Goodhart's Law
The moment you measure something and start rewarding the number, the number stops telling you what it used to.
1975 (Goodhart's formulation), 1997 (Strathern's phrasing)14 min read
British monetary economics
Charles Goodhart
1936
British economist, for many years an adviser at the Bank of England and later professor at the London School of Economics. In a 1975 conference paper on UK monetary management he observed that any statistical regularity tends to collapse once it is used as an instrument of control — the remark that became Goodhart's Law.