Editing Goodhart's law (section)

==Generalization==
Later writers generalized Goodhart's point about monetary policy into a more general adage about measures and targets in accounting and evaluation systems. In a book chapter published in 1996, Keith Hoskin wrote:

{{blockquote|text='Goodhart's Law' – That every measure which becomes a target becomes a bad measure – is inexorably, if ruefully, becoming recognized as one of the overriding laws of our times. Ruefully, for this law of the unintended consequence seems so inescapable. But it does so, I suggest, because it is the inevitable corollary of that invention of modernity: accountability.<ref>{{Cite book | last = Hoskin | first = Keith | title = The 'awful idea of accountability': inscribing people into the measurement of objects | year=1996 | language=en-GB }}</ref>{{fcn|reason=Not [[WP:V|verifiable]] without further publication details. Cited by Strathern 1997 (q.v.) suggesting it's an article in: Munro, R. and Mouritsen, J., eds. Accountability: Power, Ethos and the Technologies of Managing. London: International Thomson Business Press|date=December 2024}}|author=}}

In a 1997 paper on the misuse of accountability models in education, anthropologist [[Marilyn Strathern]] cited Hoskins expressing Goodhart's Law as "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure", and linked the sentiment to the history of accountability stretching back into Britain in the 1800s:

{{blockquote|text=When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The more a [[Upper second|2.1]] examination performance becomes an expectation, the poorer it becomes as a discriminator of individual performances. Hoskin describes this as 'Goodhart's law', after the latter's observation on instruments for monetary control which led to other devices for monetary flexibility having to be invented. However, targets that seem measurable become enticing tools for improvement. The linking of improvement to commensurable increase produced practices of wide application. It was that conflation of 'is' and 'ought', alongside the techniques of quantifiable written assessments, which led in Hoskin's view to the modernist invention of accountability. This was articulated in Britain for the first time around 1800 as 'the awful idea of accountability' (Ref. 3, p. 268).<ref name="Strathern1997">{{Cite journal |last=Strathern |first=Marilyn | author-link=Marilyn Strathern |title='Improving ratings': audit in the British University system |url=https://archive.org/details/ImprovingRatingsAuditInTheBritishUniversitySystem |journal=European Review |year=1997 |language=en-GB |publisher=[[Wiley (publisher)|John Wiley & Sons]] |publication-date=1997 |volume=5 |issue=3 |pages=305–321 | doi = 10.1002/(SICI)1234-981X(199707)5:3<305::AID-EURO184>3.0.CO;2-4 |s2cid=145644958 }}</ref>|author=|source=}}