Somewhere in the last forty years, quantification stopped being one tool of economic governance among others and became the whole operating system. Inside the firm, shareholder value crowded out almost every other account of what a company was supposed to be for. In macroeconomic debate, GDP figures got promoted from diagnostic instrument to final verdict on whether things were going well (never mind what was happening to the people who couldn’t afford the rent). Public agencies and universities were quietly retooled around audit regimes and key performance indicators imported from the private sector. The labor process itself now runs through dashboards that watch workers in real time and convert what they do into figures someone in a different building can rank against last quarter’s. Whatever the explicit politics of the moment, almost every institution we pass through has been redesigned to produce numbers, and to be evaluated and disciplined by them.

Goodhart’s Law, the 1975 observation by economist Charles Goodhart that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure,” was originally a narrow point about central banks losing their grip on whatever indicator they picked to control. In the half-century since, it has quietly become a more acute diagnostic of late-capitalist life. If our institutions are now built to hit numbers, regardless of whether they’re still doing the things those numbers were supposed to track, what exactly are those institutions for anymore? Who benefits from rule by metric, and who gets to decide which metric counts? Once the dashboard has been built into the architecture of political economy itself, what would it even look like to push back against it?

Grab a drink and join us as we ask what our institutions were supposed to be for, before they all became scoreboards.

This week’s jukebox picks:

In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers, ideas, texts, etc.:

• Goodhart’s Law
• Charles Goodhart
• Intrinsic vs. instrumental value
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
• C. Thi Nguyen, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game
• C. Thi Nguyen, “Value Capture”
• SMART criteria for goal-setting
• Jordan Peterson and citation metrics
• The No Child Left Behind Act
• Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
• Grade inflation
• “Publish or perish” culture in academia
• Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza 
• Late capitalism
• C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art
• Aristotle on friendship (Books VIII–IX of the Nicomachean Ethics