The Pakistani Spectator

by Dan Tow

If you missed Part I of this, here’s a link. I covered the principles:

• Solve the problem within the current constraints of the actual world.
• Never give up on solving the problem, but remain very open-minded about what is the problem.
• You cannot choose reality – what is, is.Part II

A solution to the problem that takes too long or costs too much is no solution. Any fool can build a bridge if money and time are unlimited. It takes an engineer to design one that is cheap and can be built quickly. Government can solve almost any one problem, with enough spending, but if solving the problem costs more than the solution is worth, for example, damaging the economy with high taxes to pay the costs, or with too much borrowing to (temporarily) avoid the high taxes, the government solution is no solution. Costs are particularly hard to “weigh” when considering the pros and cons of some proposed government action, for a couple of reasons:

• The money doesn’t come from the leaders’ own pockets. It is all too easy to feel virtuous spending other people’s money to solve other people’s problems – the good done is locally obvious and plain to see, and the harm done (by taking people’s money away with a bit more taxation, or by accumulating a bit more government debt) is much more subtle, but still adds up and can easily exceed the good done.
• The amounts of money tend to be so high as to become very abstract and hard to comprehend. Does anyone really have a clear, gut feeling how much one billion rupees will buy, and how much good it would do the taxpayers if it remained in their pockets? How about 10 billion? (I am using “billion,” here, with the American meaning of 1000 million.) Of course, 10 billion rupees will buy ten times more than 1 billion, but how many leaders will realize, instinctively, that they could afford 10 programs costing one billion each if they just gave up on a single favorite program costing 10 billion? Instead, money at this level tends to be viewed instinctively as just “a lot of money,” I expect, and instinctively we don’t react much differently to a 10-billion-rupee price tag than to a 1-billion-rupee price tag, even though the difference is really immense. Even worse, spending such large sums of money is so routine in government that these sums start to seem not only abstract, but also small. (I’ve heard a joke quoting a fictitious congressman, about the US Congress’s attitude toward spending government money: “Spend a billion dollars here, a billion, there, and pretty soon you’re talking about spending a lot of money!”)

Time is a particularly insidious problem. If a long-term project does good every day that it happens, that is fine, and safe, if the good done exceeds the cost. What about a long-term project that only begins to pay benefits when it is complete? During the lifetime of the project, economic factors will change, technology will change, leadership will change, priorities will change, and designs will change. In all, the odds of completing such a long-term project even remotely as planned decrease exponentially with the lifetime of the project. The American Apollo program to reach the moon was probably just at the outside edge of being the longest long-term program that doesn’t pay benefits smoothly along the way that might actually succeed. (I should say, though, that Apollo actually did pay benefits, subtly, along the way, since it helped bring many new technologies to market, though most of those benefits, including much of today’s computer technology, paid off largely after we reached the moon.) In 1961, Kennedy gave a speech “committing” the US to reach the moon by the end of 1969. This eight-year project, under three presidents just barely made it, at extraordinary expense and extraordinary brilliance and personal sacrifice by thousands of professionals involved. If Kennedy had committed to reach the moon by 1975, allowing 6 more years, would that have been easier to achieve? No! Congress would have dithered, leaving the major spending, every year, to begin the next year, and priorities would have changed, with the whole thing forgotten. As it is, I suspect that if Kennedy had failed to be re-elected in 1964, rather than being assassinated in 1963, the strength of his memory and the desire to honor his memory would have been weaker, and the whole project would have been forgotten long before it succeeded. Even with its success, afterward, the program rapidly lost the people’s interest, and was cancelled ahead of schedule once the novelty wore off, and the manned space program has scaled way back ever since.

Compare Apollo to George W. Bush’s Mars “commitment.” In 2004, Bush tried for his own “Kennedy moment” with a “plan” to reach Mars by some time after 2030, a 26-plus-year time frame, compared to Apollo’s 8-year time frame. Plans for spending on this massive project began, conveniently enough, with almost no spending at all, with “plans” for huge spending to happen in future, other presidents’ terms. Presumably, each one of the next 5 or so future presidents are expected to risk their popularity and use up their political capital selling this expensive program out of their reverence for the beloved and honored memory of the Bush administration! What a laugh! There are only two explanations I can see for Bush’s Mars “vision;” the vision is foolish, or the administration knew full-well that the vision had no chance of success, and they merely hoped to grab a little glory in the short term, with the hope that in the longer term, future presidents would be blamed for the vision’s inevitable failure. (I think there are ways humans can reach Mars, with a series of useful, shorter-term technology projects that are each economically useful right on Earth for their own sake, and that each bring us closer to the technology necessary for permanent, economically useful settlement on Mars, but this is nothing like the program Bush proposed.)

A solution that requires resources that don’t exist, and can’t be made, is no solution. My father worked in air pollution control, and someone once asked his help to market an electric car. This fellow showed my father a blueprint for his “invention” of an electric car, showing a layout for a fairly conventional-looking car, where the wheels were, the steering column, the electric motor, brakes, et cetera. Near the electric motor was a modest-sized box-shaped space marked “electric battery,” with no further information on that “detail.” My father had to burst the poor fellow’s balloon: any competent automotive engineer could design a practical electric car, if someone would just create a compact battery capable of storing enough energy to power an otherwise normal car at highway speeds for reasonable distances before requiring recharging. “Inventing” a car built around a battery that doesn’t yet exist, with no idea how to create the battery, is no invention at all!

Most forms of government will work wonderfully well if the leaders and the citizens are members of the species Homo Sapiens Perfectus, an imaginary variant on humans with none of our flaws or limitations. Communism, for example, ought to work nicely, if the necessary central planners are capable of grasping the full complexity of a modern economy, built around thousands of times more complex interactions than any one mere human can grasp, and if the workers are selfless heroes, who always work hard and creatively, even when such hard work has no effect on their income or security. Mere humans, however, need a little personal stake in the game to work their best, and central planning by mere humans is a disaster.

