I think NeedMoreTea is pointing to the practice of looking at the numbers and optimizing as much profit as we can out of them, which tends to remove or not account for the human element. It's easy to do a quick glance of the balance sheet and see that the money and hours spent on gardening are a drain on the family budget. A similar thing can happen for government budgets. After all, you don't need flowers to survive, nor do you need many government programs to maintain a country.
Just look into the suicide rates stemming from Universal Credit and PIP, and the sheer number of incorrectly rejected claims. Or the growth of food banks and homelessness.
Numbers aren't the problem per se. We don't tend to have great numbers for matters of the human heart. We can count the number of steps we took in the last day, but how do we count the wellbeing we imparted on those around us?
The reason we measure things is so people can't make assertions like this without some kind of evidence.