Quantity vs Quality

What is it about our culture that seems to make us tend to value quantity of quality?

It seems to me that virtually everyone I know is overcommitted. We all have our fingers in too many pies and as a result, we quite often don't have the time to really do things right. For example, my job is primarily a research position, but there is a teaching component. In my case, I'm one of the demonstrators in the second-year physics lab. Now if I had the time to spare, I would have gone through the entire lab in an ordered and organized way, filling out a lab book as I went along and really doing a nice work-up. However, other fires need to be tended, and so I went through the entire lab in an afternoon, and took some data, but not always high quality. i've worked through the analysis a bit, but my "lab book" is not at all useful as a demonstration of what a good lab book should be.

This is just a single example, but there are many. Consider what is newsworthy about movies, & music. We hear about the number of albums sold, and the TV ratings. The number one movie is determined merely from the weekend box-office takings. Even awards, which should be some measure of quality, are now enumerated. "Winner of 7 Academy Awards".

Perhaps Ken Wilber is right about the modern world reducing the universe to a flatland of numbers. Are we attracted to quantity simply because we can count, and that gives us some sort of measure? There are metrics of quality, and some even get used on occasion, but we seem to be more and more a people driven by our own lowest common denominators. More often than not the things that get done are the things that aren't risky.

Perhaps therein lies a bit of an answer. Striving for quality requires imagination and innovation. It means taking longer to accomplish less so that the less that is done is done "better". But "better" is necessarily a somewhat subjective judgement, and what if others don't see the quality? You can always justify quantity. 14 is always more than 7, even if its 7 Mona Lisas. (Of course, the 7 Mona Lisas are only valuable if everyone thinks there's only one, and you'd better be sure that nobody discovers the words "This Is a Fake" written in felt-tip pen under the paint.