Who Do You Trust? Experts or People?

In their article in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, David Shaywitz and Thomas Stossel talk about the difficulty of getting new drugs to market and about the criticism of those in academia who accept funding from and cooperate with pharmaceutical companies in efforts to develop new drugs and new treatments. To read the whole article and the arguments Drs. Shaywitz and Stossel make on this subject, see here. I just want to focus on this one quote from the article:

"Human biology is maddeningly complex, laboratory models are necessarily simplistic, and scientific understanding remains painfully limited."

This statement states the essential problem that many of us have with many of the Obama administration programs. The underlying premise of much of what the President is proposing is that government knows best and can do things best. The best and brightest experts can design programs to deal with problems, or perceived problems, as diverse as global warming, what cars to build, how to turn around our economy while at the same time making sure nobody makes more than they are entitled to, how to provide more health care for more people at lower cost, etc.

But what the Obama administration is missing is the same thing that the financial whiz kids with their superfast computers and super-complicated formulas missed in the housing bubble and subprime crisis: People and what they do and how they react are much more complex than any group of experts, no matter how smart, or any computer program, no matter how sophisticated. The programs may be faster and the experts may be individually smarter, but people are more complex and their decisions and interactions are more complicated and more varied than those programs or those experts can predict or control. The knowledge of the experts and the decision-making capability of the programs are inherently more limited and simplistic than the knowledge and decisions of people themselves.

Whether or not you agree with the last sentence in the prior paragraph is probably a pretty good indicator of whether you think President Obama’s various plans and programs will work or whether they won’t.