To the extent this is a real phenomenon, it's because of competition and not measurement. Competitions that are judged qualitatively have the same effects, and measurements without competition (e.g. measuring the height and weight of babies) don't result in power accruing to the folks doing the measuring.
That said, people systematically overvalue anything with numbers attached due not understanding the epistemology of measurement and statistics. That's why managers at software companies are obsessed with pointing tickets, why scientists are obsessed with p-values, why the school system is obsessed with grades, etc. So if you want people to compete more fiercely over something, coming up with some numbers is a good way to make that happen. (At least for a while.)
It'd be nice to believe that this is just a temporary quirk of our current cultural values. But we may also have just topped out, at least for the foreseeable future, in terms of just how well people can really understand the world given a relatively fixed level of intelligence. Even though individuals are ostensibly becoming more transmodernist, it's difficult (as a layperson) to see how that or something like it could ever really could become the dominant philosophical paradigm behind our institutions.
That said, people systematically overvalue anything with numbers attached due not understanding the epistemology of measurement and statistics. That's why managers at software companies are obsessed with pointing tickets, why scientists are obsessed with p-values, why the school system is obsessed with grades, etc. So if you want people to compete more fiercely over something, coming up with some numbers is a good way to make that happen. (At least for a while.)
It'd be nice to believe that this is just a temporary quirk of our current cultural values. But we may also have just topped out, at least for the foreseeable future, in terms of just how well people can really understand the world given a relatively fixed level of intelligence. Even though individuals are ostensibly becoming more transmodernist, it's difficult (as a layperson) to see how that or something like it could ever really could become the dominant philosophical paradigm behind our institutions.