from the article:
You occasionally hear conservatives sneer about Obama’s socialist tendencies, but if anything, I think it is the lessons of free-market economics that have undone him. Obama surrounded himself with policy folks who thought a great deal about incentives; the whole idea of the insurance-market reforms is that if you line up all the insurance incentives just so, the market will, like a well-tuned machine, produce exactly the results we want. They were open to discussing which levers might be incorrectly aligned. But it doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that there is much more to markets, and policy, than just twiddling levers. It’s no accident that their greatest policy successes came from Treasury banking programs for which twiddling the financial levers really is pretty much all you need to do . . . or that some of their greatest failures came when they tried to transfer those programs into industries such as cars, where success or failure relies on a lot more than simple math.
Don’t get me wrong: I believe that the White House understood that implementation matters -- intellectually. But I do not think they understood it viscerally, because the president prefers to surround himself with talkers and designers rather than doers
Source: Megan McArdle, "Obamacare's Big Thinkers Forgot to Bring in the Doers," bloomberg.com, October 28, 2013
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