ROI Gobbledyspeak
How a Formula Colonized Everything That Matters
There is a word that has quietly taken over the world. It is not a long word. It is not even a particularly beautiful one. Three letters, two of them repeated vowels, and yet it now sits at the center of almost every decision that gets made in business, in education, in healthcare, in the arts, and increasingly in the way we raise children and measure the worth of a human life. ROI. Return on investment.
We say it so often and so automatically that we have stopped noticing what it is doing to us. We have forgotten that it came from somewhere. We have forgotten that the people who invented it never intended it to go this far.
Here is what I believe actually happened.
In 1914, a young electrical engineer named Donaldson Brown joined a chemical and explosives company in America called DuPont. The company was diversifying rapidly, moving from gunpowder into lacquers and plastics and dyes, and the people running it had a practical problem. How do you compare the performance of very different business units using a single number? How do you govern a sprawling industrial empire from a distance? Brown developed a formula that combined earnings, working capital, and investments in plants and property into one measure he called return on investment. It later became known as the DuPont Method, and within a decade it had migrated to General Motors, and from there into the bloodstream of modern management.
What is almost never told is this: the men who created ROI were clear-eyed about what their formula could and could not do. They believed in quantitative data and cost analysis. And yet they also held, quite deliberately, that some things of genuine value cannot be captured by the formula. That caveat did not survive the export of the tool into the broader culture.
What began as an instrument for comparing a lacquer division with an explosives division became, over the course of the twentieth century, the primary language in which the world justifies itself. A question designed for one very specific purpose, how efficiently was capital deployed in a given accounting period, got asked of everything. Of teacher training. Of hospital care. Of childhood development. Of art. Of friendship. Of grief.
Once a concept escapes its original container, it tends to colonize everything it touches.
It colonized childhood in two distinct moves.
The first was theoretical. In 1964, the economist Gary Becker published a book arguing that investing in a child’s education was structurally identical to a business investing in equipment. Both incur upfront costs. Both expect future returns measured in productivity and earnings. The child became, in economic language, a capital asset. The school became a production facility. The word used for what the child was supposed to become was productive. Becker won the Nobel Prize. The framework won the argument.
The second move was legislative. In 2002, No Child Left Behind operationalized that logic at federal scale. Schools were required to demonstrate measurable progress through standardized test scores or lose funding. The curriculum narrowed to whatever the test could see. Subjects that could not be tested easily, art, music, physical education, the kind of conversation that changes how a child understands themselves, were quietly deprioritized. Not banned. Just made financially irrational.
The formula had found its way into the classroom. And into the child.
I want to talk about robots.
Not because robots are the whole story, but because robotics is one of the clearest places right now where you can watch the ROI loop running in real time, and watch what it misses.
The global market for autonomous mobile robots is somewhere between five and six billion dollars this year. It is projected to reach twenty-five billion by 2035. These machines move through factories and warehouses without human instruction. They do not take breaks. They do not get tired. In an era of labour shortage and rising wages, the business case writes itself.
And that business case is real. But here is what the ROI calculation does not touch.
The person who was moving materials through the facility was not simply a transport mechanism. They knew the floor. They knew which line was running behind and which supervisor was under pressure that morning. They were carrying, in their body and their attention and their accumulated daily presence, a form of knowledge that never appeared in any job description. When the robot takes their route, the efficiency metric goes up. What is lost does not register anywhere.
Research from Colorado State University found that workers in heavily roboticized environments feel less proficient in their responsibilities and less socially connected to their colleagues. That last finding is the one I keep returning to. Less socially connected. The floor becomes quieter in a way that is not the same as peaceful.
Now put a child in that sentence.
A child who knows which friend needs company at lunch and which one needs to be left alone. A child who is learning to disagree with a trusted adult and hold their ground. A child who is developing a relationship with their own confusion, learning that not-knowing is survivable. A child who is beginning to understand that their presence matters to someone. None of that appears on any test. None of it registers in any accountability framework. And because it does not appear, the system does not protect it, fund it, or even reliably notice when it is gone.
There is a specific and damaging irony here. The conditions that produce a flourishing adult, secure attachment, time to play without outcome, sustained relationships with adults who are not assessing them, the freedom to fail without consequence, are precisely the conditions that the ROI-driven school tends to compress in pursuit of measurable return.
The philosopher Matthew Crawford has written about what gets lost when we stop valuing the kind of knowledge that lives in the hands and the body. That kind of knowledge is not inferior to abstract or strategic knowledge. It is different. It is irreplaceable. And it is exactly what the ROI formula was never designed to account for.
Now extend this into artificial intelligence more broadly. The same logic is running, at far greater scale and velocity. AI systems are being deployed across industries, and in schools, and the justification is almost always the same. Efficiency. Reduced cost. Faster output. Better return on investment. The formula that Donaldson Brown designed to compare a lacquer division with an explosives division is now being used to decide which human capacities, in adults and in children, are worth keeping.
What troubles me is not the technology. It is the poverty of the language we are using to evaluate it.
We have one question. Does it deliver a return? We do not have an equally robust, equally respected, equally institutionalized language for asking: what does it do to the child who used to do this work herself? What does it do to the relationships in the room? What does it do to the development of a human being who no longer practices certain skills, who no longer needs to read a room, negotiate a disagreement, or carry knowledge in their body?
We have let ROI become not just a measurement tool but an epistemology. A way of deciding what is real. And everything that cannot be measured by it has gradually been reclassified as sentiment, or inefficiency, or resistance to change.
There is a line attributed, probably apocryphally, to Einstein: not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. Whether he said it or not, the thought is sound. The problem is that the world built its entire infrastructure around the things that can be counted, and called that rigor. The things that cannot be counted got labelled soft. And soft, in that lexicon, means dispensable.
We are at a moment when this has to be named. Not because automation is going to stop, or should stop, but because the language we use to evaluate it is doing active harm. It is not just that the formula is incomplete. It is that the formula has been so thoroughly normalized that we have lost the vocabulary to say what it cannot see.
Language shapes what we are able to think. When the only words available to us are efficiency, throughput, return, and scale, we cannot think our way to the question of what makes work meaningful to the person doing it. We cannot think our way to the question of what a child needs from their daily life in order to remain fully themselves. We cannot think our way to the question of what we owe each other, and what we owe the young, in the moment of transition.
We built that language once. In every domain where human development has been seriously studied, in developmental psychology, in philosophy of work, in education that takes the whole person seriously, there are frameworks for thinking about what human beings need from their environments in order to flourish. Frameworks that start not from capital efficiency but from the question of what it means to grow, to belong, to contribute, to be seen.
Children have always been the clearest answer to that question. They come into the world without productivity. They offer nothing measurable for years. And yet every serious civilization has understood, without needing a formula to prove it, that tending to them well is the most important work there is.
We need to bring that understanding back into the room where the decisions are made. Not as a counterweight to be overruled. As an equal.
Because the formula that is currently running the world was designed in 1914 by an engineer at a munitions company. It was a good solution to a specific problem. It was never meant to be a philosophy. And it was certainly never meant to be applied to a child.
If you wish to follow the research and thinking that inform this work, the books Mapping Montessori Materials for AI Competency Development and Montessori & AI -Volume I are available through my website, katebroughton.com.
Image Prompt: ROI Gobbledyspeak,
