To appreciate my approach to solving big problems in economics, education, social policy, etc. you need to be familiar with my 'bag of bricks' metaphor. It goes like this.
How many bricks can you put inside an ordinary paper grocery bag before the bottom falls out? You don't know. I don't know. There's only one way to find out. Someone holds the bag open and you put in a brick. Then you put in another, and another and so on until the bag rips. However many bricks you put in before the bag ripped, that's your answer. If you want to be more scientific, repeat the experiment a few dozen times and average the results. Let's say, to make a point, the average brown paper grocery bag can reliably hold five bricks before it rips apart. That's a piece of factual information, data. It's reliable, you found out by testing. So if someone says to you "I've got to take these ten bricks out to my car, do you have a paper grocery bag to put them in?" You can authoritatively reply "The bag won't hold that many."
In the world, particularly in America, we like forge ahead and do things without knowing how many bricks will rip the bag. Dump toxic waste into rivers? Sure, why not. Remove all federal regulations on business so they can create jobs?** Sounds great! The problem is, whenever we've tried these things, we end up with a pile of bricks on the floor and torn paper bag in our hand. We look at the mess and say "ooops!"
The trouble with this approach is that "oooops!" is not a good thing to say after you've poisoned half the wells in a given community, or implemented a policy that backfires horribly. Doctors don't get to say "ooops!" if you go into the hospital for heart surgery and they saw off both your feet. A carpenter doesn't get to say "ooops!" if you hire him to fix your roof and he puts a big hole in it and drives away.
Yet we - and i mean you and me, everybody in the world - have allowed (and i do mean allowed) public officials and heads of companies to say "ooops!" and walk away from huge disasters, laughing. We allow our so-called leaders to pass laws permitting things that are no smarter than loading bricks into a paper bag until it rips. Then when it rips they all trip over each other looking for someone to blame.
So, here's what should be done, going forward. If someone wants to do something that is clearly dangerous like, say, dump radioactive waste into a river or allow four-year-old kids to play with loaded guns, they should be forced to conduct the 'bag of bricks' test. Dump some radioactive waste in some water and drink it and wait to see what happens. Get some little kids together and give them loaded handguns and see what happens. Then you'll have some information to base your policies on.
Or we can keep doing it the stupid way, just passing laws based on something an alleged expert said and uttering a collective "oooops!" when we're up to our knees in undrinkable water, poverty, ignorance, crime and out of control inflation.
** - a further post will be devoted to what a country looks like without the EPA and OSHA - China. I've been there. Another post will be devoted to the world we had in the 19th century when people like the Carnegies and Rockefellers were free to do whatever they wanted because there was no income tax (!) and no federal regulations to stop them. The results in both cases, history records, were not good
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