Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Given the disparity in information that presidents and the general public use to make and judge national security decisions, can we in the general public ever feel confident that we can accurately judge the decisions that presidents make on such matters at the time they make them?
I don’t think so.
P.S. to post below (and countless ones before that):
An example of the theoretical tire hitting the realistic road is discussed at Volokh Prompted by Neil Katyal’s “extensive review of Jack Goldsmith’s The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration
Yesterday I went to see Elizabeth: The Golden Age….not a great movie, but worth seeing, and better than you would think from reading the reviews. The battle scenes with the Armada reminded me of something written by a Spanish government official, which I posted about a couple of years ago. Don Domingo Perez de Grandallana was writing about the battle of Cape St Vincent, in 1797, but the factors he discusses were likely also major influences on the fate of the Armada, 200 years earlier. And they are also major influences today, 200 years later, on the fate of many efforts in business and government.
Rob’s argument also partly explains why individuals tend to become increasingly risk-averse with age, since most people know more than they did when they were younger and can therefore more easily rationalize inaction. Perhaps, then, older people tend to be too risk-averse, and might accomplish more if they were more aware of this cognitive bias.
(via David Foster)
David Foster’s post got me to thinking about the ex-Mayor of Bogota. Unfortunately, my real world experiences are closer to this guy’s observations than what happened in Bogota. In general, I like the Mockus approach to re-establishing an atmosphere of intolerance for incivility. Being a libertarian, I prefer to rely on social opprobrium to discourage behavior that I think is fairly negative, but not negative enough to warrant giving the government more power to regulate.