Counterfactuals, revisited

by Russ Roberts on November 11, 2009

My favorite perspective on the political economy of counterfactuals came from a reporter (Tom Foreman of CNN) who gave me his analysis of politicians and the economy. It went something like this:

Politicians taking credit from what they’ve done for the economy are like little kids working the controls of video games without putting any money in. There’s all kinds of stuff happening on the screen of the video game and they think that it’s all due to the frantic work of their fingers.

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Methinks1776

That's a great analysis. I would argue that it's like little kids working the controls of a video game without putting any money in and occassionally whacking the machine with a sledge hammer out of frustration with what they see on the screen.

They have very little power to do any good but a tremendous amount of power to destroy the machine.

MnM

Brilliant analogy.

Mark

Yeah, it's a great analogy regarding the effectiveness of politicians (and other policy wonks). I only wish it could capture their destructiveness and arrogance.

Seth

Ah...it took me a second. Good one. At least the little kids eventually learn.

Nelly

I remember listening to a podcast by Burton Malkiel where he talked about an interesting study. He said "one study had subjects try to control a bouncing ball on a computer screen and then estimate how much control they had over keeping the ball in the top half of the screen. Subjects started out having about 15% control over the ball but they estimated they actually had 85% control over it. Then at some point the subjects were given absolutely no control over the ball but still estimated they had a good deal of control over it."

txslr

Then there's the story of the psychologist testing operant conditioning by putting a bird in a Skinner Box and dropping food pellets in at random moments. In time the bird began to associate its actions with the arrival of the food, which led to some strange behavior - jumping up and down, spinning around, rolling over, passing massive stimulus packages, etc.

joshuamacy

I *wish* they weren't putting money in.

chase

uhhh dude,

I am VERY good at video games and when i press buttons good things DO happen.

If politicians were as good at their jobs as i am at video games we'd be in heaven