Blinder Expresses Why I Chose to Be a Doctor

Hard Heads, Soft Hearts was great. But this is just the problem in my opinion. There was a time where I thought it would be so cool to be a policy maker. Not necessarily to be a politician, but to work in politics in some capacity where I would develop policy. The idea seems appealing, you go around as a smart person and you read up on things and conduct research and you come up with answers as to what the best solution to a given problem is. The government implements the policy and wham-o, you have just helped the lives of millions of people.

Then I did the Washington, DC program. I got a taste of how policy was really crafted. It seemed to me that Murphy's Law of Economics is not just true of economics but everything. We actually know more about everything than it may seem. While social sciences are necessarily vague in their responses to the correct solutions to many problems, there are wide-reaching consensuses. For example, class size reduction does not improve educational experiences of students in any way that is proportional to its cost. It costs a lot and it does not do much, there are a lot of things we could do that would help students more for the money. Nevertheless, California, among other states, has state-mandated and funded class size reducation laws that take classes from numbers like 32 down to 24 or things like that. And that costs so much and really does very little.

This is just one example, and of course half of Blinder's book is filled with others. But Blinder, like many a liberal is too much of an optimist. Wake up Blinder... shall I dare say... remove your blinders! It is not just that economists are poor communicators. This is true of every field.

The policy wonks say that solution Y to problem X is the best answer. You put it in the magical political machine and bam, instead of solution Y, the political hacks turn it into solution Z, as various interest groups fight, scratch, and bite. This is what frustrates me about policy making. Hence... I will be a doctor.