Neat, Plausible, and Wrong
26th April 2018
The Antiplanner is frequently reminded of H.L. Mencken’s statement that “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem: neat, plausible, and wrong.” Millennials, for example, blame baby boomers for ruining the world. Most of the mistakes that baby boomers made were in adopting simple and plausible but wrong solutions to complex problems. Now the millennials are promoting their own simplistic and wrong solutions to the problems created by the baby boomer’s errors.
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Here’s the thing. Most of our problems are ones of resource allocation: who gets to consume how much of what. After thousands of years of social evolution, humans have developed three main tools for allocating resources: government, religion, and markets. Government and religion always come up with simplistic solutions that usually don’t match the complexity of the problems they are trying to solve.
Markets, however, have the unusual property of being able to use simple rules to solve complex problems. That’s because markets depend on the simultaneous processing of billions of computers called human beings. Those human beings base their individual decisions on two simple metrics.