In a week in which almost everyone in Westminster and in the media is getting almost everything wrong about the topic of social mobility, let me bring up a pertinent phenomenon
I thought up called The Blind Lifeguard Problem to illustrate a big
misconception humans have about problems and solutions. There is no market
demand for blind lifeguards because a key role in being a lifeguard is being
able to see what is going on in the water.
Very obvious, I know - but
given the foregoing it would be absurd for anyone to claim that the absence of
blind lifeguards in the marketplace proves there is unfair discrimination going
on. In short, anyone who perceived the lack of blind lifeguards to be a problem
would be perceiving something that isn't a problem at all.
The Blind Lifeguard
Problem plays out often in everyday life, particularly in politics and economics
- it is what we might aptly call the no-problem fallacy. That is, sometimes
there are genuine problems, and sometimes there are only perceived problems
that are more to do with the limited analysis going in to the perception. And
then, even if it's agreed there is a problem, that doesn't mean there is
necessarily a solution.
If problems can be solved,
or a bad situation ameliorated, fine - sometimes (but not always) we should act
on that. But some problems are simply things we don't like about the world that
actually don't have a solution, or certainly not one we should attempt to bring
about. It's an important lesson that many need to learn, namely:
1) Not every perceived problem
is actually a problem
2) Even if is a problem,
it's not necessarily one we should be solving
That is to say, quite
often there are perfectly good reasons why there are very few female garage
mechanics, and more men in CEO roles than women, and TV drama shows with very few
Muslims and homosexuals, and universities with fewer graduates from state than
private school graduates.
Government regulations aside,
society is the result of billions of individual choices made in transactions
where both parties look to be made better off from the exchange. If many of
those choices culminate in society having fewer of one identifiable group than
the other, or more of one age group or gender than another, do not hastily assume
it's a problem, much less a problem that ought to be, or even can be solved.
