Bruce Bartlett emails a Keynes Quote

He writes:

Here’s a quote I just came across that you may appreciate:

“There is nothing a government hates more than to be well-informed; for it makes the process of arriving at decisions much more complicated and difficult.”

The Times (March 11, 1937); Collected Writings, vol. 21, p. 409.

Comments

[Tomas]

Good one, and as a govermental official, I would say half-true.

I think it goes more for the political leadership than the bureaucratic staff. Bu ofc in american its harder to divide them.

[spencer]

That seems just as true for business decision makers as well as government officials.

[andres]

If Keynes is right, then the huge information-gathering bureacracies that most governments deploy have only practical usefulness for the private sector and for the bureaucrats themselves. As for our leader(s), well "It's not what he doesn't know that scares me, it's what he knows for sure that just ain't so..."

[Ian Whitchurch]

You can hate things that you know are neccessary.

[Stlinquirer]

And thus, Bush, was the most beloved of all possible Republican candidates in 2000. Corporate titans and right-wing religious leaders could not have imagined a less-informed/more pliable leader who would quickly make decisions in their favor based on their input and then once the decision was made, snap into rigidity and hold those decisions to be correct and inviolable until the end of time once made. That quote should be carved in 3000 point font on the outside of his forthcoming presidential library (which should be interesting in an avant garde art sort of way as I'm certain all his papers will be classified until the end of time or some approximate equivalent and his disdain for knowledge, his inability to speak well, and his general lack of life accomplishments isn't really going to fill the bookshelves.).

[christofay]

Excellent decorating tip, "That quote should be carved in 3000 point font on the outside of his forthcoming presidential library." And considering the rest of the paragraph, I envision a challenging 18 hole indoor miniature golf course. That will make the future historians see the sunny yellow rug optimism of the guy.

[Neil B.]

It seems to mean, that the government itself hates being well-informed. However, a good case can be made that it hates for the citizens to be well-informed, for the same reason.

[Fan]

Brilliantly apropos. Our dear leader in a nutshell.

[John Emerson]

"Ignorance turned out to be a major result of specialization. Decision makers give up their knowledge of the whole as they seek full and complete knowledge of their particular piece of the whole. But ignorance is not only a correlative of specialization. It is almost a condition for peaceful coexistence among specialists.

Ignorance tends to be meaningfully distributed throughout the heierarchies. There was more ignorance at the center than at the periphery.....This brings our particular concern into focus. Ignorance at the scale that we observed could not have occurred by chance alone. Ignorance at this scale involving scientists -- that is, men dedicated to knowledge above all else -- had to be deliberate."

"Poliscide", Theodore Lowi et. al., Macmillan, 1976, p. 282.

[Anderson]

The Keynes quote should be remembered alongside Asquith's remark that the War Office kept three sets of casualty figures: one to mislead the public, another to mislead the Cabinet, and the third to mislead itself.

IOW, the ignorance suited to decision-making is a quality that government will work hard to acquire.

[George J. Georganas]

Well, perhaps Keynes meant to be Hayek: Government ought to make equitable rules for all regardless of the probable effects on each and every one of its citizens.