Trust the professionals?
I was talking to a keen cyclist a few days ago who told me that he never fixes so much as a puncture on his gleaming pride and joy. “I’d rather leave it to a professional who knows what they’re doing than risk stuffing it up myself,” he told me. I was bemused at the time by his unwavering faith in ‘professionals’ to be able to do a better job than him. It’s not that I don’t think there are some great mechanics around, but there are likely to be far more who are not as wonderful as they think they are. Why is it that people believe that professionals are the best at what they do, even when they have no evidence and little means of evaluating performance?
Part of it might be a misunderstanding of comparative advantage. This sort of reasoning is commonly used to explain international trade, but is equally applicable to micro-level bargaining and job selection. Suppose a (rather unusual) lawyer is a better plumber than the guy he hires to fix the pipes. Yet, because it would be very costly to the lawyer to take a day off work to fix pipes he’s better off going to work and paying someone else to do his plumbing. The plumber doesn’t have an absolute advantage at plumbing but he does have a comparative advantage over the lawyer at plumbing. The opportunity cost to the plumber of working in his trade is far lower than it is for the lawyer. The lawyer has an absolute advantage over the plumber at both plumbing and legal work but has a comparative advantage in only the latter. Thus, it is not the case that a person doing a job is the best at it: they just have a comparative advantage at what they do.
Of course, once a person has chosen a profession they build up specific job skills that allow them to be more productive at that job than most others. So it may be that the heuristic of assuming a professional can do the job better than you is usually correct. At least, the cost of obtaining more precise information about their skills may be greater than the expected benefit of the extra information. In that case it would be best just to let professionals do their job and quit micro-managing stuff cos you think you know better.
Perhaps you should also consider the blame-shifting perspective. The reason I get someone else to build my computers (even though I am perfectly capable of doing it myself) is because if something goes wrong I can hold them responsible and they will need to fix it.
If there werent any consumer protection laws I would do the work myself, but because there are implicit guarantees in most situations, this adds to the value of the work done by other people.