« Quote of the Day for Thursday, January 31, 2008 | Main | Congestion in New Delhi »
January 31, 2008
Chess Lessons for Business and Government
John Kay uses Fischer vs. Spassky and the Cold War to illustrate the futility of master planning, whether in business or politics:
. . . People who hold to a single idea, or a fixed design, generally lose in chess, as they lose in battle, in business and in economics. Great chess players apply a variety of principles, they sense patterns, they hold a formidable range of models and analyses in their mind without being a slave to any of them.
As in chess, so it is in business and finance. We cope with an uncertain world through incremental and mostly unsuccessful innovation, not through extensive visions of the future. That is both why computer chess is not very interesting and why market systems outperformed planned economies. And why people who seek to remodel politics or business with grand designs are as mad as Bobby Fischer and far more dangerous.
Read Kay's entire essay here, and remember it as you listen to presidential candidates' plans on how they will "manage the economy" and make our lives better.
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.heritagetidbits.com/cgi-bin/mt/mtb.cgi/3343
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)