When Getting it Wrong is Getting it Right The world’s oldest
democracies have fallen victim to a basic philosophical mistake.
Without realising it, we have embraced the self-centred idea
that ours is perpetually the most likely of possible worlds.
That belief may seem innocuous, but it is badly distorting the
way democracies make policy and evaluate their leaders. In the
United States, for example, lawmakers who opposed President
Barack Obama’s stimulus plan hope to take advantage of this
logical lapse. They know that if the plan succeeds, Obama will
get the credit, whether Republicans supported him or not. But if
the plan fails—as even its advocates concede it may—the
Republicans will be able to run in 2010 or 2012 on a platform of
“We told you so”. In strategising this way, the Republicans are
counting on the American public to make a critical assumption:
if the stimulus plan fails, then the sceptics must have been
right about it. On first thought, what could be more natural? If
the stimulus plan fails to a