The Drift Ratio A Qualitative Audit of Representation and Answerability

Modern institutions can become increasingly skilled at producing legibility, confidence, branding, dashboards, and coherent public narratives while the underlying activity becomes harder to inspect, correct, or sustain. This paper retains the idea of a Drift Ratio but sharply limits its status. The ratio is not a validated numerical metric and should not be scored with universal 1-5 scales or interpreted through empirical threshold bands. It is a qualitative mnemonic for a recurrent asymmetry: representational capacity can expand faster than answerability. The proposal is situated near institutional decoupling, goal displacement, impression management, audit culture, and research on proxy objectives. Six dimensions organize the audit: representational pressure, image maintenance, correction delay, exposure to independent evidence, capacity for warranted revision, and consequence tracing. The paper also preserves the original philosophical intuition that no mathematical constant can stand in for reality-contact. Golden ratio, zero, one, and pi can function as symbols, but they provide no epistemic warrant. Two documented cases illustrate the audit without pseudo-precision: Theranos as an example in which public claims outran tested technological capacity, and the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 dashboard as an example of a representational system designed around repeated data updating and public correction. The contribution is a qualitative drift audit that complements, rather than replaces, domain-specific evidence, accounting, safety, and governance methods.