This is a chart of the NFL’s rush attempts per game by team during the 2019 season:
Most of these teams (75%) made the playoffs in 2019, including the top seeds in each conference. All of them won at least seven games. This suggests some correlation between running the ball more and winning. Football fans know that teams who have leads tend to run the ball more in the second halves of games in order to take time off the clock more quickly. More running is often a signal that a team is ahead, and teams that are ahead more often are usually good (My 2019 Detroit Lions being a notable exception).
That said, if an NFL team decided to call only running plays on its first 30 snaps that team likely would not win very much. This is because the relationship between running and winning emerges from ebb and flow of football games, in which coaches call a strategic mix of run and pass plays meant to maximize success in specific situations. Artificially inflating rush totals by running when it doesn’t make sense would break the connection between this metric (runs per game) and wins.
This would be predicted by Goodhart’s Law, an idea from economics that says when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful measure. People in these situations adjust their routines to game the metric rather than engaging in the activity that made the measure a useful signal of productive activity.
Goodhart’s Law explains a lot about why the administration’s response to COVID-19 has been so poor and why we are sitting in our houses for the next two months or whatever. The administration spent the winter entirely focused on gaming two specific metrics — the number of COVID-19 cases in the United States and the Dow — rather than preparing for the pandemic.
Confirmed cases
Remember when that cruise ship was quarantined in Northern California and the president resisted bringing the people ashore? Trump said very clearly his thinking was based on keeping the numbers low:
“I’d rather have the people stay,” Trump said, while also noting that he left the final decision in the hands of his administration’s coronavirus task force.
“I would rather — because I like the numbers being where they are — I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault,” Trump said.
Obviously a politician wanting good numbers isn’t exactly a news flash. But that exchange is a clear signal that gaming the metric was a presidential priority. Indeed, not having a test available earlier stemmed from the administration’s choices, which also contributed to keeping the confirmed cases artificially low. Back in January, the low number of confirmed test (the metric) was a signal the virus was not here in large in numbers. By late-February, trying to keep that number low meant it no longer was a meaningful measure of the prevalence of COVID-19 within our borders. In fact, gaming the metric meant it was providing false data.
The Dow
We know that Trump views the stock market as an important measure of his success in office because he’s told us that.
The stock market is a prediction about future growth. A company’s share price goes up when the company is projected to do well over time. This is because investors buy a stock with the intent to sell it for more than they paid later. The stock market is not the economy, but it is a signal that companies are expected to do well in normal economic conditions.
When the markets started falling due to COVID-19, much of the president’s response was focused on gaming the Dow. On Friday, Trump’s mid-afternoon press conference focused on help seemed to buoy stocks so much that he literally printed out a picture of the stock chart and signed it for Lou Dobbs. But then we spent the whole weekend inside, and local governments basically moved to shut down all economic activity. We are inside waiting for an all-clear that might be weeks or months away. Gaming the Dow produced one-day bounces that didn’t last. Indeed, by the end of the trading Monday, all those gains were gone and then some. As I type this, the Dow is lower than it was when Trump took office.
The only thing that is going to put the Dow on a proper footing is going to be the promise of the resumption of more normal economic activity. And we’re probably weeks away from that. Attempts to game this metric illustrate the essential unseriousness of federal efforts to address the virus. It is an attempt to salvage a signal of optimism rather than do the hard work necessary to deal with the virus.
Gaming metrics is what you do when you see everything as public relations, untethered from any real conditions in the world. Whatever happens next, focusing on manipulating metrics rather than the actual dangers COVID-19 posed will have prolonged and exacerbated this crisis.
You can’t communicate yourself out of a sluggish response to a pandemic. We can’t ignore when dead bodies start to stack up.
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