None of this is new. Adam Smith noticed most of it, and then the profession spent two centuries forgetting. The point is not that people are foolish. The point is that expertise is expensive, and we economise on it like everything else. Understanding people turns out to be a more urgent task than changing them, and a great deal harder. What looks like expertise from the outside is usually something simpler from the inside: tiredness, a deadline, a wish not to look foolish.
The cost of being right
The usual story is that we are careless calculators. The better story is that we are careful about the wrong things. The strange thing about the second opinion is not that it exists but that it works, most of the time, for most people. None of this is new. Adam Smith noticed most of it, and then the profession spent two centuries forgetting. We describe the departure from the model as an error. We might equally describe the model as a hopeful guess about us.
Nobody sets out to be governed by the second opinion, yet it shapes an astonishing share of the ordinary day. The textbook treats expertise as a preference to be revealed. In practice it is a story we tell ourselves after the fact. Economists have spent decades modelling expertise as a quantity. It behaves more like a weather system. The honest conclusion is uncomfortable for reformers: people are not waiting to be corrected.
