Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Rob raises an interesting point in the comments to the previous post on this topic: My thermostat runs a simple algorithm along the lines of "temperature below 78 turn on heater, temperature above 78 turn on a/c" (actually its a bit more complex than that but you get the idea) If the fed ran a similar algorithm (I'm sure they could pay the manufacturers of my thermostat to build a device to do this) "NGDP growing less than 5% increase money supply, NGDP growing more than 5% decrease money supply" would this still fall foul of Goodheart’s law?  So, let's say a nation's central bank was replaced by a computer running the above algorithm. Would this work as well as a home thermostat? Rob's thermostat is solely Rob's servant. He gets to set the temperature he wants for his house, and the thermometer keeps it there. But targeting NGDP is not the same thing at all. Some of the "residents" of the central bank's "house" w...

I've posted on this before, but I just ran across some quotes on the matter, so I will share them with you. The following is from my review of James C. Scott's Two Cheers for Anarchism : Scott also takes on the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” legislation, which predictably resulted in teachers “teaching to the test” and in fact often falsifying results to meet standards imposed from the top downward. Scott explains the perverse results by invoking “Goodheart’s law [which] holds that ‘ when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure .’ And Matthew Light clarifies: ‘An authority sets some quantitative standard to measure a particular achievement; those responsible for meeting that standard do so, but not in the way which was intended.’” [Emphasis mine.]  Looking backwards, we might conclude, with Scott Sumner and other monetarists, that stable NGDP is a good measure of whether the monetary authorities have been doing their job. But once it...