Against the Quantification of Culture: Objections to Structural Cultural Indexes

Cultural Asset Economics (CAE) introduces a set of non-aggregative structural lenses: Cultural Asset Durability (CADI), Ownership Friction (OFI), Generational Transfer Risk (GTRI), Exit Optionality (EOI), and Cultural Yield (CYI), designed to evaluate the structural survivability of ownership positions under governance and regime entanglement. These lenses are ordinal and non-substitutable, intended to clarify structural exposure rather than predict market outcomes, rank cultural merit, or generate optimization signals. Because structural cultural indexing invites serious conceptual critique, this paper presents and addresses the strongest objections to CAE, including concerns regarding subjectivity, reification, power asymmetry, non-aggregation, and the quantification of culture itself. The framework is defended not as a replacement for financial theory, but as a bounded structural admissibility framework for domains where ownership becomes governance-dependent, continuity-sensitive, and non-neutral.