When you’re an Expert™ who lives in a universe comprised entirely of models that bear but a tenuous connection to reality and pay no price for being wrong, it should come as no surprise that you find informed consumer choice a threat to the new world order your university is being paid to promote.

At first the Beaver thought the recent paper co-authored by MIT Sloan School professor Georgia Perakis was a hoax written in response to the Beaver’s Sokal Hoax Challenge. But no!

The Impact of Social Learning on Consumer Subsidies and Supplier Capacity for Green Technology Adoption uses nifty game theoretic math to argue that “social welfare” is maximized when the government jacks up subsidies for products that consumers judge inferior. To save the planet, of course.

This is all well and good. But supporting the approved narrative sometimes takes more than bribes. If negative consumer feedback on products like dishwashers that don’t wash, dryers that don’t dry, vaccines that don’t prevent infection, electric vehicles whose range craters on cold days, and solar panels that don’t pay for themselves, then social media has a civic responsibility to suppress the negative reviews.

Wise choices that conform to the policy preferences of ruling elites must be guided by anointed Experts™, never by actual experience.

Story suggested by MIT Sloan School newsletter