Just as Apple doesn’t want to be in the generic MP3-player business, Blumer didn’t want to be just one more guy competing to charge a few hundred dollars an hour to do your taxes. A few years ago, he said, he realized that the billable hour was undercutting his value — it was his profession’s commodity, suggesting to clients that he and his colleagues were interchangeable containers of finite, measurable units that could be traded for money. Perhaps the biggest problem, though, was that billing by the hour incentivized long, boring projects rather than those that required specialized, valuable insight that couldn’t (and shouldn’t) be measured in time. Paradoxically, the billable hour encouraged Blumer and his colleagues to spend more time than necessary on routine work rather than on the more nuanced jobs.

But those complex problems were the ones that Blumer wanted to solve, and he also knew his insights were more valuable than the time it took him to conjure them. So he identified a niche — creative professionals who struggled to manage their finances as their start-ups became mature businesses — and he endeavored to help his clients make (and save) enough money that they would gladly pay a significant fee without asking about the hours it took him to figure out what to do. Blumer has been so successful in his approach that he has become a leading voice among a national band of accountants who call themselves the Cliff Jumpers. Many Cliff Jumpers have abandoned the traditional bill-by-the-hour approach to focus on noncommodity accounting solutions for specific client groups. One focuses on entrepreneurs hoping to sell their new businesses; several work with people who are terrified about starting a small business.

Perhaps without realizing it, the Cliff Jumpers are at the forefront of one of the great challenges of modern economics. Measuring productivity is central to economic policy — it’s especially crucial in the decisions made by the Federal Reserve — but we are increasingly flying blind. It’s relatively easy to figure out if steel companies can make a ton of steel more efficiently than in the past (they can, by a lot), but we have no idea how to measure the financial value of ideas and the people who come up with them. “Compared with the mid-1900s, goods production is not as important a part of our economy, but we continue to devote about 90 percent of our statistical resources to measuring it,” says Barry Bosworth, a Brookings Institution economist who is a leading thinker on productivity in the service sector.

Many economists have tried to break professional “knowledge workers” down into their component parts. It’s fraught enough with lawyers and accountants, Bosworth says, but it’s all but impossible with other professions, like doctors and teachers. “We don’t even try with education,” he says. In the meantime, the Bureau of Labor Statistics directly measures the productivity of only 60 percent of U.S. industries, which means that nearly half of our economic activity is unknown, including almost all of the fastest-growing sectors. If education and health care are not becoming more productive, as many economists fear, it will be hard to know if government policies to improve those sectors are working without knowing what to measure in the first place.

During the 20th century, industry started out in small workshops that created unique handcrafted products. Over time, they morphed into massive plants that churned out a countless number of identical units. Now there’s a synthesis. In the era of mass specialization, companies are using high-tech efficiencies to make customized products that each consumer finds especially valuable. This has enormous advantages for both consumers and producers, but the big problem it creates is that we don’t know how to do the math. Blumer, who, after all, is an accountant, told me that set formulas and financial spreadsheets are just not compatible with this new approach to work. He can only figure out what to charge his clients after spending a lot of (unbilled) time talking to them about their needs. But now that it’s clear that the fundamental nature of work has changed, it is fitting that a bunch of rogue outliers from one of the world’s oldest professions are helping guide the way.