Treating and focusing on symptoms, not the underlying ailment. Yes. Everything from gun violence to national security policy seems to be caught in this vortex. Is it the political expediency (and popularity) of easing the temporary situation (symptom) that causes this short-sighted approach to policy?
Especially at the national level, politics becomes too abstract. Everything is ideology, and when you deal in ideology there is never any way to tell what works or doesn't.
I often think of it as a problem of scale. Here's Rory Sutherland touching on it:
"Government suffers cause it doesn’t have a marketing function. Government does not have a group of people who look at problems through the consumers’ own eyes, as experienced over time. They look at people in aggregate, and there are certain problems you can’t solve at the aggregate level. You can’t solve for the average.”
Problems of all sorts change depending on the scale at which they are viewed. National (or even state) politics are at too course a grain to effectively solve many problems, but they have to attempt to solve them, leading to solutions that ultimately don't work but placate certain groups until the next election.
You are writing GEMS Joel!!! Loved this one. I’ve often called myself an “unconventional” urban planner because of my distrust for the dogma of the profession. Now, independent-mindedness is a mouthful but much more accurate and positive too!
I also think it’s time for the word “subvert” to broaden up a bit. Maybe it’s not about authorities... but long-standing, enduring, perennial problems can be almost equally as crushing, almost more, because our reason for not being able to solve them is ourselves. We can be made aware of our blind spots, but society pursues this more as a hobby rather than a moral imperative. Well, keep on fighting the good fight Joel.
Thank you so much for the nice words!! Paul Graham has a wonderful way of articulating things that people like us often feel but (at least for me) don't always know how to put into words.
Completely agree with your second paragraph. "because our reason for not being able to solve them is ourselves." It's impossible to solve those problems with the same tools and institutions that created them (usually as second order effects from solving some other problem). So what's needed is not more or different policy, but an entirely new incentive structure within which to approach things.
Treating and focusing on symptoms, not the underlying ailment. Yes. Everything from gun violence to national security policy seems to be caught in this vortex. Is it the political expediency (and popularity) of easing the temporary situation (symptom) that causes this short-sighted approach to policy?
Especially at the national level, politics becomes too abstract. Everything is ideology, and when you deal in ideology there is never any way to tell what works or doesn't.
I often think of it as a problem of scale. Here's Rory Sutherland touching on it:
"Government suffers cause it doesn’t have a marketing function. Government does not have a group of people who look at problems through the consumers’ own eyes, as experienced over time. They look at people in aggregate, and there are certain problems you can’t solve at the aggregate level. You can’t solve for the average.”
Problems of all sorts change depending on the scale at which they are viewed. National (or even state) politics are at too course a grain to effectively solve many problems, but they have to attempt to solve them, leading to solutions that ultimately don't work but placate certain groups until the next election.
You are writing GEMS Joel!!! Loved this one. I’ve often called myself an “unconventional” urban planner because of my distrust for the dogma of the profession. Now, independent-mindedness is a mouthful but much more accurate and positive too!
I also think it’s time for the word “subvert” to broaden up a bit. Maybe it’s not about authorities... but long-standing, enduring, perennial problems can be almost equally as crushing, almost more, because our reason for not being able to solve them is ourselves. We can be made aware of our blind spots, but society pursues this more as a hobby rather than a moral imperative. Well, keep on fighting the good fight Joel.
Thank you so much for the nice words!! Paul Graham has a wonderful way of articulating things that people like us often feel but (at least for me) don't always know how to put into words.
Completely agree with your second paragraph. "because our reason for not being able to solve them is ourselves." It's impossible to solve those problems with the same tools and institutions that created them (usually as second order effects from solving some other problem). So what's needed is not more or different policy, but an entirely new incentive structure within which to approach things.
Thank you again for the great comment!