When I was a child and young adult, my optometrist was Dr. Bernard Vodnoy. I remember his energy, curiosity, and exuberance. He had contracted polio a few months before the vaccine was available, and he was confined to a wheelchair—except it did not seem like confinement. He had rigged ramps through his office and the speed with which he moved with his wheelchair left the impression that it was his version of a skateboard. He was entrepreneurial in attitude and action, founding a small firm to make visual therapy equipment.
I remember him being conventionally liberal, wanting the government to protect us from a host of evils. But I also remember one conversation in which he became quite animated about the ignorance and stupidity of government regulations related to optometry.
Government regulations sound plausible in areas where we know little and have thought less. But usually those who know an area well can tell us of the unexpected harmful consequences of seemingly plausible and well-intentioned regulations. As a result, the same person often advocates government regulations in areas in which they are ignorant and opposes them in areas where they have knowledge. I call this the “Vodnoy Paradox.”
This is from Arthur M. Diamond, Jr., Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism, forthcoming in 2019 from Oxford University Press. Art asked me to read his manuscript and give a blurb for his book, which I was pleased to do. He tells story after story about various entrepreneurial successes—and failures—and had me saying after many of them, “I didn’t know that.”
I’ve seen the Vodnoy Paradox over and over in my adult life. Now I have a name for it.
Incidentally, what I hadn’t known is that we have someone in common early in our intellectual lives. Art credits the late Ben Rogge, an economics professor at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, for turning him on to Schumpeter. Rogge was the first speaker the University of Winnipeg Libertarian Club had after I joined. He came in February 1969.
READER COMMENTS
Jacob Egner
Sep 29 2018 at 6:13pm
The Vodnoy Paradox seems very similar in nature to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. The former for government policy, the latter for news/journalism.
David Henderson
Sep 29 2018 at 7:06pm
Thanks, Jacob. Yes, it does indeed.
Michael Gray
Sep 30 2018 at 8:16am
The Vodnoy Paradox sounds very similar to Robert Conquest’s First Law of Politics: “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.” There is some doubt about whether Robert Conquest was the author of the “Three Laws of Politics” ascribed to him, but I suggest his First Law goes some way to explaining why we see the behaviour labelled as the Vodnoy Paradox and even removes the element of paradox in the behaviour.
For the record, Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics are:
Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
David Henderson
Sep 30 2018 at 11:55am
Thanks, Michael.
I don’t quite understand Conquest’s Third Law of Politics:
The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
Are bureaucracies to weak that their enemies can control them? That’s certainly not how I read the EPA’s behavior during the Obama administration.
Michael Gray
Sep 30 2018 at 4:52pm
I think that “Conquest’s Laws” should be regarded as generalisations, frequently helpful in understanding the behaviour of bureaucracies but not ironclad rules, and slightly tongue-in-cheek like Parkinson’s Law and The Peter Principle. If they are truly from the mind and pen of Robert Conquest, they are probably influenced by his decades of study and writing about Soviet Communism. There are variations, the third law sometimes being expressed as “…assume that it is controlled by a cabal of the enemies of the stated purpose of that bureaucracy.” In Australia where I live the Third Law frequently appears to explain the behaviour of our two main political parties, the – sort of – conservative Liberal Party (small “l” liberal as it is often said) and the very left wing Labor Party. Right now I wonder whether it explains the behaviour of your Democrats regarding the latest Supreme Court nominee.
Weir
Sep 30 2018 at 6:38pm
Robert Conquest was “Bob” to Kingsley Amis. (To Martin Amis they were Kingers and Conquers.)
Anyway, this is from pages 145 and 146 of Kingsley’s memoirs:
“In deliberately inverse order I now set down something about Bob’s real or proper concern, a sufficiently serious one as a writer on politics and authority on the Eastern bloc, particularly the USSR and its internal history. His political position has come to be on the libertarian Right, and he has always been implacably anti-Soviet, an unfashionable stance for an intellectual and poet in those early 1950s days. In those same days I was some sort of man of the Left, and this brought us into mild conflict. Some time later he was to point out that, while very ‘progressive’ on the subject of colonialism and other matters I was ignorant of, I was a sound reactionary about education, of which I had some understanding and experience. From my own and others’ example he formulated his famous First Law, which runs, ‘Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about.’ (The Second Law, more recent, says, ‘Every organisation appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents.’)”
It was John O’Sullivan who said that any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
David Seltzer
Oct 1 2018 at 6:19pm
Somewhat related, NIMBY; a person who objects to the siting of something perceived as unpleasant or potentially dangerous in their own neighborhood, such as a landfill or hazardous waste facility, especially while raising no such objections to similar developments elsewhere.
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