You get what you measure.

The very first time I heard these words, they were described to me as an “old saying” in the small business world by none other than Hector Baretto.

Mr. Baretto, in case you are just joining us, was President George W. Bush’s first SBA Administrator. His primary mission appeared to be promoting his boss and his boss’s agenda. Second on the list was helping his boss to destroy the SBA.

But I digress.

For the most part, I have found those words to be quite true and for precisely the reasons Mr. Baretto gave me.

When you regularly measure something, that means you are paying attention to it. You notice when something is wrong. And, because you probably want your measurements to behave in a certain way, when something is wrong, you fix it.

Even when nothing is wrong, since you want your measurements to behave in certain ways, you do things to make them behave in those ways.

Here in the U.S., we measure incomes rather than outcomes, as Umair Haque as pointed out on more than one occasion.

We measure how much money businesses make but we don’t measure how their products impact the lives of their customers.

We measure how much money households make but we don’t measure how well they live.

That is precisely why very few economists or policy makers are especially interested in microbusinesses: they are long on outcome but short on income.

I have asked on more than one occasion in this space what would have to happen for those economists and policy makers to uncover this blind spot and mend their ways. The point of the exercise for people in both those lines of work is supposed to be all about how people live, after all.

Microbusinesses matter to people’s lives.

And whatever it is that has to happen clearly hasn’t happened yet.