Our world is ruled by metrics (not only in the patent system) and of course mainly in the financial world. When turning the radio on, the first sentence in the morning news is often :
"...a recession is possible as the index of [replace it with your favourite financial index] is going down of [replace with a float or an integer] percent..."
A simple lookup of recession and index in Google news give also "some" results. Everyday, we are in a continuous flow of data (please note, I'm not using the term information in this case) where percentages, index values and numbers are the keywords. Are those data useful or does it give any insightful information ? Maybe but that's not my point. My point is about the negative effect of this flow information every morning… Is that motivating us for doing a better work ? being creative at work ? Not really. Often those numbers are detached from reality because they just depend of the perception held by the people making those numbers. Those numbers are often just influenced by the volume of buyer-seller of a stock. We don't really have a large influence on those numbers (except when you have large volume of stocks to sell or buy but that's not really common).
But, wait a minute, why not creating other indexes where people (you and me) have more influence to make it tangible ? Indexes are just made out of convention and used by convention. Working on a simple rsscount in the RssAny project to make creativity index from anything that generate a RSS feed is still in my to-do list. But that could be starting point to have more human indexes and metrics…