Rejecting a workable institution by comparing it to an ideal rather than to the available alternatives.
Demsetz's 1969 term. Its symmetry is worth keeping: the market version compares real government to ideal markets, and Munger's unicorn fallacy is the same error pointed the other way.
In practice
- A council's imperfect recycling scheme is attacked by comparison with an ideal one that no council operates.
- A working vaccination programme is judged against zero risk rather than against the disease, which is the comparison that matters.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- The catalogue of predictable errors