Following Glen Whitman fear of slippery slopes and Richard Thaler’s response, Shane Frederick weighs in over at Cato Unbound.
Slippery slopes and other metaphors are evocative and sometimes instructive. But they don’t always provide the best description of the world. We’ve all heard (and many believe) that if you place a frog in a pot of water that is gradually heated, it will cook without ever attempting to get out. The putative logic is that the frog displays small-change tolerance, which makes it relatively easy, through a series of small thermal increments, to induce the unsuspecting frog to remain passive until it succumbs to the heat.
That is a good story. And it is false. Dr. Victor Hutchison summarized experiments testing this claim thusly: “As the temperature of the water is gradually increased, the frog will become more and more active in attempts to escape…If the container size and opening allow the frog to jump out, it will do so.”
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