I believe this is a result of the shift from production of physical goods to a more service-oriented economy. If your main concern is "manufacturing X" it is us

I believe this is a result of the shift from production of physical goods to a more service-oriented economy. If your main concern is "manufacturing X" it is usually fairly simple to tally "Number of X produced" (even "Number of X produced by operator #128") number of defective parts, number of returned items after sale... If you deal with software development, translations, advertising, copy editing getting an idea of "productivity" is far more complicated. Do you count "lines of text written by operator #128"? This might make marginal sense for translators (and you are still missing any idea of quality/defects, because even if a customer rejects your work as "completely wrong" you won't get any specific metrics) but completely misses the mark for the other examples I listed. So yeah, we are stuck with the idea that "you cannot control what you cannot measure", but we have a serious deficit in terms of measures.