When someone offers to sell you unmeasurable benefits, guard your wallet. I don't deny that there are things of value that are hard to quantify with precision.

When someone offers to sell you unmeasurable benefits, guard your wallet. I don't deny that there are things of value that are hard to quantify with precision. That doesn't mean they can't be measured at all. For something to be of value, it must have detectable consequences, at least statistically or eventually. The detection of its consequence is a measurement, and that consequence, even if roughly measured, can be compared to the cost to achieve it. If it has no detectable consequences at all, though, it is not worth paying for. If the schools tell you that they are teaching "critical thinking", for example, ask them for a demonstration of something a child can now do that he couldn't before his critical thinking instruction. If they can come up with something, they've figured out a way to measure it; if not, it's either just a meaningless buzzword or they don't know enough about critical thinking to be paid to teach it. When they tell you that your past increases to their pay have produced no measurable improvements but lots of unmeasurable improvements, tell them that until they can find a way to measure those improvements, their future compensation increases will be in the form of unmeasurable benefits.