The Kingdom That Collapsed While Everything Looked Fine

Every report said the kingdom was healthy. The harvest was "better than expected", the army was "acceptable", the treasury "stable". Every report was true, and the kingdom was dying. King Aldren hated flatterers, so he built the best information system his kingdom had ever seen. Then a young mapmaker noticed that the giant map in the palace stayed green while the north went hungry. Nobody forged a number. The target moved, the definitions were narrow, the averages were comforting, and every desk polished the truth a few degrees. Twenty thousand soldiers were on the rolls; about nine thousand could march. King Aldren, Elian, the ministers, the kingdom and the modern examples are made up; the trap is real. In 1995 the fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly named the shifting baseline: each generation treats what it first saw as normal. In 1970 the psychologists Sidney Rosen and Abraham Tesser described the MUM effect, our reluctance to pass on bad news. And Charles Goodhart warned in 1975 about what happens when a measure becomes a target. You had all the information. That's not the same thing. 00:00 Every report was true 01:05 The perfect system 01:46 The mapmaker 02:29 Ninety one percent 03:24 Not the question on the form 04:27 Five desks 05:17 Then we continue 05:47 Twenty thousand 06:52 Good news travels up 07:34 You were told 08:19 The battle 09:00 Fixing the system 09:41 Compared to what? 10:08 The kingdom today Sources: Pauly (1995), Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries, Trends in Ecology and Evolution 10(10): 430: https://www.waterbucket.ca/rm/files/2... Rosen & Tesser (1970), On reluctance to communicate undesirable information: the MUM effect, Sociometry 33(3); Tesser, Rosen & Tesser (1971): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2... Goodhart (1975), Problems of Monetary Management: the U.K. Experience; popular wording by Marilyn Strathern (1997): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhar... The kingdom, its people, its neighbour and the company are fictional; no real country, ruler or organisation is shown. The studies are real. Credits: Music: "Mining by Moonlight" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Music: "Deliberate Thought" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Music: "Spy Glass" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Music: "Thatched Villagers" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Music: "Hidden Agenda" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Music: "Volatile Reaction" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Music: "Sneaky Snitch" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Music: "Investigations" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Music: "Perspectives" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Music: "Thinking Music" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Music: "Wholesome" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Music: "Cheery Monday" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Additional sounds: Joseph SARDIN - BigSoundBank.com