Anticipating Mistakes

Why getting prevention wrong is far less expensive than getting it wrong when you try to fix a problem

I recently had small children and I read them a lot of small children books. One of my small children was particularly taken with Thomas the Tank Engine and I read my child a lot about that cheeky engine. But by the dozen, I began to question Thomas’ authenticity and standing as a moral philosopher. That is, eventually I noticed that Thomas the Tank Engine is just derivative of the Boy Who Cried Wolf in its use of Type I Errors as a snobby aphorism to not waste people’s time above all else. “You have caused confusion and delay” the autocratic train conductor Sir Topham Hatt would thunder, as if those were the real sins of childhood.

What I would like to argue here is that some bit of that thinking has permeated the way we make policy. That our deep and earnest fear of wasting people’s time if we cry wolf leads academics and policymakers to ignore the other danger, which is that we ignore the wolf and we all are eaten. I would like to argue that intensely studying whether something wor…