Goodhart’s Law

Goodhart’s Law is the measurement failure pattern in The laws of the office revisited: once a measure becomes a target, it can stop being a good measure of the underlying goal. The episode attributes the idea to Charles Goodhart, whose original monetary-policy point is generalized into a workplace and public-service rule.

The source makes the law concrete through Kenny’s cashier story and the British hospital target case. In both, a visible performance number encouraged behavior that protected the metric while weakening the real objective, turning measurement into Workplace Metric Gaming.

Key Claims

• Metrics are useful until rewards, punishments, or status make the number worth gaming.
• A metric can fail even when it was originally correlated with the real goal.
• Public ranking can intensify metric gaming because people protect reputation as well as pay or evaluation.
• Goodhart’s Law is a design warning: pair metrics with qualitative checks, failure-mode review, and outcome grounding.

Connections

• Charles Goodhart - economist behind the named law.
• Workplace Metric Gaming - specific behavior pattern the episode illustrates.
• Workplace Incentive Design - broader office-management frame.
• Economic Way Of Thinking and Research Integrity Incentives - adjacent wiki branches where measurement pressure also changes behavior.