Irrationality: The Enemy Within
My early morning post about unintended consequences, good and bad, prompted an email exchange between me and our friend Paul Coulam. Paul works in philosophy and publishing, and on my long wishlist of those I’d love to blog, his name is high on the list. Thanks to him for giving me permission to quote from his emails here. First quotation:
All clouds, however big, will have a silver lining, however slight, somewhere. A nuclear explosion in London would have some benefits (for example some currently unpunished murderers would be summarily killed). But looking at the silver linings and downplaying the cloud is an error systematically committed by socialists.
Well, yes. The point I failed to make when I was explaining this fantasy project (for which I will almost certainly never make the time, but wouldn’t mind someone else doing) is what I replied to Paul (after assuring him that I wasn’t making the argument that such silver linings prove or disprove any arguments):
…I am surrounded by ‘reasonable’ people who don’t see how anyone ‘reasonable’ could possibly object to, say, fair trade, or compulsory education, [or] socialised healthcare, or public television…etc. For me, I’d like a resource purely devoted to pointing out the many bad points about these things…The same people also just can’t see what’s so great about, say, private healthcare, private ANYTHING, etc. It’s one thing to seek out blog posts and articles from all over the internet to point them to, but that’s a bit too much work, and I’d like to collate all the points onto one resource.
So no real dispute, apart from that Paul would rather not see me indulging tactics often employed by statists. Fair enough. As he writes:
[E]very economic cloud will have a silver lining and it is often not difficult to see what they are. I could, without trouble, point out the silver linings to shark attacks, happy slapping, the spread of AIDS or alien invasion. But in none of these cases would the silver lining remotely mitigate the disaster of the cloud. The trouble comes when people are so impressed with themselves for noticing a particular silver lining that they forget that the cloud is still bigger. This is what the fellow you are quoting seems to do. He is merely using the higher gas prices to ride his hobby horse about teleworking. Systematically making this mistake and pointing out silver linings is how socialists and statists of various types manage to advance their agendas. It is, for example, how people are tricked into financing things like the Olympic Games. It seems to me that claiming that there are benefits of more teleworking as a result of higher gas prices is exactly akin to saying that the spread of AIDS has led to more celibacy and higher condom sales than would otherwise be the case and then claiming that this is a ‘benefit’.
On the other hand it is always right to look for the likely bad effects of apparently bright ideas and see if they don’t actually vitiate the bright idea they are an unintended consequence of. There is an excellent book called ‘Irrationality: The Enemy Within‘ by Stuart Sutherland, published about 15 years ago, that does exactly that for hundereds of cases. It certainly includes the example about perfomance related initiatives and hundreds of others as well. You may enjoy reading it.
We’ll find out when it arrives, as I’ve now ordered the book.
Filed under: Life