Economists love the idea of “automatic stabilizers.” These are economic policies that go into effect when certain objective economic conditions appear. There’s no political negotiation or partisan fighting. It’s just smart, technocratic policy. And Congress will never do it. The cynical explanation is that they don’t want to give up power. The less cynical but still problematic explanation is that they have excessive confidence in their ability to make a good decision in the moment. That’s a mistake, and it’s a mistake you’re likely to make as well.

We’ve all been infuriated by rigid, stupid policies. They could be hiring policies, development policies, expense policies, etc. There’s something that we need to do in good faith to achieve our company’s goals, but we can’t because of a stupid policy. There are definitely stupid policies, but these should not be arguments against all policies.

Another word for a policy is “heuristic.” A policy is a conditional rule that tells you what to do in specific circumstances. It’s usually not something that’s driven solely from first principles; instead, it’s a pragmatic and possibly arbitrary construct. It can have three major redeeming qualities.

The first is to be simple. Well, not simple but simpler. The policy may be complicated, often more so than any given decision, but it’s likely not more complicated than the aggregate of all of the decisions in a particular category. This has the added benefit of making decisions faster and require less thought.

The second is that it’s clear. Ad hoc decision-making is inevitably going to messier and more opaque. In advance, you don’t know what’s going to happen. After the fact, it can be difficult to fully explain the decision.

Third and most important is that good policy is smarter than people’s ad hoc decisions. You can easily come up with situations where individual policies in specific situations have been stupid. That’s not the standard. The standard is the overall set of policies over all relevant situations. The problem is that we aren’t all that great at thinking on our feet. We get tired, hungry, distracted, distressed, etc. There are many factors that can compromise our judgment, but we’re too complacent about the effect those will have on us.

I’m not saying that policies will always make the best decisions. That shouldn’t be the goal of policies. What policies should do is simplify decision making and avoid the worst outcomes. Yes, you can often make a better decision than the policy. However, given our human fallibility, you can also make a decision that’s worse than the policy. Every decision you force yourself to make in the heat of the moment is one more decision you can make wrong. It’s one more decision that sucks up your mental bandwidth, which means it can also make other decisions worse. Yes, policy can be dumb. Make the policy better if that’s the case. Just don’t get rid of the idea of policy itself. It’ll make you dumber if you do.