Problem #28: The Golden Hammer
No, I’m not talking about some mythical token of power. I’m speaking of a famous quote from Abraham Maslow: “If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” In other words, people tend to address a problem by looking at their favourite tool, and then deciding how that tool is, in reality, the perfect one for the problem at hand. Or, to look at it from the opposite direction, the way they see the problem depends on the solution that they want to use.
Sadly, that’s completely backwards. For instance, for a bad back, a chiropractic adjustment may be absolutely perfect. But for a broken leg, a chiropractic adjustment could well be worse than useless. In economics, if there’s a problem with demand, increasing supply isn’t likely to help. If the problem is that nobody’s buying your cars, tailfins aren’t likely to convince people otherwise. Each problem has a tool that is ideally fitted to it; perhaps even multiple tools. But if you begin to look at a problem by trying to figure out how your favoured tool will fix it, you could well make things worse.
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