Short post: are the people affected by laws the only people you should listen to?

Consider the Americans with Disabilities Act. I love this particular piece of legislation, passed into law during the Ford administration. It's the reason America has elevators in practically every building and so many ramps for people in wheelchairs, while Europe somehow lags behind. A rare USA W.

When deciding whether to pass this into law, I don't think Congress should have just spoken to disabled people about it and said "Sure thing!" We might start with a simple idea: require access for disabled people, always. What happens? Well, a government agency would need to take on the task of implementing the law, as written by Congress. For the ADA, the Department of Justice is responsible for enforcement, filing lawsuits when people fail to comply by building things that lack access.

Now suppose you're an economist in the 1970s, sitting around, thinking about the law. You notice that the law says all residential properties need access for disabled people. You run the numbers, and typically this is going to increase the cost of housing, even for people who aren't disabled and don't need the accommodations. So you write a letter to your member of Congress, and they get an amendment written and passed. Problem solved.

For another example, just consider pollution. Activists might try really hard to halt all new natural gas construction. They might be the people most affected by pollution from natural gas, like disabled people in the previous example. Should we just listen to them?

Economists have special expertise in this area. Any good economist could tell you that in some areas, the cost of switching from natural gas to solar wouldn't be too great, but is high enough that it hasn't happened yet. In other areas, the cost is terribly high. Even if you consider pollution in those areas, it just doesn't make sense to shut the plant down. Electricity would get dramatically more expensive, and overall, people would be worse off.

Economists have a solution: cap and trade. The government can create permits for people to pollute—a finite number, mind you, so somebody is going to have to stop. Then the government gives every electricity producer a permit and lets them trade. With cap and trade, the people who would find it really expensive to quit polluting are able to buy permits from the others, who just make the switch instead (at a lower price).

If you ignored economists, you might just try shutting down all natural gas production. This would cut pollution by a lot, and help people harmed terribly by pollution. It would hurt a lot of people, too. That's why that policy is a political loser.

If, to the misfortune of the economist, nobody listens to them, the more extreme option might win in a political primary. Then one of two things happens: we get the extreme option, and people are hurt when we could have gone with the solution that cuts emissions where it's cheapest to cut emissions, or, more likely, the Republican wins.

I don't think this point can be made with complete certainty without providing endless examples. Sometimes, the people most harmed by something are not the only people you should listen to. Some things are genuinely hard to understand, and you have to do a lot of work studying them before you can make the optimal choice.