this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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This is so true. The ability for human beings to game any metric you put out there is pretty legendary. I've seen it in action so many times. Measure people on a single metric and they will sacrifice every other aspect of your business to make that metric look good.
Reminds me of the story about the British India Company putting a bounty on snales to combat an infestation. People started breeding snakes to claim the bounties. When the government caught up to that, they stopped giving bounties for snales heads. So people released all their snakes into the wild, making the infestation worse than it was.
Do you mean that GDP is not the most important measure of a success of a country?
Isn't the GDP itself a roll-up of dozens or hundreds of other metrics, making it nigh impossible to game? Gaming the metric is the problematic part of identifying metrics to track performance being referred to.
No, GDP (gross domestic product) is an amount of money produced by states' economy. That's why you can have falling wages and lots of people in poverty yet if the stock market is doing well the government can boast how everything is just fine.