Had Mr Brooks proven this belief in a revealed preference sense, by voluntarily shrinking his budget, it would add a lot of weight to what is otherwise a nicely sounding but not very believable passage. But I doubt that anyone could be so insane as to not trust themselves with making a good use of a larger budget. One's underlings - quite possibly!
Also it's just so much easier to get the benefits of constraint without the downsides if one is in charge of the decisions. Like if you can do something with $10k and have $30k to work with, many adults manage to constrain themselves by merely moving $20k to a savings account, and those who lack the requisite executive function for this simple "out of sight out of mind" organizational schema can often function with slightly stronger artificial constraints, sometimes aided by a collaborator. People do NaNoWriMo or whatever, and while many fail, the benefit of the artificial time constraint motivates a lot of people, despite being self-imposed. In either case, this informal method of constraint is more responsive to situational changes or emergencies than an optimization valve that always wants to bring costs down and doesn't understand any of the functional constraints, as is the case for most finance and management arms of "efficiency"-driven orgs. The game theory of budget inflation is really obvious when you consider it in terms of locus of agency
> But I doubt that anyone could be so insane as to not trust themselves with making a good use of a larger budget. One's underlings - quite possibly!
If I need 4 people for a project, what am I going to do with $20M/year in budget? I can’t pay them 5M a year each. I would not trust myself to do something sensible with that money, no. Nor do I suddenly want to hire 100 instead of 4 people.
