Meaningless targets and hidden agendas

This is what can happen when targets have nothing to do with society's well-being: 

Stephen Miller, the [US] president's deputy chief of staff and the architect of his immigration policy, wants ICE to arrest 3,000 people a day. In early June the agency was averaging roughly 1,100, according to the Deportation Data Project, a group that collects immigration statistics Mr Homan and DHS insist that the administration is prioritising criminals and national-security threats. But the pressure to ramp up arrests is leading to indiscriminate round-ups of day labourers and taco-sellers. An analysis of the Deportation Data Project’s figures by Mr Bier suggests that nearly half of the migrants arrested during the first week of June had no criminal record. ICE’s big payday makes mass deportation possible, the 'Economist', 12 July 2025 

Why 3000? Why not 300...or 30 000? Numerical targets are probably essential for governments of our large, complex societies, but they need to be meaningful. The case for Social Policy Bonds rest on two pillars. One is the channelling of market forces into the achievement of our goals. The other, though, is the precise definition of these goals. For any quantitative measures of progress, our goals should not only be meaningful to ordinary people. They should be ends in themselves or inextricably linked to those ends. They need to be broad and long term, so that solving one problem can't occur simply by creating others, or shifting the problem into another region, or kicking the can down the road.

So, if the perceived problem in the US is criminality, then target crime. If the target is the number of criminal migrants then, OK, target the number of criminal migrants. But that's not what's happening here. These targets, and other unfocused micro-targets, might have started out as well intentioned. But they are too easily devised or perverted by people with an interest in avoiding effort or, as seems to be happening here, fulfilling an unstated, more sinister, agenda. People can get away with this because few of us will challenge the stated goal, or because we share the unstated agenda. Only in retrospect do we see how the targets and indicators associated with such ideals are so poorly or cynically designed that they have little do with achieving society's real goals.