Thought for the Day: The Buttinsky Effect
21st May 2017
Far too many people operate according to a screwy and uncivilized code of ethics. Butting in to strangers’ private affairs is applauded as altruistic if done through the agency of the state, while resisting and protesting against such officiousness is portrayed in the media and in the classrooms as evidence of greed or of cruelty or of ignorance (or of some combination of the three).
Making matters much worse are the all-too-typical modern economists. They thrill to the not-very-challenging challenge of pointing out the many ways that real-world markets ‘deviate’ from textbook models – and in particular of all the many situations in which flesh-and-blood individuals acting in markets are less than fully informed. These economists then leap, stuffed with confidence but devoid of anything at stake, to the conclusion that they – and the state officials who they imagine are eager to act on their scientific advice – somehow know, or can make known, all that the flesh-and-blood people are presumed not to know about the details of each of these individual’s specific situations.