I agree that ideally we should set our baseline much higher. It's why I promote low-defect methodologies, code reviews, static analysis, and languages (eg Ada, Haskell) that prevent/catch most problems early. The few empirical studies done on such things show it actually saves money with occasional productivity boost for one reason: huge reduction of debug time.
And the satisfied customer effect can't be ignored. ;)
And the satisfied customer effect can't be ignored. ;)