Subnostr

Incentives matter. When HCA hospitals send patients to die somewhere else to die, it jukes their stats, reducing the average length of stay for patients, a key metric used by HCA that has the twin benefits of making the hospital seem like a place where people get well quickly, while freeing up beds for more profitable patients.

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Cory Doctorow 2y ago

#GoodhartsLaw holds that "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Give an MBA within HCA a metric ("get patients out of bed quicker") and they will find a way to hit that metric ("send patients off to die somewhere else, even if their doctors think they could recover"):

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

Incentives matter! Any corporate measure immediately becomes a target.

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Cory Doctorow 2y ago

Tell Warners to decrease costs, and they will turn around and declare the #WritersStrike to be a $100m "cost savings," despite the fact that this "savings" comes from ceasing production on the shows that will bring in all of *next year's* revenue:

https://deadline.com/2023/08/warner-bros-discovery-david-zaslav-gunnar-wiedenfels-strikes-1235453950/

Incentivize a company to eat its seed-corn and it will *chow down*.

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