Long ago in another dimension, I used to be an accounting manager in progressively larger commercial bank branches, and then a financial analyst for a couple of years after that. Why, I don't know .. other than I was young and absolutely had to pay the rent and thought I should have a 'career'.

Stripping human activities down to nothing but numbers representing transactions does an impressive job of emptying those transactions of their social meaning and human impact. Yes, it offers managers another form of meaning and impact ... but it reinforces and embeds Taylorism and other industrial-era core assumptions into the fabric of human activities, as we see all around us today.

It's important to have signposts and to be able to get some measure of what activities "add up to' in a context, but to have made managing costs and profit a dominant dogma has bent why we do what we do into a driving force that arguably is not healthy for human society.

Under the current rules of the game, paying humans to work is a cost to organizations. However, humans live in societies, and if they do not work and do not have ways of obtaining money in order to live (even in basic ways), helping them stay alive in order to try to participate in their society becomes another type of cost (liability). Etc.

We all know this. But we continue to let established paradigms and practices manage us and our organizations towards unhealthy societal arrangements. Accounting standards and rules are created by humans and are a central part of the game we call an economy. The current set could easily be changed in radical ways, if there were the political will to do so.

Imagine if the stock markets around the world rewarded metrics that addressed something like 'net benefit to society' just as much as they rewarded whether an organization met analysts' quarterly earnings forecasts. And yes, it could be done .. change the rules of the game. You all know, I'm sure, the emerging field of the economics of happiness (and so on).

An interesting sighting last fall whilst doing research for a client; I discovered that ..

"USA's National Endowment for the Arts that the US Bureau of Economic Analysis will open a GDP-related account (ACPSA- Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account) to begin assessing and tracking the contribution of the arts-and-culture sector to the economic output and vitality of the country."

But imagine the howling if the hallowed 'free market' rules of capital markets were to be fundamentally changed by law and / or by FASB.

Like I said, once I get started .. ;-)