Jerome Ravetz's 1971 book Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems also predates Goodhart, though it does not formulate the same law. Other academics had similar insights at the time. Notably, Campbell's law likely has precedence, as Jeff Rodamar has argued, since various formulations date to 1969. Numerous concepts are related to this idea, at least one of which predates Goodhart's statement. It was used to criticize the British Thatcher government for trying to conduct monetary policy on the basis of targets for broad and narrow money, but the law reflects a much more general phenomenon. It is named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who is credited with expressing the core idea of the adage in a 1975 article on monetary policy in the United Kingdom: Īny observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. Goodhart's law is an adage often stated as, 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure'. Charles Goodhart, for whom the adage is named, delivering a speech in 2012
