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what to make of flyvbjerg and sunstein's passionate attack on Hirschman's thought piece "The Hiding Hand" (1967a)? As both authors admit, the principle of the Hiding Hand, as Hirschman called it in a tongue-in-cheek reference to Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, is more akin to a "petite idée" than a testable proposition, let alone a fully developed theorem. It is obvious from the charges put forth that the authors have little sympathy for Hirschman's idea. Armed with massive data and employing various statistical tests, they go to great lengths to show just how ill-conceived and deficient they think the principle ultimately is. Here is not the place to take issue with the operationalization of the various hypotheses Flyvbjerg and Sunstein propose to unmask and dress down the principle; nor is it the purpose of this commentary to question why they treat what is little more than a "petite idée" as an affront against rational planning, be it in the case of infrastructure, which is Flyvbjerg's forte, or economic development, the substantive interest for Hirschman. The argument here is conceptual: by emphasizing the malevolent sibling of the Hiding Hand, they fail to see the broader problem of incomplete information and uncertainty in planning processes.
In other words, we are dealing with a family of hands in response to such problems, not only two. What Hirschman's Hiding Hand does is shed light on a somewhat perplexing phenomenon of how unexpected circumstances trigger acts of innovative problemsolving in the face of uncertainty. By underestimating resourcefulness ex ante, planners may well underestimate to a roughly similar extent the difficulties of the tasks themselves. In a way, they trick themselves "by these two offsetting underestimates into undertaking tasks which we can, but otherwise would not dare, tackle" (Hirschman 1967a, 13). The Hiding Hand "does its work essentially through ignorance of ignorance, of uncertainties, and of difficulties" (Hirschman 1967b, 35).
Yet Hirschman did not explore the central connection further: the dual underestimation embodied in the principle of the Hiding Hand involves two underlying dimensions. The first is the state of knowledge at the start of the project, in particular whether obstacles, challenges, or difficulties likely to confront the project are known or unknown, including the possibility that such knowledge is not wanted....