Rational ignorance

Abstract: In this chapter, I provide argument and evidence that the scope of people's ignorance is often invisible to them. This meta-ignorance (or ignorance of ignorance) arises because lack of expertise and knowledge often hides in the realm of the “unknown unknowns” or is disguised by erroneous beliefs and background knowledge that only appear to be sufficient to conclude a right answer. As empirical evidence of meta-ignorance, I describe the Dunning–Kruger effect, in which poor performers in many social and intellectual domains seem largely unaware of just how deficient their expertise is. Their deficits leave them with a double burden—not only does their incomplete and misguided knowledge lead them to make mistakes but those exact same deficits also prevent them from recognizing when they are making mistakes and other people choosing more wisely. I discuss theoretical controversies over the interpretation of this effect and describe how the self-evaluation errors of poor and top performers differ. I also address a vexing question: If self-perceptions of competence so often vary from the truth, what cues are people using to determine whether their conclusions are sound or faulty?

Abstract: The Economics of Time and Ignorance is one of the seminal works in modern Austrian economics. Its treatment of historical time and of uncertainty helped set the agenda for the remarkable revival of work in the Austrian tradition which has led to an ever wider interest in the once heretical ideas of Austrian economics. It is here reprinted with a substantial new introductory essay, outlining the major developments in the area since its original publication a decade ago.

Abstract: It is common to assert that the Patent and Trademark Office does a bad job of examining patents, and that it should spend more time and money weeding out bad patents. In this article, Professor Lemley challenges that conventional wisdom. Using available data regarding the cost and incidence of patent prosecution, litigation, licensing and other uses of patents, he demonstrates that strengthening the examination process is not cost effective. The core insight is that very few patents are actually litigated or licensed; most simply sit on a shelf unused, or are used only for noncontroversial purposes like financing. Because of this, society would be better off spending its resources in a more searching judicial inquiry into validity in those few cases in which it matters than paying for a more protracted examination of all patents ex ante. In economic terms, the patent office is rationally ignorant of the objective validity of the patents it issues.

Abstract: Developing an agenda for the social study of ignorance, this paper introduces the sociology of strategic unknowns: the investigation of the multifaceted ways that ignorance can be harnessed as a resource, enabling knowledge to be deflected, obscured, concealed or magnified in a way that increases the scope of what remains unintelligible. In contrast to theoretical preoccupations that underlie the study of knowledge accumulation, a focus on the importance of strategic unknowns resists the tendency to value knowledge over ignorance or to assume that the procurement of more knowledge is linked in an automatic or a linear fashion to the attainment of more social or political power. Refining and challenging the assumption that modern liberal societies inevitably thrive on the accumulation of information about the public personas, private psyches, consumer habits or political proclivities of citizens, the papers in the special issue explore how the cultivation of strategic unknowns remains a resource –...