Tie a car salesman's bonus to sheer volume and he will slash prices until the dealership goes bankrupt while still collecting his bonus. That is Goodhart's Law in action: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. This episode goes back to 1975 and British economist Charles Goodhart watching the central bank chase money supply targets, then shows how banks under the Thatcher government invented products classified as broad money to sidestep narrow money restrictions, breaking the very relationship policymakers relied on.

The hosts then trace the same distortion through the accountability era: UK degree grades collapsing into a 2:1 baseline, No Child Left Behind narrowing curricula and forcing teaching to the test, scientists salami slicing papers and forming citation cartels to inflate their h-index, hospitals discharg ...