Sarah Gonzalez

This is Charles Goodhart, economist, former advisor to England Central Bank, professor emeritus at London School of Economics.

But over time, it was.

People took Goodhart's Law out of the world of monetary policy and came up with new formulations of the law.

This is a real example.

The British government started pressuring its hospitals to see emergency patients faster, within four hours.

And sure enough, wait times dropped, just not always for the right reasons.

Another way of stating Goodhart's Law?

Be careful what you measure because your employees are going to make it happen.

And we're not even close to finished.

So, for example, Kenny and I have an entire week to finish this Parkinson's Law segment.

Probably, yeah.

But we have a whole week.

So that means we're probably going to spend time like looking for archival tape that we're probably not going to use.

But today we're going to try to use Parkinson's law to help get this done.

Archival tape?

No, you actually brought us archival tape?

That should be Planet Money's slogan.

I feel like that's what we're going for.

Like how much money do we have in our pockets?

Empty your pockets.