In business and in government, lesson after lesson has been learned against trusting the ‘smartest guys in the room.’
Remember Enron, where doubters were told by CEO Jeff Skilling that they just didn’t ‘get it’? … the alarmist climate scientists who have long stated that the science is settled…. the Obama Administration energy decision-makers who know which technologies are ‘environmentally sustainable’ and are ‘commercially promising’?
F. A. Hayek warned against the ‘pretense of knowledge” where an intellectual elite via government coercion plans for the rest of us. Economist/educator Russell Roberts (Mercatus Center, George Mason University) explained what Hayek meant in a Wall Street Journal piece, “Is the Dismal Science Really a Science?”
…If economics is a science, it is more like biology than physics. Biologists try to understand the relationships in a complex system.