The deeper truth of Goodhart's law

2025-09-05

Whenever a measure becomes a goal, it cease to be a meaningful measure.

That’s Goodharts’ law. Goodhart was an economist, at the time criticizing the Thatcher government’s economic policies.

Goodhart’s law is probably hand-caligraphied in vegan ink letters and framed in the finnest bamboo frame in every degrowth economist’s office. GDP¹ was invented to measure the economic resumption after the great depression, during WWII. Increasing GDP, “growth” was an explicit measure of the success of economic policies. But increasing GDP wasn’t a goal. Of course not! No one cares about some number in a box at the end of a spreadsheet in some government employee’s office. What mattered was that there was the industrial capacity for everyone to have a job, not only that, but enough power as a worker that you could force your boss to remunerate your work with more than breadcrumbs. That was the only purpose of GDP growth.

But even after this goal was reached, GDP growth, the means by which we atteined it, stayed as a goal. The reasons are complicated (mostly finance though) but GDP growth became a goal, while the actual goal – full employment² and good salaries – disapeared as a notion, or even an aspirational possibility.

And so, now we have economic policies explicitly aimed at reducing worker power and increasing unemployment, as a mean to increase GDP.

That’s been the program since the 1980, and it keeps being served as somehow new and innovative. I call it the homeopatic social economy theory: the less social spending there are, the more somehow it’s the problem.

Yet, any sensible person will ask you this: What’s the point of “improving the economy” if the net result is lower pay, poorer health, shorter lifespans, more social isolation, and a more poisonous environment? If the goal is the improvement of the human condition, then improve the human condition, don’t poison people and burn the planet to line your pocket.

We all know of enshitification by this point. Driven by many thing, but not least of which are KPIs (key personal indicators) and OKRs (Objective and Key Results) pushed by a management class starving for more tools to control workers. When your entire livinghood (KPIs are used to decide who to fire next year) depends on some measure, you bet you are going to do anything to optimize it. Including gaming it, including debasing yourself, including destroying your company in the long term.

And this is how we end up with poisonous social networks that are ready to spray you with the most depressing drivel, if only to keep you looking at the screen a little bit longer. It’s how we get dating apps that does everything to keep you alone and ready to pay for premium, and keep paying. It’s how we get news articles that are everything but informative. How we get search engines that serves you everything but what you are looking for. Academics that publish like a pressing machine, but write nothing of interess. The number chasing substituing for the actual meaningful goal of the task.

Not only does the measure stop being meaningful when it becomes a goal, but it actively harms the original goal the measure was supposed to promote once entranched enough.

But it doesn’t stop there. Ah! The so-called “eternal” debate of whether the ends justify the means.

Experience shows us: the means will eventually become the ends at any rate!

The French revolution: A society built with blood is a society that feeds on blood.

The theory explains it very easily: A system that lasts in time, by the nature of entropy, is a system that allocates energy to its own renewal. And whatever makes the system work will be reproduced.

The means will replace the ends as an end, if the means are stable.

“The purpose of a system is what it does”. That’s Staford Beer. It’s almost a truism.

Now what does it look like when applied to our world? Misery, pollution, and especially turning the victims of the cruelty of the system into criminals. That’s all inherant to our system. If the purpose of a system is what it does, it follows that we are living in a system which purpose is to kill humans, and dehumanize the ones that somehow survive. And it implies that the only way to stop the onslaught is to change the system.

What would a system that puts humans first look like? A system that not only gives each individual the tools for their own striving, living life as a person in all its dimensions; but also, by an almost mechanical process makes them agent of replication of this system of liberation.

The goal is liberation, democracy, self-organization. And the mean to it is self-organization, democracy and liberation. The name of this system is Organizing. Some may call it “post-growth” or “ecosocialism” but I find those labels to be missleading. Those are inspirational goals, and a compass to orient ourselves, but fundamentally, what matters is the way we go about it.

By the radical action of just trusting people, of just giving them what they need to improve, trusting them, no string attached, we change the world. We break this awful system that reproduce itself by cutting from us all that is human and all that we love. We introduce a new system, and we hope that this new system is capable of eating into the old one and eventually replace it.

Goodhart was right in a deep level.