Marilyn Strathern
1941– — anthropologist; popular paraphrase of Goodhart's Law
British social anthropologist who restated Goodhart's observation as 'when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure' in audit culture.
Marilyn Strathern (1941–) is a British social anthropologist. In a 1997 essay on university audit and ratings, she gave the widest-known wording of what is colloquially called Goodhart’s Law:
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
She explicitly framed this as a paraphrase of Charles Goodhart’s monetary-policy observation (via Keith Hoskin’s 1996 account), applied to accountability metrics in British higher education — not as Goodhart’s own sentence.
What we cite
- Generalisation to governance — from central-bank control variables to any metric wired to promotion, funding, or reputation.
- Attribution hygiene — the corpus treats Strathern’s line as the familiar aphorism; Goodhart’s 1975 text as the original statistical-regularity claim. Conflating the two erases who said what.
Corpus stance
Context — attribution for the short form used in Goodhart’s Law and metric substitution discussions; not epistemic canon for tier or commitment design.