A recent column (Sept. 22) by David Wessel in the Wall Street Journal argues that “Better Information Isn’t Always Beneficial.” His major arguments can be summarized as follows:

Having more information available is generally good
Having …

Kenneth Arrow may be a brilliant economist, but I doubt many–if any–farmers would agree with his assessment of farming.

The amount of food available would NOT be “unchanged” if farmers knew for certain what the weather was going to be!

Why in the world does Kenneth Arrow think farmers CARE about the weather?

For example, suppose a farmer applies fertilizer right before it unexpectedly rains heavily…the fertilizer washes into the Mississippi River and then to the Gulf of Mexico, without helping his crop at all. If he knew several days earlier, when it looked like it was going to rain heavily, but didn’t, that it was NOT going to rain, he would have applied the fertilizer and helped his crop.

“Eliminating uncertainty makes insurance impossible.”

So?

“If deciphering the human genome allows each of us to know the precise odds of contracting a dread disease, life and health insurance will be very tricky.”

If we know the “odds” then there isn’t perfect certainty. If there is perfect certainty, the “odds” are either 100 percent, or zero.

Such information would be extremely valuable not only to society, but even to individuals.

For example, Mickey Mantle got a liver transplant only two months before he died. If he and everyone else had known he was going to die within, he wouldn’t have had an expensive procedure that provided him no extra life, and depleted the available supply of livers.

I hope Kenneth Arrow didn’t win his Nobel Prize for this particular train of thought!

Here’s a dodgy thesis. when it comes to actual processes of decision making, more knowledge does not always lead to better outcomes, and in fact may lead to worse outcomes. In a thoughtful column in a recent edition of…