> If some bureaucrat thinks children should go to this or that school, we should do it because...? Depends on the case. Sometimes parents are the best judges —

> If some bureaucrat thinks children should go to this or that school, we should do it because...? Depends on the case. Sometimes parents are the best judges — but parents, like all of us, focus on local maximization, in this case, "what's best for my kids," and not what's best for all kids. Sometimes it's globally better for Alice not to be able to have the absolute best thing for her, because of the risk that this would produce worse outcomes for Bob, Carol, Dave, etc. Dr. Atul Gawande wrote in one of his books that obstetricians decided that their job was not to achieve the absolute local-maximum best outcome for every individual mother — and therefore to use forceps for difficult deliveries, vice C-section surgery — but instead their mission was to seek a global maximum, i.e., the safe delivery of millions of babies per year. (Apparently it's difficult to be sure that trainee physicians have the proper "feel" for handling forceps, which if mishandled can result in catastrophic injuries to baby and mother.) So, the OB community redefined the standard of care for difficult births as the C-section, which is much easier to teach and monitor. This means that some individual mothers will have surgery that they could have avoided through the use of forceps. But that's considered less important than avoiding the risk of the damage that improper use of forceps can cause. > Would you prevent Alice and Bob from experiencing schools that are perfect matches for their abilities? Shouldn’t this be their or their parents’ call? Again this focuses too narrowly on the local maximum. Sometimes parents are in the best position to make the call. But sometimes we as a society insist that parental judgments stay within certain guard rails; that's why, for example, we have compulsory-education laws. (And it goes without saying that we don't assume the kids are the best judges.)