However you measure it, China’s job market is weak

STEERING AN economy has never been easy. In a candid presentation in 1975 Charles Goodhart, then of the Bank of England, shared some of Britain’s “unhappy” experiences after sterling lost its link to the dollar four years before. Instead of defending an exchange rate, the bank had hoped to use interest rates to control the supply of money, variously measured. But the monetary authorities had ignored what the presenter playfully called Goodhart’s law: “Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.”Visitors walk past booths at an exhibition hall during the 2026 World Robot Conference, in Beijing, China August 21, 2026. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang (REUTERS)Others have put this more snappily: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases