'Ignorance'

Chris Dillow:

Ignorance: Economics, it is said, is the study of scarcity. There is, however, one thing that certainly isn't scarce, but which deserves the attention of economists - ignorance. A recent paper by Richard Zeckhauser and Devjani Roy - which introduces a new method of economic research - shows that this is unjustly neglected in economics.

Conventional economics analyses how individuals choose - maybe rationally, maybe not - from a range of options. But this raises the question: how do they know what these options are? Many feasible - even optimum - options might not occur to them. This fact has some important implications. ...

Now, I suspect (hope) that this will seem trivial to economists in the Austrian tradition, which has tended to recognise (pdf)  the role of ignorance. It does, however, clash with the managerialist ideology of our time, which pretends to manage away ignorance. In a brilliant post, Will Davies gives a lovely example of this. Academics making funding applications, he says:

have to describe the entire project, its outcomes and 'impact' in advance. These pieces of science fiction serve little purpose of ensuring that money goes to the 'best' recipients, but a great purpose in reassuring the state that nothing unexpected will happen.

But the entire point of economics - and indeed of life - is that the unexpected does happen. An ideology which overlooks ignorance is therefore a fiction. And worse still, a potentially costly one.