Forwarded message:
From <@kate.ibmpcug.co.uk:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sat May 13 00:25:36 1995
Date: Fri, 12 May 95 11:31:47
From: David Herron <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED],
[EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED],
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: For Your Amusement
A Software Engineer, a Hardware Engineer and a Departmental Manager
were on their way to a meeting in Switzerland. They were driving down
a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed.
The car careened almost out of control down the road, bouncing off the
crash barriers, until it miraculously ground to a halt scraping along
the mountainside. The car's occupants, shaken but unhurt, now had a
problem: they were stuck halfway down a mountain in a car with no
brakes. What were they to do?
"I know", said the Departmental Manager, "Let's have a meeting, propose
a Vision, formulate a Mission Statement, define some Goals, and by a
process of Continuous Improvement find a solution to the Critical
Problems, and we can be on our way."
"No, no", said the Hardware Engineer, "That will take far too long, and
besides, that method has never worked before. I've got my Swiss Army
knife with me, and in no time at all I can strip down the car's braking
system, isolate the fault, fix it, and we can be on our way."
"Well", said the Software Engineer, "Before we do anything, I think we
should push the car back up the road and see if it happens again."
An economist (neoclassical) would have done the same as the software engineer,
but rather than redoing it, he/she would have writen a computer programme to
simulate the the accident, assuming no friction, and that the driver had
perfect foresight about the car failure. He/she then would have found that it
was irrational to drive the car given that the brakes were going to fail and
the prescribed doing nothing, on the basis that there is no basis for believing
that the problem exists.
Peter Robertson
