logoalt Hacker News

TZubiritoday at 7:42 PM1 replyview on HN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."

Or the more pop layman version

"When a measure becomes a metric/KPI, it ceases to be a good measure."

Story time, I live in Argentina, and we don't have Big Macs, the main Mc Donald's brand, here, because during the CFK presidency, one of her tactics was to Goodhart economic metrics. Even the informal obscure ones like the [Big Mac Index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index), I don't know the precise details, but the Big Mac ended up being a very cheap item, like 2 or 3 times cheaper than actual menu items, but it was never on the advertised menu, and it also ended up being very small compared to the other burgers, so it wasn't even like a hack, a shrinkflation type of deal.

But hey, anyone who read the Big Mac Index table would never find Argentina at the bottom of that list along with a couple of other countries with bad brands, so the ploy worked. And now we live with the aftershock, the brand never really turned around, other brands with ridiculous names took over it like the McTasty, which makes me sound like that skit from Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.


Replies

zahlmantoday at 8:51 PM

How did the president manage to influence McDonalds' local business decisions? And how did that lead to McDonald's pulling out of the country?