Overall, I enjoyed the case for Barry Lamb’s book less rules, better people: discretion. Initially, I had the motivation to read books. Because I was thinking about two different ideas that are common to classical liberals and libetarians who seem to be nervous about each other.
The first is the idea of the distributed nature of knowledge. Economists, and influenced by the FA Hayk debate, are aware of the benefits of decentralized decision-making and how it allows it to fully utilize distributed knowledge. By carefully expanding, the libertarian shottle seemed friendly to expanding discretion, as long as it enhanced the ability of knowledge to be utilized depending on the partial part of time and place.
Meanwhile, within libertarian and classical liberal communities there is also debate over the issue of rules and discretion, where people fall hard in favor of rules. An example of this thinking is given in the First Principles of John Taylor’s book. Five keys to restoring America’s prosperity, where (sick) economist John Cochran has been described as deep in cue and economy, and our Shuz as deep in macroeconomics. “
I will initially leave Lamb’s book with more discussion added to the “discretionary” camp. Interad, the argument that reading a book and being a slatch of thought helped me to think about whether I was Hayekian style discretion based on the knowledge Ronts Toty distributed in Taylor Style rules. I know the question is that the choices should not be guided by rules or made sparingly
Lam’s argument in favor of discretion is intended for what he calls “street-level bureaucrats.” And I was convinced from Lamb’s book that the modest place is from the street level to the scale of decision-making on the spot.
There are two main reasons for this. The first reason relates to the importance of stability and predictability. The more you are in your organization as a decision maker, the more people affected you need to predict your actions so that they can effectively plan their plans. This makes it very important that the chalk is made up of stages and planned. This well explained why co-blogger John Murphy is such a great person. He explains the constant leap from President Trump’s constant policy directive to another, and explains how millions of people undermine the stability and predictability they need to implement their plans. So he put it down,
I see this accurately in Donald Trump’s arbitrary tariff “policy” to get out of the classroom and move into economics (“policy” cites scholarships here. America and foreigners don’t know how I write this.
Similarly, John Taylor is well-known as a guide to monetary policy in the Taylor Rules (among others), while Scott Sumner advocates a rule-based policy to target nominal GDP level growth. At the microeconomic level, individual agents must have broad discretion about how they perform their activities. At the macroeconomic level, it is much stronger when polymakers and central bankers are bound by rules and are restrained from matching at activists’ discretion.
The second reason why discretionary cases are stronger at the street level compared to the macro level is that when street level decisions misfire, the damage is much less. As I wrote in another context about why decentralized decisions are good business practices, “If centralized decisions are misunderstood, mistakes are thrust into the entire system. Bottom-up decisions can be misunderstood in any instance, but they can prevent comparisons and competition in ways that do not allow top-down decisions.”
This simple distinction also led me to believe in the subject, and I mentioned in my previous post about Lamb’s book. What Boudin did was to strip discretion from places previously before individual prosecutors, move away from street-level decision-makers, and raise the bureaucratic ladder to a more centralized level. The discretionary misuse of individual prosecutors in regard to a single case will result in more damage than the unconservative misuse of the district attorney and will make decisions that will strengthen their entire jurisdiction.
Most of my opposition to Lamb’s book was rooted in how the distinction between law and law existed. But that’s probably to choose something quite niche. And I thought I needed to expand or explain his idea som more to explain it. The other is, to be fair, this book is part of the A Norton Short Book series. Given the rather compact book, it was inevitable that getting research was not entirely explorable. And that could be the virtue of the book. There was an aspect to the discussion that Ram didn’t cover, so it ended up spending more time on what points and counterpoints were made in that regard. This has inspired the book to inspire more thoughts on my part.
Overall, I give the book a high mark. But as always, reading book reviews is not a substitute for actually reading the book itself.
