From Adam Butler’s “The Strip-Mining of Trust“:
The economists call trust “social capital,” but the name obscures the crucial asymmetry. Trust is not like money. It is more like topsoil—built up over generations through countless small depositions, easily washed away in a single season of careless extraction, and once gone, recoverable only on timescales that mock human planning. The farmer who strip-mines his soil for a decade of bumper harvests will leave his children a desert. The society that strip-mines its trust for a generation of efficiency gains will leave its children something worse: institutions that still stand in their accustomed places but have been hollowed out from within, and a friction industry selling services to navigate the rubble.
There is a story about a nurse in part three that is so compelling that I will not deprive you or Mr. Butler of some of the essay’s potency by trying to blockquote a reasonable portion of it. Just go read it.
This is not a failure of implementation but a structural limitation: to manage at scale what it cannot see, the system must convert discretionary judgment into measurable proxies. And here Goodhart’s Law begins its corrosive work. Once the proxy becomes the target, it ceases to measure what it was designed to capture. What gets measured gets managed; what gets managed gets gamed; what gets gamed gets hollowed out.