Indeed, the rhetoric of technocratic management and cold data analysis underpinned the depoliticisation of discussion around public sector management that we witness in the neoliberal age. By insisting governance was simply a data-led assessment of performance, responsibility for the continued failures could be passed onto lower orders, while responsibility for decision-making was reinforced at the top.

The deployment of the new management science, with its suite of metrics and decision technologies enabled a new form of control at a distance. Top managers cast themselves as neutral arbiters, who simply allocated resources to those who performed. [...] the managed competition that characterises neoliberalism belongs firmly within a framework intended to empower managers, rather than enforce 'the market'.

From the beginning, proponents of systems analysis shad doubted the ability of market-like mechanisms to adequately assess the information it was given [...]

For that reason, public sector reform was built on new techniques of costing and performance assessment, so as to compensate for the inability of the market to correctly assess needs and costs. The point was not to 'let' competition choose winners and losers. Instead top managers expected to arrive themselves at a verdict on what performance indicators really meant and what their implications should be. [...]