Opposition to a course of action is inversely proportional to knowledge of what the alternatives actually involve.
The claim is that confident opposition is often a report of unfamiliarity rather than of comparison: it is easy to be against a proposal whose alternatives one has not had to cost. The corrective it implies is procedural, which is to require any objection to name the alternative it prefers and what that alternative costs.
In practice
- A proposal defeated by objections from people who were never asked what they would do instead.
- A critic who has costed the alternative and still objects is offering something different from one who has not.
- Standing
- Part of Issawi's Laws of Social Motion, a set of satirical propositions about institutions.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- The paradoxes of democracy and the quips of partisans