alt Hacker NewsThe not-so-hidden message is, "Interventions don't do anything, so make the government smaller, and let corporations do whatever they want."
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This really is not the message though. From the post:
“That’s why the worst possible reaction to a failed intervention is resignation. We may not know enough to improve our lot right now, but perhaps we could figure it out, if we tried.”
From reading the whole post, I gather that he’s truly not advocating some libertarian angle, he really is writing on the observation that policy is hard, and it’s nearly impossible to actually predict all the effects of societal intervention.
From my reading, I’m not sure even sure that he’s advocating caution or reluctance to social policy. Just goat sacrifices!
Wow. So we must not ask if any govt interventions work for fear that the wrong answer will empower political groups disfavoured by the govt and govt staff?
"Because there are sometimes unintended consequences to doing stuff, we should never do anything" is a great motto to live by. (/S)
If you read more of the author's stuff it'll be obvious to you why this is wrong.
His whole thing is "we don't understand the world remotely as well as we think we do, and we need to be trying more diverse things (and reliably measuring the outcomes) so that we can understand it better"