Evaluating a policy by imagining it administered by benevolent and competent officials rather than by the ones who would actually administer it.
Munger's 2014 term. It is the public-choice mirror of the nirvana fallacy: one compares real markets to ideal states, the other compares real states to ideal markets, and both smuggle in the same error.
In practice
- A new regulator is assessed on what a well-resourced, expert and disinterested body would do with the power, and staffed with three people on temporary contracts.
- A market remedy is judged against a textbook market of informed buyers, and the actual buyers cannot read the tariff.
- Standing
- The public-choice mirror of the nirvana fallacy, aimed at state rather than market idealisation.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- What can be proved and measured about power