Abductive Reasoning

Summaries are measures made to tame complexity. They quickly tell something about a system by condensing its manifold dimensions into a single number. Every summary compacts the information about the system like an hydraulic press. They are used to evaluate the system's progress, even considering all the potential problems that come from excessive simplification. But why do humans have the tendency of transform them into goals? This reification of summaries, results on Goodhart's law that says when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. GDP (gross domestic product), for instance, is not just reified, but even deified. Policies are made, and societies suffer, to increase GDP. It does not matter if something is productive, or destructive, or parasitic, if the final result is the increase of overall GDP. It only knows sums, because subtractions are taboo. And everything not measurable in GDP terms, like ecological services, humans' well being, or social inequality, are seen as irrelevant zeros. Because someone said, long ago, that economies that progress had seen increases of GDP. Then, the superstitious flocks that rule economic schools, by a kind of abductive fallacy, flipped the idea to defend that because GDP grows, the economy progresses. And for that, as a sacrifice to this grotesque god, the world burns.