The Nirvana Fallacy

June 23, 2009 — -- President Obama has announced his "sweeping overhaul of the financial regulatory system."

We can debate endlessly whether the Constitution authorizes any president to "overhaul" the financial system. But I want to focus on a different matter: whether any president, with all his advisers, is capable of overseeing something as complex as the financial system.

My answer is no, and it is ominous that a bright guy like Obama doesn't know this. He thinks he must regulate the system because it is so complicated and important. In fact, those are the reasons why he cannot regulate it, and should not try.

As F.A. Hayek said in accepting the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics, "[W]ith essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones." So when regulators set out to redesign an economy, they display not wisdom but a "pretence of knowledge".

Yet Obama is so confident.

"[W]e will ... coordinate and share information, to identify gaps in regulation, ... solve problems in oversight before they can become crises ... that will allow us to protect the economy."

What Obama cannot tell us is why these are anything more than words. We've heard them before. Why should we be comforted?

Regulators are human beings with the same shortcomings as everyone else. Even if we assume they have the best motives, on what basis do we believe they could possibly know what they need to know to manage a financial industry that is complex beyond conception -- and changing every day in response to new conditions?

Obama speaks as though these facts don't exist. He goes so far as to say, "[W]e're proposing a set of reforms to require regulators to look ... -- for the first time -- at the stability of the financial system as a whole."

That is precisely what no one can do. The financial system isn't a machine. It's people -- a huge number of them -- engaging in countless transactions often on the basis of hunches that are not quantitative and never written down. How is a regulator to keep tabs on -- much less manage -- that?