gwern comments on Rationality Quotes August 2011 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: dvasya 02 August 2011 08:24PM

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Comment author: gwern 22 August 2011 04:15:33PM -1 points [-]

“Like experts in many fields who give policy advice, the authors show a preference for first-best, textbook approaches to the problems in their field, while leaving other messy objectives acknowledged but assigned to others.

In this way, they are much like those public finance economists who oppose tax expenditures on principle, because they prefer direct expenditure programs, but do not really analyze the various difficulties with such programs; or like trade economists who know that the losers from trade surges need to be protected but regard this as not a problem for trade policy.”

Summers, Lawrence H, “Comments on ‘The Contradiction in China's Gradualist Banking Reforms’”, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2006, 2, 149-162