Whoa! Yeah, I’m going to do this, but let me start with some caveats. First, this is an argument, not the argument. Every silver lining has a storm cloud, and acknowledging the silver lining doesn’t mean you’re in favor of tornadoes. Second, I’m being sloppy with the term libertarian; classical liberal is closer to the truth, but doesn’t make for as good a title. Most importantly, I think my argument is swamped by the traditional libertarian arguments against the FDA. All that said, this argument has some interesting implications for how we think about intervention generally. Here goes…

The human body is a complex system that we do not fundamentally understand. Although every complex system is unique, they have similarities. In the case of both the human body and society/markets, interventions lead to unintended consequences which can offset the (ostensible) gains from the intervention. At the end of the day, although the FDA intervenes in the complex system of human society, it also prevents intervention in the complex system of human physiology.

The Hippocratic Oath instructs its speaker to not play God and to avoid over-treatment, and the justification for that is made clear in a recent Econ Talk. The guest was on to promote his book which discusses the problem of medical reversal–the phenomenon of medical practices that are adopted and subsequently abandoned after evidence shows the practice to be ineffective or worse. From this position he argues that the FDA’s mandate to ensure not just safety, but efficacy, is especially important. His argument is that because of the cost of type II error the FDA ought to go further.

Let’s look at two extreme cases. In the “anything-goes” world, we might have a lot of people trying good and bad interventions with a lot of harm being done to the unlucky ones. You and I know that the real problem is one of information and that in a perfect world we would have “anything-goes-that-consumers-with-access-to-good-information-from-Consumer-Reports-®-or-a-competitor” but this world still leaves us with the problem (which we face in today’s FDA-evaluated world) that consumer trial-and-error is a poor substitute for randomized control trials.

At the other extreme we have the “first-do-no-harm-second-do-real-good” world of an ideal FDA. This world has very steep type I errors but instead of two steps forward, one step back, we would have one step forward, then another, and never any steps back…. but of course each step forward would cost a few billion dollars.

Neither extreme is ideal, but the second world is one where standards of evidence are taken very seriously. In that world I’d be a third grade teacher instead of a college professor. The standards of evidence are at the core of the problem of medical reversal, but also the problem of economic intervention (which is far less likely to be reversed, even in the face of good evidence indicating that it should be).

As far as medical intervention is concerned, my position is bullish on better efficacy evaluation of medical procedures but still bearish on the FDA itself. But looking at the FDA from this angle opens up an interesting thought experiment: what might be the effects of an Economic Intervention Standards Authority? In practice it would probably be awful (my guess is a federal bureau that attempts to quash Tiebout competition), but in a libertarian utopia it would be the bureaucracy that libertarian kids with administrative bents would dream of heading.