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Rubin's Probabilistic Thinking

Brad DeLong recently read In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington, the recently released memoir of Robert Rubin (the Treasury secretary under Clinton), and has an enlightening post on him:

The factor Rubin himself sees as most important is his habit of “probabilistic thinking”: a willingness to always ask questions like “What else might happen?”, “What if we’re wrong?”, “What could happen next?”, and to look at the full range of situations that might come to pass—and at their costs and benefits—rather than to assume that things will go as planned or as the fashionable ideology or favorite administration model would have predicted…. Rubin’s recognition that the world is a complicated and poorly-understood place, where lots of unexpected and surprising things happen (as opposed to a place to which John Maynard Keynes or Milton Friedman or Irving Kristol has already drawn us an accurate map we need merely to consult), seems to have been the most powerful of his secret weapons.

Sentence italicized by me. Despite being a fan of Friedman (although it’s admittedly been many years since I’ve read anything by him), I’ve always found this kind of thinking to be an admirable quality to be striven towards. The world is a very complicated and unpredictable place, and I am tired of leaders who pretend that it isn’t (well, until only after something goes wrong).

Perhaps this is an inevitable result of democracy in a country where much of the electorate views the world the same way? Maybe most people (or just Americans?) find it inconvenient for the world to be too complicated to predict — so much so that we punish leaders who admit they’re wrong more than leaders who are too stubborn to admit they’re wrong.