Charles Goodhart
1936– — monetary economist; originator of Goodhart's Law
Author
British economist who observed that statistical regularities used as control targets tend to break down — the core of Goodhart's Law.
Charles Goodhart (1936–) is a British economist, long associated with the Bank of England and the London School of Economics. He is the namesake of Goodhart’s Law — though he did not coin the popular one-line paraphrase most people quote today.
What we cite
- Original observation (1975) — at a Reserve Bank of Australia conference on monetary management, Goodhart noted that stable econometric relationships (notably between interest rates and monetary aggregates) broke down once central banks treated them as intermediate targets for policy control. His formulation: any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
- Context — UK monetary experience in the early 1970s; not a general theory of KPIs at first, but a warning about using ex post stable correlations as ex ante control levers.
- Later reception — Goodhart himself noted that others elevated the idea into broader social science; the condensed aphorism when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure is Marilyn Strathern’s (1997), building on Keith Hoskin’s 1996 restatement — not Goodhart’s own words.
Corpus stance
Context — names the mechanism behind metric substitution and incentive-linked proxy collapse; we cite the original monetary-policy claim and trace generalisation explicitly so the corpus does not misattribute Strathern’s line to Goodhart.