Poor people are generally bad at managing their own affairs and need external guidance
That seems like a particularly cynical way of describing this argument. Another description might be: Individuals are on average fine at identifying ways to improve their lives, and if you think life improvements are heavy tailed, this implies that individual will perform much less well than experts who aim to find the positive tail interventions.
Here’s a similar situation: A high school student is given 2 hours with no distractions and told they should study for a test. How do you think their study method of choice would compare to if a professional tutor designs a studying curriculum for them to follow? My guess is that the tutor designed curriculum is somewhere between 20% and 200% better, depending on the student. Now that’s still really far from 719x, but I think it’s fine for building the intuition. I wouldn’t necessarily say the student is “bad at managing their own affairs”, in fact they might be solidly average for students, but I would say they’re not an expert at studying, and like other domains, studying benefits from expertise.
Sure, there are more reasonable ways to express the argument, all of which boil down to “experts have a comparative advantage at producing welfare gains.” And the people don’t need to be poor for this theory to be in vogue, e.g. American public health officials giving very nuanced guidance about masks in March-April 2020 because they were looking to achieve a second-order effect (proper distribution). I think my broader point, however, about the necessity for such a theory, regardless of how it is expressed, holds. I went with a cynical version in part because I was trying to make a point that a theory can be a ‘folk theory’ and therefore impolite, but elucidating that was out of scope for the text.
That seems like a particularly cynical way of describing this argument. Another description might be: Individuals are on average fine at identifying ways to improve their lives, and if you think life improvements are heavy tailed, this implies that individual will perform much less well than experts who aim to find the positive tail interventions.
Here’s a similar situation: A high school student is given 2 hours with no distractions and told they should study for a test. How do you think their study method of choice would compare to if a professional tutor designs a studying curriculum for them to follow? My guess is that the tutor designed curriculum is somewhere between 20% and 200% better, depending on the student. Now that’s still really far from 719x, but I think it’s fine for building the intuition. I wouldn’t necessarily say the student is “bad at managing their own affairs”, in fact they might be solidly average for students, but I would say they’re not an expert at studying, and like other domains, studying benefits from expertise.
Sure, there are more reasonable ways to express the argument, all of which boil down to “experts have a comparative advantage at producing welfare gains.” And the people don’t need to be poor for this theory to be in vogue, e.g. American public health officials giving very nuanced guidance about masks in March-April 2020 because they were looking to achieve a second-order effect (proper distribution). I think my broader point, however, about the necessity for such a theory, regardless of how it is expressed, holds. I went with a cynical version in part because I was trying to make a point that a theory can be a ‘folk theory’ and therefore impolite, but elucidating that was out of scope for the text.
I amended the text to be less inflammatory