[davidboyd] David: Decision-making

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Posted by David:
Decision-making
http://davidboyd.org/posts/1145189983.shtml


   [1]Seebach:

     But when the government makes mistakes, then everybody is required
     to make them. Even if the government is right sometimes, which
     certainly happens, the consequences of being wrong are greater.
     And, Glaeser suggests, as the difficulty of problems increases, and
     the human ability to solve them decreases, "the quality of
     government decision-making decreases even faster than the quality
     of private decision-making."
     If public policy mistakes come from the efforts of interest groups
     to persuade bureaucrats to enact the policies, and certainly some
     of them do, and if it costs less to persuade a few high-level
     bureaucrats than millions of consumers or thousands of local
     officials, then, Glaeser predicts, government decision-making will
     be particularly flawed.
     If I understand this argument correctly, textbooks are an example.
     A very small number of people decide on statewide textbook
     adoptions in California and Texas, and what they like, everybody
     gets. Without them, we'd have better textbooks and a wider variety
     of textbooks. Publishers would be able to experiment, indeed they'd
     have to, in order to sell books to thousands of individual school
     districts, with widely varied opinions about what kind of books are
     good. Some books would emerge that are better than the
     government-adopted ones, and their value would be proved by
     experience. 

References

   1. http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion_columnists/article/0,2777,DRMN_23972_4622797,00.html