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… is from page 164 of Steven Landsburg’s 1997 book, Fair Play [2]:
Education means learning to ask “Is it plausible?” in an intelligent way. Often, this means finding the right thought-experiment. For example, it is sometimes said that Japanese car manufacturers make Americans worse off through the practice of “dumping” (selling cars for artificially low prices). Having been told such a thing, the successfully educated person might pause to consider whether the Japanese could make Americans worse off by giving every U.S. citizen a free Lexus. Having performed that thought-experiment, who can go on believing the dumping hurts Americans?
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