Thirty years ago, I drove from Boise to Fruitland on a cold winter night to watch a Tuesday basketball game between Fruitland and Bishop Kelly. My son was playing for Bishop Kelly, and as I settled into my seat on the nearly empty visitors’ side, I noticed an elderly couple sitting just behind me. Only later did I learn they were there to watch their grandson, who played for Fruitland. In that small gym, on that ordinary evening, I was about to get a lesson in knowledge, experience, and humility that has stayed with me ever since.
We exchanged pleasantries throughout the game, the way strangers do when they recognize a shared purpose. But in the fourth quarter, everything changed. Our two boys collided in the middle of a critical play. The whistle blew. Suddenly, the entire game turned on one question: was it charging—an offensive foul—or blocking—a defensive foul? The Fruitland crowd across the court erupted as one, convinced their player had been wronged. Their opinion filled the gym in a way the scoreboard never could.
On my side of the court, the conversation turned into a quiet but pointed debate. I appealed to what I thought was my trump card: my credentials. I told the lady behind me that I had played a lot of basketball in my day, and that I knew what charging was. From my vantage point, the call favored my understanding. But she was not impressed. In fact, she ended the argument in one sentence.
“Young man”—I was fifty-two at the time—”I had eleven boys, and I have nineteen grandsons and granddaughters. I have watched almost every one of their games over forty years. I know charging when I see it, and that was charging.”
End of argument.
In that instant, I realized that whatever experience I thought I had brought to that bleacher seat, she had brought more—and of a different and deeper kind. The next day, back in Boise, I told the story to my friend, Dave Yraguen. He listened, smiled, and then added one final twist: he knew the woman well, and he agreed with her assessment of the call. “And by the way,” he said, “she’s, my mother.”
It was a small incident, almost trivial in the grand scheme of things, but it put flesh and bone on an important idea: the difference between abstract knowledge and lived experience.
The economist F. A. Hayek spoke of two kinds of knowledge. One is tacit knowledge—the kind of understanding people develop about their immediate world: their customers, their communities, their weather, their roads, their neighbors’ habits and needs. A shopkeeper who knows what products will sell this week, before any market report comes out, has tacit knowledge. A contractor who knows which supplier is actually reliable right now, despite what the glossy brochures say, relies on tacit knowledge. This is not the stuff of textbooks. It is the stuff of accumulated experience, observation, and accountability.
The other is general knowledge—the type you find in textbooks, manuals, and models. Physics formulas. Accounting rules. Engineering standards. Economic theories. General knowledge is indispensable; it gives us structure, language, and tools. But it is different from knowing how things actually work in a specific place, at a specific time, among specific people.
In economics, the closer one is to a transaction—on the ground, local, embedded in the relationships and realities at stake—the more likely one is to make a sound decision. Empirical knowledge rooted in experience is often more reliable than theoretical knowledge generated in a classroom or written in a distant office. That grandmother in the Fruitland bleachers had decades of tacit knowledge about high school basketball. I had general knowledge and some first-hand experience. That night, hers was the better guide.
This distinction matters far beyond sports. It goes to the heart of how we govern ourselves.
A healthy republic envisioned by our Founding Fathers included the idea of a “citizen legislature”—a body made up of people who have run businesses, raised families, worked farms, signed paychecks, built houses, taught students, cared for patients, and navigated the real-world consequences of public policy. People whose knowledge is not merely theoretical but grounded in the daily friction of life. Tacit knowledge, in this sense, is not a luxury; it is a necessity. It tempers ideology with reality and theory with experience.
Yet, too many of the voices that dominate our political debates today are long on general knowledge and short on tacit knowledge. When I listen to the polished anchors on national cable networks hold forth on economics or war, it is hard not to wonder how much of their commentary comes from personal study, primary sources, or hard-earned experience—and how much is simply recycled talking points and second-hand analysis. When they speak glibly about civil disobedience or First Amendment rights, I find myself asking: have they read the original documents, or are they relying on summaries of summaries? Have they lived with the consequences of the policies they promote, or will those consequences fall entirely on someone else?
What is missing in much of our public discourse is the kind of grounded practical wisdom that Mrs. Yraguen displayed in that Fruitland gym. She did not need a credential or a title to know what she knew. She had seen thousands of plays, comforted disappointed grandchildren, celebrated victories, and watched referees get it right and wrong over forty years. Her judgment had been tested, not just formed.
That is why the recent elections in Idaho’s Magic Valley were so disappointing. Instead of allowing local citizens—those closest to the farms, the schools, the small businesses, the churches, and the town halls—to set their own course, outside special interests poured in money and influence to bend outcomes in their favor. The people with actual tacit knowledge of the community were effectively told to sit down and be quiet. The lobbyists and consultants, many of whom have never lived under the policies they push, claimed the louder voice.
This is upside down. We, the people who live in these communities, bear the weight of decisions made in distant capitals. We are the ones who know which regulations help and which cripple. We know which schools are thriving and which are failing. We know which roads need repair and which agencies no longer serve their original purpose. Lobbyists in Washington, D.C., or even state capitals, may have binders of general knowledge and clever talking points. But they have no real idea how it feels to watch a small town lose its hospital, its mill, or its school. They do not know, in the visceral way a local doe, what a bad policy feels like on the ground.
We need more people like Mrs. Yraguen in local leaders like Glenneda Zuiderveld representing us—people whose authority comes not from a résumé line, but from years of engagement in their communities. People who have watched the “game” of public life play out again and again and can say, with conviction earned by experience: “I know what that is when I see it.”
In basketball, you can argue a call all night, but in the end, the person who has watched the most games, the closest, with the most at stake, usually has the clearest eye. The same is true in public life. Tacit knowledge may not come with a diploma or a title, but if we ignore it—if we continue to elevate distant experts over local wisdom—we will keep getting calls wrong in ways that hurt the very people who know the game best.
The lesson I learned that winter night in Fruitland still stands sometimes the wisest person in the room is the one who would never dream of calling herself an expert.
