You Can't Pick the Winners

To Do Next Week

The book I highlighted in yesterday’s Signals should really be everyone’s To Do for this week.  Seriously, if you want to understand the enormous, foundational failures of how we do big economic development incentives, go read that.

We’re going to focus instead on a foundational issue: you need to have a sense of what you don’t know in order to truly assess the risk you face when do you try to pick winners.   That’s where biggest risk is.

Even if we are able to move away from trying to pick winners (or if we need to demonstrate to our boss what a bad idea trying to pick winners is) we come up against a really tough question:

How do you know what you don’t know?  

I didn’t actually know how to tell you how to do that, so I’m excerpting here from this article:

To discover the things you can’t explain, take a lesson from teachers. When you instruct someone else, you have to fill the gaps in your own knowledge. But you don’t need to wait for the opportunity to teach someone else:

Explain c…