On Fri, Apr 26, 2002 at 05:15:33PM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote: > I apply the same logic to government. If I believe, as I do, that people > often overestimate the value they get from government, I should fix that if > I can by persuasion.
What if you can't fix it by persuasion and everyone becomes worse off because of your advice? Or what if you do manage to persuade everyone, and then they blame you for giving them what they thought they wanted? > Wei asks about the case of advising slave owners about productivity > improvements. So how large are any negative externalities on the slaves > from improving productivity, versus benefits to both owners and slaves? > Without any particular reason to expect them to be enormous, I guess I'd > give the advice. The negative externality is not necessarily all on the current slaves. By increasing the productivity of slaves, you've made it profitable to spend more resources on capturing people into slavery, which obviously has huge negative externalities. BTW, how do you make interpersonal comparisons of expected (rather than actual) benefits and costs, when people do not have common priors or the same capacity for logical reasoning? What if some (crazy) person believes that having a smaller government is worth a quadrillion dollars? How would that balance out with the (slightly less crazy) people who believe that a bigger government is a net benefit?
