Occam’s razor of public policy

Ajay Shah has a food for thought post on public policy:

Occam’s razor is the idea that when two rival theories explain a phenomenon, the simpler theory is to be preferred. Aristotle’s epicycles fit the data as well as Kepler’s ellipses, and a pure empiricist could have been agnostic between the two. Occam’s razor guides us in preferring Kepler’s ellipses on the grounds that this is a simpler explanation.

In the world of public policy, a useful principle is: When two alternative tools yield the same outcome, we should prefer the one which uses the least coercion.

Gives a lot of examples where least coercion just works and even better than more coercion..

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