Just like in those stories, these groups are chewing through other aspects of life that are absolutely significant in order to optimize a single metric to the exclusion of all else.

I just wrote a rant about exactly this phenomenon. Literally insane greed, and a sort of simple-minded myopic focus on setting goals based on easily understandable metrics that are ultimately based on wildly questionable premises (and might actually be counter to what the people at the top think they want to achieve) are why literally everything is going to shit.