corporate welfare is all the rage in NZ today.
If you are so smart, why aren’t you rich?
This is the American question – asked of MIT’s Paul Cootner by a money market manager in the 1960s.
Why do investment advisors sell and often give away their sage advice? If their insights were any good, they could trade on the share market before others caught on and make a killing!
Deirdre McCloskey wrote a book about the limits of economic expertise. For a summary, see http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/pdf/Article_168.pdf.
I will give a personal example based on the skills of bureaucracies in picking winners. The test of my hypothesis is based on the transferability of human capital across jobs.
My graduate school professors in Japan included many retired bureaucrats from the Ministry of Finance and MITI. These agencies were heralded by Joe Stiglitz and others for picking winners and guiding Japanese companies to choose the right technologies and what to export.
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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