Evolution rules.....................

................................................or, beware of the experts:

The economic engineers will say, as they have concerning the Fed's performance during and after the 2008 crisis, that without the Fed our economic performance would have been much worse. But this is an untestable assertion. Moreover, it is sobering to observe that the U.S. economy has suffered from recessions with at least as much frequency and severity since the Fed was created in 1914 as it did before.

Those same engineers believe that health-care policy also ought to be managed by experts. Former senator Tom Daschle explicitly called for the equivalent of a Federal Reserve to take charge of our health-care system. The Affordable Care Act called for the creation of an Independent Payment Advisory Board, composed of 15 experts who would set payment policies for Medicare. Some economists of the engineering persuasion, such as leading health-policy expert David Cutler, believe that, when independent experts are given such authority, they can create incentives that will lead to better health care at lower cost.

To an ecologist, the idea that a centralized bureaucracy could successfully manage the performance of skilled health-care professionals seems implausible. The doctor who is with the patient is in the best position to judge the most appropriate treatment. Moreover, much of medical knowledge comes from doctors experimenting with slightly different protocols and reporting the results to one another. Replacing this evolutionary process with a set of fixed national standards would thwart medical progress. Substituting top-down control for the cultural intelligence of the medical profession would likely be a step backwards.

Evolution, not intelligent design, is how societies advance.

-Arnold Kling, as excerpted from this "Cultural Intelligence" essay