Talk:Goodhart's law/Archive 1

Archive 1

Concern about being based on primary sources

I remove the concern about this being based on primary sources. This article is about the existence of the law and not about its veracity. Thus it is entirely appropriate for it to be based on primary sources that introduce the law. There's not need for secondary or tertiary sources here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.73.121.44 (talk) 16:55, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

Earliest Date for Goodhart's Law

Looks like there may be some difference of opinion on the earliest date for the statement of Goodhart's Law. I'm not an expert, so will not modify the main article, which currently states '1975.' But I will point out that the Danielsson journal article that is listed in the main article references does explicitly state 1974 and give credit to Goodhart. The bibliographical reference to Goodhart's Law within the Danielsson paper is dated 1974, but the reference is to a talk and not a paper: "Goodhart, C.A.E., 1974. Public lecture at the Reserve Bank of Australia." So it may be that Goodhart was only speaking of it in 1974, and did not publish it in any paper until 1975. — Preceding unsigned comment added by N2e (talk • contribs) 16:03, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Response: I have asked the Bank of Australia about the original paper. They included a "File note" stating (Transcribed from the PDF); "THE ORIGINS OF GOODHART'S LAW: The first statement by Charles Goodhart of what he called "Goodhart's law" has, from time to time, been a subject of interest to the research department. It now seems that the first statement of "Goodhart's law" was in a paper entitled "Problems of Monetary Management : The U.K Experience". The paper was presented at a Bank conference in 1975. This paper is contained in the volume "Papers in Monetary Economics 1975: Volume 1" [RD.LIB P332.5(063)d]. Davidmanheim (talk) 13:16, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

Two purported "original formulations"

The lede claims: "The original formulation by Goodhart is this: "As soon as the government attempts to regulate any particular set of financial assets, these become unreliable as indicators of economic trends."

But then in the first section we have:

Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. Goodhart's original 1975 formulation, reprinted on page 116 in Goodhart 1981

Since the latter is cited and the former isn't, I am removing the version in the lede. It seems too narrow to properly bear the name Goodhart's Law anyway. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2620:0:1045:8:F9F2:B499:861E:BBE9 (talk) 13:29, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Limited Utility of Uncertainty Analogy

Goodhart's law is not much at all like the uncertainty principle, which says that you cannot know the position and momentum of a particle at the same time. Goodhart knew you could measure inflation, but that once you had a "target" for inflation, markets would game it and make it a poor (though not useless) measure of that quantity. Knowledge of Goodhart's law can allow policy makers to plan for its effect ( so, for instance, the Kyoto protocol to th UNFCCC has "carbon-trading" guidelines, knowing that national target differences in Carbon emissions would create a market for these between states in any case, and that these ought to regulated by the protocol. Shoshin5 16:39, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

The reason you can't know position and momentum is that the act of measuring affects it, the more precisely one is measured the more the other is affected. It's more like Schrödinger's cat in that once you open the box to see if the cat's in there you kill the cat half the time. So the analogy is a vaguer principle where observing something affects it. Also Hawthorne_effect 194.207.86.26 (talk) 14:41, 7 June 2020 (UTC)