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… is from page 16 of Angus Deaton’s 2013 book, The Great Escape [2]:
The need to do something tends to trump the need to understand what needs to be done.
Yes. And typically, in my view, an understanding of what needs to be done reveals that, in fact, there’s nothing that government can do to ‘solve’ the problem at hand. The existence of a problem – which frequently is simply the reality of unavoidable trade-offs – does not imply the existence of a ‘solution.’