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 social anthropology
Marilyn Strathern
1941
British social anthropologist, Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge and a leading analyst of audit culture. Her 1997 essay on ratings in British universities supplied the phrasing by which Goodhart's Law is now almost always quoted: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."