… is from page 88 of my emeritus colleague Gordon Tullock’s 1984 essay “How To Do Well While Doing Good!”, reprinted as Chapter 6 of Daniel B. Klein, ed., What Do Economists Contribute? (1999); here, Gordon discusses the challenges faced in the 1970s by Jim Miller, Fred Kahn, and other economists who successfully back then exposed the ill-effects of the Civil Aeronautics Board:
The problem was mainly that of explaining the matter to the politician and the media. This is not necessarily easy since neither of these groups has any particular motive to think hard about the true public interest. They are both much more interested in the image of public interest currently in the minds of the citizenry.
