He discusses how systems in general can be gamed, focuses on cases where the goals of a task are complex, sophisticated, or subtle. 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.
This was articulated in Britain for the first time around 1800 as 'the awful idea of accountability' (Ref. It was that conflation of 'is' and 'ought', alongside the techniques of quantifiable written assessments, which led in Hoskin's view to the modernist invention of accountability. The linking of improvement to commensurable increase produced practices of wide application. However, targets that seem measurable become enticing tools for improvement. Hoskin describes this as 'Goodhart's law', after the latter's observation on instruments for monetary control which lead to other devices for monetary flexibility having to be invented. The more a 2.1 examination performance becomes an expectation, the poorer it becomes as a discriminator of individual performances. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. In a 1997 paper responding to the work of Hoskins and others on financial accounting and grades in education, anthropologist Marilyn Strathern expressed Goodhart's Law as "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure," and linked the sentiment to the history of accounting stretching back into Britain in the 1800s:
But it does so, I suggest, because it is the inevitable corollary of that invention of modernity: accountability. Ruefully, for this law of the unintended consequence seems so inescapable. 'Goodhart's Law' – That every measure which becomes a target becomes a bad measure – is inexorably, if ruefully, becoming recognized as one of the overriding laws of our times. In a book chapter published in 1996, Keith Hoskins wrote: Later writers generalized Goodhart's point about monetary policy into a more general adage about measures and targets in accounting and evaluation systems.