Goodhart's Law
Properties
- logseq-entity
- Logseq/Entity/Named Law
Goodhart's Law
- Statement: once a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure—people optimize the metric rather than the thing it was meant to track.
- Origin: economist Charles Goodhart (1975), originally about monetary policy; later generalized to its common form by Marilyn Strathern.
- Kind: heuristic.
- Example: rewarding developers for "lines of code" yields more code, not necessarily better software.
See also
- Campbell's Law — a stronger, sociological version of the same failure.
- McNamara Fallacy — the companion error of measuring only what is easy.
- Epistemics/Concept/Heuristic vs Axiom