M: This started with more crap about Donald. Boy, I'll be glad when he's gone, and I can figure out what I'm focusing on otherwise. But I expanded more to a generic concept. I'd like to see your input on the idea that one of the problems we have with selecting leaders in terms of trying to get the economy going is equivalent to the problem of who cuts the barber's hair. Because it's like, if we use that metaphor, essentially, we keep going to the barber with the best haircut without understanding just that simple first order consequence that he can't be cutting his own hair, and we should be looking to the person he goes to.
G: I actually think there's something interesting in that analogy, and it generalizes beyond politics.
The "best haircut" is a visible outcome. But visible outcomes are often produced by systems that are invisible to the observer. If you choose based only on the visible outcome, you risk attributing success to the wrong person.
The barber doesn't cut his own hair. The Olympic coach may never have been an Olympic champion. The CEO of a successful company may have inherited a culture built by predecessors. The politician presiding over a strong economy is often inheriting conditions created years earlier by businesses, central banks, legislatures, technological changes, demographics, or previous administrations.
So your question becomes: Are we rewarding the producer of the result, or merely the person standing nearest to the result?
That's a much deeper question than the barber example itself.
Where I'd modify the analogy is that there often isn't a single "other barber."
Economic performance is more like a network:
The president is one barber among many, not necessarily the one holding the scissors at the moment you notice the haircut.
I also think your analogy points toward a common cognitive shortcut. Humans naturally infer:
Success is visible. Therefore the visible person caused the success.
That's an extremely efficient heuristic in everyday life, but it breaks down in complex systems.
There's another layer that I think is especially relevant to democratic politics.
Voters often aren't selecting the person who creates prosperity. They're selecting the person who looks like prosperity. Charisma, confidence, wealth, or apparent business success become proxies for economic competence. Sometimes those proxies correlate with genuine competence; sometimes they don't.
If you wanted to sharpen the metaphor, I might phrase it like this:
We keep judging the barber by his haircut instead of asking who trusts him enough to cut theirs.
That shifts the emphasis from appearance to reputation among informed peers. Experts are often better judges of expertise than outsiders because they can see the quality of work that the public cannot.
Of course, even that isn't foolproof—experts can be insular or biased—but it's usually a better starting point than judging purely by appearances.
So I think the underlying principle isn't really about barbers. It's about second-order attribution. In any complex system, the obvious success is often downstream of causes that aren't obvious. Good leadership selection therefore requires looking past the visible winner and asking, "Who actually generated the conditions that produced this success?" That question is harder, but it's also much closer to what you'd want if your goal is finding the people who can reproduce good results rather than merely inherit them.
M: I appreciate what you're looking at, but it's a little bit off. You're making it more complex than it needs to be. Like I said, I started this thinking about Donald, but then I started thinking about Republicans in general, and to a degree, Democrats as well. There's a simplistic bend, it seems, to the way that voters who don't pay attention to ongoing ideas follow. Which is the simple idea that someone who has made money knows how to make everyone money. When in fact, it is like that barber's haircut in that it just takes a moment of thought or the right question at the right time. With the barber, it's just, who do you think does his hair? Or something like that, to actually get people to notice that someone who has succeeded or can display the kind of wealth and success that seems to get people to vote for them, they aren't actually necessarily the people who have caused that effect. Not just Donald, but all the billionaires that run and seem to get some sort of support. There's this idea that because they were successful, that they can make other people successful, when in fact, at best, it's a toss-up as to whether their methods would extrapolate to an entire country. And usually the money is made in competition with someone rather than in the closed system of a national or global economy. And just generally is, it's like saying whose pie is better based on whether or not it looks pretty. I mean, packaging means something, but we keep failing to recognize that someone who owns a nice house isn't necessarily qualified to advise you in building yours.
G: I think I understand the direction better now. You're not really making an economic argument first. You're pointing out a category error in how people infer competence.
The implicit reasoning goes something like this:
This person is successful.
Therefore they know how to make success happen.
Therefore they can make our success happen.
Each step feels intuitive, but none necessarily follows from the previous one.
The barber analogy works because it exposes the hidden assumption with almost no effort. You look at the barber's haircut and think, "He must be good at cutting hair." Then someone asks, "Who cuts his hair?" Suddenly you realize you've attributed the visible result to the wrong mechanism. The haircut is evidence that someone was skilled—not necessarily the person wearing it.
Likewise, seeing a billionaire tells you they became wealthy (or inherited wealth, or retained it). It doesn't by itself tell you:
Business and government also optimize for different objectives.
A business can prosper by outperforming competitors. A country's economy isn't "winning" because one citizen got richer than another. Government is trying to create conditions under which millions of independent actors can be productive simultaneously. Those are related skills, but they're not the same skill.
I also like your house analogy because it captures something the barber example doesn't:
Owning a beautiful house doesn't prove you know how to build one.
It might mean you hired an excellent architect, inherited the house, had exceptional luck in timing the market, or simply had enough money to pay experts. The final product doesn't identify which of those explanations is true.
More generally, I think the underlying cognitive shortcut is:
People often mistake possession for production.
We see someone possessing wealth, status, or success, and unconsciously assume they produced it through the specific expertise now being asked of them.
That shortcut isn't always wrong. Some wealthy entrepreneurs genuinely have extraordinary organizational or strategic ability. But the evidence is weaker than people often treat it as. The existence of success is evidence that something went right; it's not proof of which thing, nor that the same process transfers to an entirely different domain.
So if you were looking for a compact way to express the idea, I might put it this way:
We keep electing people because they display the outcome we want, instead of asking whether they know how to produce that outcome for everyone else.
Or, borrowing your metaphor:
A barber's haircut proves someone knew how to cut hair. It doesn't prove the barber cut it himself. Likewise, a billionaire's wealth proves someone knew how to create that fortune. It doesn't prove the billionaire knows how to create prosperity for a country.
That framing keeps the focus on the logical leap rather than on any particular politician. It's less about whether business experience is valuable and more about recognizing that evidence of a personal outcome is not automatically evidence of a transferable causal skill.