The Guardian Looks At Rothbard's Law: why do we undervalue what we're good at?

The Guardian reports:

I don't have much patience, generally speaking, with the ideas of economists like Murray Rothbard, a free-market extremist who thought the government shouldn't run the police or the army, let alone hospitals or schools. (For a while, he was a follower of the high priestess of wrongness, Ayn Rand.) Still, we owe him gratitude for the tongue-in-cheek observation he called Rothbard's Law: "People tend to specialise in what they're worst at." He was thinking of his fellow academics: "[Milton] Friedman is great except on money, so he concentrates on that," he once said.

Other examples may spring to your mind: the comedian intent on being taken seriously as an actor; the religious figure who can't stop making pronouncements about science; the manager with zero people skills who nominates himself to run the corporate retreat. Given his views, I'm tempted to suggest that Rothbard himself was a victim of his law. But he'd seen that cheap shot coming. He was immune to the law, he liked to say, because he'd failed to specialise in anything.

Actually, Murray Rothbard might be the greatest economist of the 20th Century given how prolific he was.