So who is up for some side bets on Obamacare?
I’m sympathetic to the opinion that introducing a huge, complicated, government-run program is just asking for trouble. On the other hand, the Adams Rule of Slow-Moving Disasters says everything will work out.
As a reminder, The Adams Rule of Slow-Moving Disasters says that any disaster we see coming with plenty of advance notice gets fixed. We humans have a consistent tendency to underestimate our own resourcefulness. For example, the Year 2000 bug was a dud because we saw it coming and clever people rose to the challenge. In the seventies, we thought the world would run out of oil but instead the United States is heading toward energy independence thanks to new technology.
Obamacare is a classic slow-moving disaster. Absent any future human resourcefulness, it just might be a nightmare. But my money says that clever humans will figure out how to tame the beast before it triggers the collapse of civilization.
If betting were legal, I’d bet $10,000 that in ten years the consensus of economists will be that Obamacare had a lot of problems but that overall it was neutral or helpful to the economy. I base that hypothetical bet on The Adams Rule of Slow-Moving Disasters, not on the scary first-year state of the law. And I reiterate that I know next-to-nothing about the details of Obamacare. I’m just working off of pattern recognition.
Scott Adams, “Obamacare – Side Bets”, Scott Adams Blog, 2013-10-18
October 21, 2013
QotD: Obamacare as a special case of The Adams Rule of Slow-Moving Disasters
Filed under: Economics, Health, Quotations, USA — Tags: BarackObama, Insurance, Obamacare, Regulation — Nicholas @ 00:01
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And if I was a betting man, I would take that bet as I am quite sure Scott Adams would lose. If you read Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (published March 1944), it would be hard to look at socialism and communism and say “well it was not like you were not warned”.
So did human inventiveness solve the problem associated with communism? I mean the Russian Revolution was in 1917 and it would be hard to argue an awful lot of people did not have a lot of time to work on it.
The reason Scott Adams’ contention is so completely fatuous is that large government projects like this are pretty much designed to prevent the exercise of human inventiveness (i.e. markets). The British NHS was founded in 1948…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Hospital_scandal
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-125860/Britain-trails-cancer-survival-rates.html
Is that slow motion enough?
Comment by Perry de Havilland — October 21, 2013 @ 05:33
He allows a lot of wiggle-room in his definition — “a lot of problems but that overall it was neutral or helpful to the economy” is a blank cheque for the folks who think adding a few trillion to the national debt is a positive thing.
Comment by Nicholas — October 21, 2013 @ 06:40