Always optimise for the scarce resource

It’s a fairly basic idea - a pre-economic one really - that we should always optimise for the scarce resource. Gold, for example, is expensive, so the plating on connectors in computers has gone from perhaps 200nm to 2nm over the past four decades of the personal computer’s existence. We use less gold - which is expensive - to make each computer these days, we have optimised for the scarce resource.

Meat is expensive, every society has a standard carbohydrate sludge to accompany it to fill bellies by optimising for the scarce resource. Human lifetimes are limited thus we desire that things be done faster so we can fit more of them in to our three score and ten - we optimise for that scarce resource.

This is not economics telling us we should do this, this is economics observing that this is what humans do.

At which point: William Hague:

Ideology is dead: it’s competence we need now

Talk of tax cuts and the size of the state should give way to pragmatic plans for education, business and the NHS

We’re not aware of any shortage of ideology. We are not aware, either, of any over-abundance of competence in the political classes. That’s about as mildly as we can put it.

There is that Hayekian point that the centre never will have - cannot possibly have - the information necessary (or, for completists, be able to process the data it can’t get into useful information) to approach competence in managing a society or economy.

There is also the rather milder point that selecting those managers by who kisses babies best is unlikely to be selecting for said managerial competence.

All of which is, of course, ideology. The reason the state should do less is because the state, as directed by politics, is not good at doing things. The advantage of this as an ideology is that it’s clearly factually true as well as merely being a worldview.

Hague’s insistence seems to be that we should use more of what we’ve not got and less of what we do. This is as with insisting we should up our intake of steak and lobster, economise on potatoes, in order to make our diets cheaper. Or, to plate those computing connectors with trilithium, or unobtanium - useful tricks in science fiction but not wholly sensible in this ‘ere reality.

Setting up the system to use more of what we’ve not much - if any - of just isn’t the way to do things.