We've all heard the story, which sounds for all the world like a typical urban legend.  It goes something like this:

> Once upon a time, there was a factory in the Soviet Union that made
> nails.  Unfortunately, Moscow set quotas on their nail production, and
> they began working to meet the quotas as described, rather than doing
> anything useful.  When they set quotas by quantity, they churned out
> hundreds of thousands of tiny, useless nails.  When Moscow realized
> this was not useful and set a quota by weight instead, they started
> building big, heavy railroad spike-type nails that weighed a pound
> each.

The moral of the story, depending on who's telling it, is either "[be careful what you measure for because it's often not representative of the result you really wanted][1]," or "ha ha, look at how silly central planning of an economy is; we never had messes like that over here with Free Enterprise™."  But it makes me wonder, did the Soviet Nail Factory ever truly exist?


  [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law