...I give "Knowledge and Decisions" as a Graduation gift to every High School Student I know.
That's a good one, huh? I've not read it. I'll have to get a copy.
Its a Tome. Some call it his Magnum Opus. He basically shows you how the knowledge (or lack there of) in decision making process determines outcomes - and that process itself had costs... When I first read it I found it very hard to think in those terms - being indoctrinated liberal, I was used to looking at thinking terms of desired outcome, and of course not looking too deeply. The example that most struck me was how prejudice is simply an economization of knowledge. The video above gets into it a little, when he talks about hiring and prison records. If you pay in time and effort to get the actual record ( a cost of knowledge) , it allows you to make a better decision. If you don't want to pay for the back ground check you might discriminate because 80% of the applicants have criminal records, and you can't afford to take a chance - because the chance is only 2 in 10 of being right in a given case. Its a rational decision. I like giving that one to graduates because they are all fired up about how they are going to change the world, and I tell them that they need to read the book so they understand why the world is the way it is, and why previous attempts of other generations similary motived failed. Making sure they understand the tradeoff of how we got here, makes you understand why somethings are possible and other are not. A country that put a man on the moon can't do XYZ BECAUSE they went to the moon.. and used up the resources that could have been dedicated to other endeavors..
K & D basically covers the decision making process and its cost in a number of different areas - social, governmental etc. and relentlessly makes the case for the "tragic" worldview of mankind. Liberals assume an abundance of knowledge, concertrated in a few, conservatives assume a dearth of it, spread over the many. But that's another book called Conflict of Visions.
