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.
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