I use the relaxed summer months for planning the future; for setting goals.
I practice my pitch to the Hartford Business Journal publisher for a big raise. The extra money will be funneled into an annuity invested exclusively in REITs, which will triple in value by the time I start taking my money, so that I can buy that villa on Lake Como, right next to George Clooney.
I’ll certainly have cash left over, which means I can buy up Hartford’s Front Street Undevelopment Project and transform it into a giant tattoo parlor.
I’m laying out my writing schedule to give me a surplus of 15 columns each month, so that I can use the cushion to take time off and offer to help Mitt Romney with his speech writing. The transformation will sweep him into the White House, at which point he will name me ambassador to Switzerland, a comfortable niche from which I can polish up my French and German and Italian, in anticipation of my eventual nomination as U.N. Secretary.
I plan to have a large enough staff so that I can finally get the garage cleaned out.
What’s that, you say? You have some doubts about my goals and objectives and schedule? There are always naysayers. I respect that. In fairness, I’ll consider what Dan Arley, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, had to say in the Wall Street Journal recently about what the academic types call the “planning fallacy.”
In his column, he suggested that experiments have shown that plans are often fueled by “rosy expectations,” and when the plan has many aspects, depending on each other, the “exaggerated optimism” tends to get even worse.
Wow. You guys may be right. I may have to cut back on my forecast for when the garage is tidied up. But, for the most part, I’m fine. It’s not as if I’m a mass transit project or anything like that.
There are few things in Heaven or on Earth more vulnerable to the “planning fallacy” than mass transit projects. By the time the friendly consultants are hired to tell you what you want to hear; by the time the forecasts of ridership or traffic are fudged to comic levels; by the time the cost estimates are made public to the hum of muffled snickering; by the time the construction schedule is sent to a fiction writer for editing; the planning fallacy becomes less of an inadvertent psychological tic and more of a system-wide conspiracy.
The $70 billion high-speed rail project being foisted on near-bankrupt California is fueled by all manner of rosy predictions, despite the fact that most voters don’t want it and much of the construction will take place in rural areas where there is no “mass” for mass transit.
The mysterious Hartford-New Britain Busway project, a solution in search of a problem, will cough up almost any benefit you ask of it, as long as your checks don’t bounce. The most popular figure from the transit freaks is a supposed $2,268,000,000 benefit to the state — not a penny more, not a penny less.
The construction unions are less fanciful; they just want the wages to build the damn thing, whether anyone wants to whiz between Hartford and New Britain or not. It will be 9.4 miles of Heaven on Earth.
Despite the fact that it will drape Central Connecticut in gold and glory, even the Central Connecticut Chambers of Commerce call it an expensive joke. They must have read something about a “planning fallacy.”
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