Similarly, a written constitution is a nice idea in a perfect world with perfectly wise citizens and leaders, but how does it work in the real world? Well, mere humans can’t quite agree what it means, and merely human leaders have every incentive to interpret it only to their benefit, or to ignore it, altogether. That is where the Supreme Court comes in, of course, and only a Supreme Court can make a constitution worth more than the paper it is written upon. Independence of the court is crucial, though, since a constitution is mainly about protecting the people from the government! If the Supreme Court does not have real independence of the rest of the government, it is useless and a sham! I can imagine an independent Supreme Court without a written constitution (and the British actually have something like this), operating on precedent, ordinary laws, and simple wisdom, and such a thing could work (and apparently does work, for the British!), but a constitution without an independent Supreme Court is just a useless piece of paper, an invention depending on citizens and leaders of a type that doesn’t exist.

Truth matters, and personal integrity is essential. Reportedly, Vice President Dick Cheney has an astonishing amount of power in the Bush administration. Reporters have studied how he exercises this power from a position that has almost no formal authority. Apparently, one of his methods is simply to show up at lower-level meetings where policies are debated by officials far down the chain of command from the president, debates that will later lead to recommendations to Bush. These lower-level officials are naturally terrified to defy Cheney’s wishes, as he is so widely known to be so powerful, so when he shows up at these meetings and drops a hint what his own position is, the whole meeting quickly turns into an endorsement of that position. What comes next? Well, the “opinion” of that group (which was never their real opinion!) filters its way up the chain of command until it eventually becomes a recommendation to George W. Bush, himself, from his cabinet officers. If it is an important matter, Bush might ask Cheney for his opinion, too, and Bush will be delighted to learn that Cheney finds the recommendation to be brilliant, and that likely ends the question – two respected sources of advice “agree” on this difficult matter, and Bush needn’t strain himself to reconsider their carefully thought out “consensus.” The “consensus” was never real, though – it was never more than the opinion of one man, one man who cleverly produced the illusion of consensus, and who multiplies his power with that illusion!

Something like this happened to disastrous effect in the lead-up to war in Iraq. It became clear early on that the administration would notice and reward intelligence officials who saw evidence of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs in Iraq. Arguments that such programs were smaller than we thought, or even had become non-existent, were unwelcome, and hardly the way to advance a career. The resulting appearance of consensus was comforting to those at the top, but not the information they needed to hear!

Sometimes, “yes men” with no personal integrity will simply agree with anything their superiors say, leading leaders to have a dangerous and exaggerated sense of their wisdom. In a deeply hierarchical organization, though, even people with solid personal integrity can find their messages horribly distorted. Imagine an organization where the lowest-level analysts find clear evidence that the current course of the organization is thoroughly wrong, hopelessly broken, and heading for disaster. Well, they aren’t looking to be insulting, so they might tell their managers something like “This is a serious problem, and it must be addressed.” Those managers aren’t looking for trouble, either, so the message they pass to their managers might be, “We recommend serious attention be paid to this problem.” Those managers, in turn might tell their managers, “This issue needs serious study so that we can do better,” and the next level above them hears, “We can do better, if we study this,” and the person at the top might hear, “We are doing great, and we think with study, we can do even better!” No level distorted the message much, just putting a slightly more positive face on the exact message they heard as the truth, but by the time the person at the top got the message, it had no resemblance to the truth!

There are two sorts of activities when handling facts; there is trying to know what is true, and there is trying to persuade others what to believe. Disasters happen when these get mixed up. In a government or a corporation, it is imperative that persons of high personal integrity simply tell the complete, undistorted truth as they see it to their superiors, and since they are only human, it is imperative that they be encouraged to do so, even if that truth is uncomfortable to hear. Truth catches up eventually, and it is far, far better to hear it early than after leadership has committed to a disastrous mistake! After he or she hears the full truth, the leader at the very top may decide that some “edited” version of the truth is necessary for what will be shared outside the organization, some version that helps persuade the rest of the world to do the right and necessary thing, where the fully complex truth would confuse the issue, and then part of the organization might need to hammer out a story that is deliberately not perfectly true. When distortions creep in even before the leader hears the truth, though, or when the leader and his or her underlings aren’t even prepared to encourage or accept reality, disaster is inevitable!

A democracy is a special case for such an organization’s handling of truth, though! The people in a democracy choose their leaders, so in a sense, the people are at the top of the hierarchy, and for them to choose well, they must get the whole truth, too! This is where a free and intelligent press is utterly vital! The leaders will invariably attempt to distort the truth in favor of their point of view, to make it look like they are doing a better job than the really are, so they or their party can stay in power. Only a vigorous free press, preferably including many points of view, not dominated by just a few owners with uniform views, can work independently of the government to spread the truth against the government’s best efforts at distortion, without the government’s self-interest in distortion. Thomas Jefferson, one of the American founding fathers, once said that given the choice between government without newspapers or newspapers without government, he would unhesitatingly choose the newspapers! I would add another necessity: people educated to be capable of grasping complex truth, interested in grasping complex truth, even if the truth uncomfortably conflicts with what they already believe, and willing to make the effort, even while others make the effort to distort the truth they see!

Last 5 posts by Dan Tow

• Just Taxation - October 31st, 2008
• New American Voters; Guilty Until Proven Innocent? - October 22nd, 2008
• Safety in “Big Daddy’s” Shadow? - September 8th, 2008
• Coping with Limits to Control in Politics, Life, and Bridge - August 26th, 2008
• The Right to Remain Silent - June 18th, 2008