The technocratic masters of the world made the same basic Goodhart’s Law mistake that so many rookie managerial-types make.  They realized that they’re stuck trying to maintain an impossibly complex system that’s serving ten million different functions simultaneously, so they invented a single hacked-together metric of “how things are going in a given place and time,” just so that every decision wouldn’t devolve to a tradeoff between incomparables.  Surprise!  Instantly, every system agent starts optimizing for this stupid artificial metric, and no one in power has the slightest clue whether things are actually good or bad! 

This much is not a surprise.

…but I can’t help being surprised that Mencius Moldbug, of all people, falls for it hook, line, and sinker.  The 20th-century neoliberal elite came up with an empty measure of human well-being, designed mostly for ease of bureaucratic analysis?  That sure sounds like the star on which a neoreactionary should be pinning his highest sociopolitical ideals!