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There was another article on academic incentives today that referenced a wonderful quote: "When a measure is used as a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
by api 10y ago
There was another article on academic incentives today that referenced a wonderful quote:
"When a measure is used as a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
My impression is that economics as a whole does not understand this. When you target GDP for example, GDP ceases to be a good measure of anything. The trouble with economics as a science is that its results are used to guide the economy. This creates a feedback loop, making it essentially a self-invalidating discipline.
- matt4077 10y agoThat's true if what you measure is only a proxy for some other reality that you actually want to affect, but that is harder to measure. Cholesterol, for example, has long been targeted because it had shown a high correlation to cardiovascular health and life expectancy. The result was a long series of medications that successfully lowered cholesterol, with occasional death as a side effect. GDP is pretty close to what you actually want to change. There are some other measures, such as social mobility, Gini, or poverty–but rising GDP has almost always been good for people.
- api 10y agoI'm not convinced GDP is what we want per se. It's a secondary indicator of what we want, but it's also possible to boost GDP by inflating asset, debt, and investment bubbles, and otherwise moving money around un-productively or even counter-productively. This is particularly true in the short term. What we want is productivity, development, and innovation. Those are primary things that like "good science" in the academic case are not easily distilled into simple measures that can be set as targets.