Against metrics: how measuring performance by numbers backfires

Article note: Yup Yup Yup. I become more and more convinced that bureaucratization is the limiting factor of societies. Goodhart's law ("When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure") guarantees that we can't effectively measure, and thus Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy ("In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.") takes over, and now you have a giant overhead machine that occupies all available resources. It's the "mythical man month" problem at maximum generality and scale.