Here is the mighty Richard Posner looking at some Big Picture economic issues.

A good passage about ‘rational’ descision-making:

If rationality means omniscience, then it is indeed an unsound premise for economic reasoning. If it means reasoning unaffected by emotion, then it misunderstands emotion.

The word "emotional" has overtones of irrationality, but actually emotion is at once a form of telescoped thinking (it is not irrational to step around an open manhole "instinctively" without first analyzing the costs and benefits of falling into it) and a prompt to action that often, as in the case of investment under uncertainty, cannot be based on complete or even good information and is therefore unavoidably a shot in the dark. We could not survive if we were afraid to act in the face of uncertainty.

And this:

… mistakes and ignorance are not symptoms of irrationality. They usually are the result of limited information. Ben Bernanke, in October 2005, just before the housing bubble began to leak air, denied that the rise in housing prices was a bubble.

Was he irrational? That the errors of experts can lead to disaster is hardly a novelty, but it does not follow that only an irrational person would heed the advice of experts.

Plus here is Mark Steyn picking up this astounding story about the performance of the police at a fatal fire in the UK – The Death of England (Contd):

The incident has strange echoes of that fire at a school in Saudi Arabia not long after 9/11, where the fleeing schoolgirls escaped the blazing building but, because they were unveiled, were beaten back by the stick-wielding religious police to die in the flames.

In both cases, the emergency responders who are supposed to save you (or at least make an attempt) instead wind up killing you – because a rote prostration before rule enforcement trumps their basic humanity.

See also Samizdata and the Daily Mail on this one.

What links all these?

Our attitudes to risk and uncertainty.

In the Doncaster fire disaster, the behaviour of the police in (yes) stopping people who were prepared to risk themselves to help their desperate neighbours was, in effect, the state first nationalising then dumbing down heroism.

It reminds me of those FCO guidelines to their staff in dealing with consular emergencies:

  • Lead from the front where it’s safe to do so (Emphasis in the original).
  • Take overall responsibility for the welfare of staff, families and themselves, including by ensuring staff have rest periods.

Where does all this prissy uneasy weakness come from?

Ultimately from lawyers, in an unholy alliance with the media and thence ultimately to government which sets the rules and operational frameworks.

If you are the police inspector outside the burning house, you have seconds to decide. What to do about citizens who want to try to effect a rescue, if you have made a good faith decision that with what you have to hand it is now impossible for the police themselves to intervene successfully?

The sort of factors you weigh up are:

  • what legal powers do I have to stop them trying?
  • might I be sued for assault if we do physically prevent them from approaching the building?
  • if we do let them through to try to help and someone else is injured or killed, what happens when we get the likely lawsuit for professsional negligence?
  • who will have to stand up in the witness stand and be grilled by an oily oh-so-clever barrister, and/or be sneered by a BBC talkshow host for ‘recklessly taking risks’?
  • do I need all this?
  • better (for me) safe than sorry?

Which all wends its way back to the insane Precautionary Principle.

A ‘principle’ which purports to insist that we do nothing unless we are sure that it brings a positive outcome (whether for the environment or anything else) is a guarantee of stagnation and stupidity. It is a form of displacement – it merely accumulates new costs and risks which may or not be hidden.

The point of the principle is not, of course, to achieve anything useful.

It is to let those who shout the loudest about risks get a policy veto.

This does not always succeed. But the prospect that it might, and the very fact that such thinking is out there at all, serves to chill the soul – and shrink ambition.

Which is why heroism as such is so dangerous to collectivists. The idea that humans might do extraordinary things and motivate people to act beyond themselves brings in an element on unpredictability and above all uncontrollability.

Ellsworth Toohey put it all in simple terms:

Make man feel small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity … Kill his capacity to recognize greatness or to achieve it. Great men can’t be ruled…

The world I want. A world of obedience and of unity … everything that can’t be ruled, must go…

This sort of thinking leads directly to the utter blackness of that burned out building in Doncaster.

Would-be individual heroes stymied by the brute force of state-sponsored collectivist anxiety.

Last word with Mark Steyn:

Still, you begin to see why so many lazy government officials are wedded to that "there’s no right to shout fire in a theatre" rubbish. Even when the building’s burning down, you’ve no rights.

New Hampshire’s great motto, "Live free or die", is not just a bit of bloodcurdling stemwinding but a real choice that Britons, Canadians and, alas, Americans ought to ponder: You can live as free men, with all the rights and responsibilities and vicissitudes of fate that that entails.

Or you can watch your society decay and die before your eyes – as England, once the crucible of freedom, dies a little with every day.