. Not yet. I am working on a few ideas and I will put them down when they are less embarrassing than they are today. But I already know they will not be enough, because this is not a problem one person solves from a laptop. It is too big for a single head, and anyone who marches out with the complete answer is either selling something or has not understood the size of the room.
What it needs is a community that stops gathering to groan. We are very good at the groan. We have refined it into a genre. What we have not done is sit together, agree on the crux, and then actually argue about options, the bad ones included, especially the bad ones, because the bad idea said out loud is what gives the next person something to push against.
So here is my one disposable contribution, thrown on the table precisely so someone can knock it off: if the disease is single-metric optimization, then maybe the direction is not a better metric but deliberately competing ones, several scoreboards that are never allowed to reconcile, each holding the others honest, none permitted to become the master. It is probably wrong. That is the point. It is on the table. Kick it.
Let us start there. A mind drizzle, at least. And if enough of us show up willing to be wrong out loud, maybe, just maybe, we work our way up to a brainstorm.