For hardcore sports fans and casual viewers alike, not much beats three special weekends in March. The Holy Grail of college sports, March Madness, is equal parts exhilarating and agonizing.
No matter how much work one puts into a bracket, everything can change in an instant. For every Florida victory, there’s a Mercer upset, and everyone, from the most dedicated fans and commentators to casual viewers and novices, is subject to the upsets and surprises.
Last week, as I watched my bracket go up in flames, I couldn’t help but see the whole process as a timely analogy for our country’s current state of affairs.
A busted bracket is inevitable – and it’s a painful reminder of the limitations of human knowledge.
It’s been decades since Hayek wrote the oft-quoted line, but it rings true today:
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
Or to put it in modern terms, you could say that March Madness teaches us how little we can know.
Of course, technology, in sports as in economics, has come a long way since Hayek’s time. Everything from computer modeling to Internet communication stretches the capacity of our minds. But technology can only enhance our abilities, not give us new ones.
Omniscience would be nice, but it just doesn’t exist — not for the most advanced and intelligent people and industries, and certainly not for the lumbering and stilted beast that is government.
Recent examples are plenty — everywhere from the disastrous Healthcare.gov rollout and embarrassing enrollment numbers, to Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia, where progress on a new “Silver Line” portion of the train system is now delayed indefinitely. The latter is a classic case of government regulating itself into a pretzel: because government regulations changed while government was building the line, the line is now not up to code.
Government can try to do lots of things, and it does. But it’s always going to be limited because of incomplete knowledge. Just as even the most sophisticated prediction technology and the smartest sportscasters can’t predict the outcome of games, neither can the government predict the outcomes of the countless interactions between actors in the market.
So the next time government leaders try to push for more involvement in your lives and wallets, think of March Madness, and how little we can know.
