Goodhart’s Law: Controlling Is Distorting
March 15th, 2006
Goodhart’s Law - the sociological analogue of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics - originally arose in economics, and can be defined rather succintly as: Controlling an indicator results in the distortion of its use as an indicator (1). But I think it should be easier to understand Professor Marilyn Strathern’s version of the Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
