"The choice is between which mistake is easier to correct: underdoing it or overdoing it"
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Geithner’s line is the kind of bloodless pragmatism that only feels bloodless until you remember what it was built for: moments when technocrats are staring at a cliff edge and being asked to choose how to fall. Framed as a “choice” between two mistakes, it quietly rejects the fantasy option everyone wants in a crisis - perfect calibration. You will be wrong. The question is whether you can recover.
The intent is managerial, but the subtext is moral. “Underdoing it” isn’t just a smaller error; it’s an error that can metastasize. In financial panics and recessions - the world Geithner is most associated with - timid action can let feedback loops harden: failing institutions take others down, unemployment becomes long-term, confidence drains out of the system. “Overdoing it,” by contrast, is positioned as a reversible sin: you can pull back liquidity, unwind emergency programs, raise rates, tighten standards, reclaim political legitimacy later. He’s smuggling in an asymmetry: in certain emergencies, the costs of being cautious are not linear; they compound.
It also functions as a defense against hindsight prosecutions. By naming both paths as “mistakes,” he preemptively disarms moralizers who treat policy as a character test. The standard isn’t purity, it’s repairability. That’s a very crisis-era, post-2008 worldview: governance as triage, legitimacy as something you borrow with one hand while trying to pay it back with the other.
The intent is managerial, but the subtext is moral. “Underdoing it” isn’t just a smaller error; it’s an error that can metastasize. In financial panics and recessions - the world Geithner is most associated with - timid action can let feedback loops harden: failing institutions take others down, unemployment becomes long-term, confidence drains out of the system. “Overdoing it,” by contrast, is positioned as a reversible sin: you can pull back liquidity, unwind emergency programs, raise rates, tighten standards, reclaim political legitimacy later. He’s smuggling in an asymmetry: in certain emergencies, the costs of being cautious are not linear; they compound.
It also functions as a defense against hindsight prosecutions. By naming both paths as “mistakes,” he preemptively disarms moralizers who treat policy as a character test. The standard isn’t purity, it’s repairability. That’s a very crisis-era, post-2008 worldview: governance as triage, legitimacy as something you borrow with one hand while trying to pay it back with the other.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
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