By stripping the emotions from pressing problems, economists can often illuminate the most practical ways to tackle them—but only if ordinary people and their representatives are prepared to listen.

There is a gulf between small-scale society and large-scale society. Use the Dunbar number as a breaking point, so small scale means less than 150 people and large scale means more than that. At small scale, coordination problems can be solved by intuition and mutual recognition. You do not need markets or centralized command. But at small scale you cannot have much specialization, and you cannot provide complex goods and services.

At large scale, the coordination problem becomes much more complex. Economists pay attention to this, and that makes them wiser than non-economists who do not.

But many economists are far too oriented toward the possibilities of centralized command (government regulation) as a coordinating mechanism. And they are too smug about what they can accomplish using math and statistics.

For my perspective on the topic of Ip’s essay, see How Effective is Economic Theory?

I would argue that the theme that unites many of the flaws in people’s judgment about risk is a focus on the salient at the expense of the less salient.