Response: Culture counts: “A step along the way” or a step back?

David Throsby puts forward a strong critique of our Policy Perspective “Counting Culture to Death” (2017). In it, he identifies aspects of the quality metrics dashboard Culture Counts of which we are suspicious. He considers our position to stem “from a well known distrust of measurement in any form…that quantification is the enemy of judgement”. This is inaccurate. We do not regard quantification per se as inimical. Rather, we address the proper balance between measurement and judgement in official value assessment, a problem identified as crucial in the 2008 McMaster Review, Supporting excellence in the arts– from measurement to judgement. For McMaster, as for us, it is not a matter of rejecting numbers in favour of “subjective and individual [responses]”, but under what circumstances a fair, reasonable and cost-effective balance between measurement and judgement can be achieved.