How do we know we are doing much better this year than last year?
What was this year is the last year plus or minus this year’s change.
If change is the only constant why do we need to measure it? You don’t know if something is better if you didn’t know how to measure what it was before.
“An actuary is a person who passes as an expert on the basis of a prolific ability to produce an infinite variety of incomprehensible figures calculated with micro-metric precision from the vaguest of assumptions based on debatable evidence drawn from inconclusive data derived by persons of questionable reliability for the sole purpose of confusing an already hopelessly befuddled group of persons who never read the statistics anyway.” 
Daren Daley, Perr & Knight
