THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF MEASURING THINGS

Is our obsession with metrics actually making things worse?

Goodhart’s Law states that once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. We can see examples of this all around us – from crime statistics that incentivise police to report fewer crimes to school league tables that pressure teachers to "teach to the test" at the expense of critical thinking and creativity.

Sometimes the results can be disastrous. In 19th-century India, a scheme incentivising the killing of poisonous snakes supposedly led to people breeding more of them. The so-called "cobra effect" has become a byword for how oversimplified metrics can come back to bite us.

So, should we stop measuring things altogether?