Can Everyone Become a Billionaire?

Commentary by John C Goodman

Source: Town Hall

I'm going to tell you something that Barack Obama doesn't understand.

And because he doesn't understand it, our country is wasting hundreds of millions of dollars at a time when we cannot afford to waste hundreds of millions of dollars.

Time and again President Obama has told us how he intends to solve our health care problems: spend money on pilot programs and other experiments; find out what works and then go copy it. He's also repeatedly said the same thing about education. The only difference: in education we've already been following this approach with no success for 25 years.

Still, if the president were right about health and education, why wouldn't the same idea apply to every other field? Why couldn't we study the best way to make a computer, or invest in the stock market and do any number of other things — and then copy it?




Here's the problem: In order for each of us to be a billionaire, we have to each be doing something that produces a billion dollars' worth of goods and services. But if all we're doing is copying action items out of a book, then we are not doing anything special. And if we’re not doing anything special, we are definitely not producing a billions dollars of value added.

In mathematics, Gödel's Theorem says that no complex, axiomatic system can be both consistent and complete. What I am proposing is something similar for social science. Although there are some habits of highly successful people that can be identified and copied, there are not enough of them for each of us to become highly successful ourselves through copycat behavior alone.

I think I will call this Goodman's Nonreplicability Theorem.

In health care, it's already been borne out.


A separate study of physicians' practices found much the same thing. There were simply not enough objective characteristics that the practices had in common to allow an independent party to set up a successful practice by copycat alone.


John C. Goodman is president and founder of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a free-market think tank established in 1983. Goodman’s ideas on health policy can also be found at his own blog, where he provides daily analysis and lively discussion on a wide range of health care topics.

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