Yes, I think this is an important book. We have Greta Thunberg as Person of the Year. Now while she is representative of something that is important (the need to get governments in particular to act) the profound misinformation contained in her/ dark green’s/ extinction rebellion’s position needs to be countered, not least of all to stop the worthwhile bits of their campaigns being disregarded as the inaccuracies become clear.

Actually, what happened during the late 90’s / early 2000’s illustrates another facet of my general point about our political system having a tendency to get stuck in an unnecessarily bad equilibrium and needing something akin to an exogenous bailout or disruptive shock to kick it into a superior condition that, theoretically, was practically available and feasible at the time even without new technologies, but politically impossible.

Another, more cynical interpretation is that these surprises provided a good cover story / alibi to officials who wanted to change things and who were desperately looking for some new socially acceptable excuse to which the opposition had not yet developed any effective response.

This is how it goes with new football plays too. Eventually someone is going to figure out a new defense to block your new offense, but for a short while, it’s going to work great and maybe get you to the very top of the game. In repeatedly iterated games, maybe that doesn’t matter in the long run and in the grand scheme of things. But in rare opportunities to make a sudden quantum jump from bad to better social equilibrium, you may only need one good opportunity. In personal terms, this is like breaking the ice, making a good first impression, or having the fortune to land that first lucky acting role which catapults one into long-lasting fame.

I think this is the real intellectual stumbling block of the ‘slow and steady’ approach to change of the anti-radicalists (and I think it’s fair to say that Levin is in this camp).

The failure mode of getting stuck in a way that only sudden, major, scary leaps can fix is one they very much dislike acknowledging.

For example, it wasn’t absolutely necessary for the internet and smartphones to come along to enable the superior equilibrium we have now with things like Uber. Prior to that there were pirate taxis and gypsy cabs which were already experimenting with alternative methods of dispatch, pricing, and service, and which tended to lower prices by adding “gig”-type slack-availability supply to demand. Of course all of that was totally illegal and cities tended to enforce the medallion system, locking everything so much in place that even the established, regulated taxi companies made absolutely no moves toward using new communications technologies to increase because their business model was protected to the point of being written in stone. And enforcement is easy to do against isolated ‘criminals’ because decentralized and unable to scale up their operations quickly and cheaply to the point that the public comes to embrace their new better quality of life.

What Uber was able to do was to use internet and smartphone technologies not just to improve matching and market-making so much, but to take advantage of very low marginal costs and economies of scale to immediately scale up by orders of magnitude, quickly, and at minimal costs. So quickly, and at such large scale, that they could take huge legal risks with regard to obviously and intentionally breaking the medallion (and maybe other) laws.

So technological developments and basic entrepreneurial incentives ended up bailing us out of the quagmire due to our political system.

As another example, with regards to crime, time-tested techniques of establishing public order and security through harsh but effective methods of investigation, trial, and punishment were available, but mostly judicial and some legislative developments came close to wiping out effective deterrence and the ability of police to keep criminals off the streets.

We didn’t need new material technology, because we had adequate social technology. We just made using it illegal.

Fortunately, police tried to adapt and circumvent those new onerous requirements, and new technologies – cheap DNA tests is one, but also, especially those related to electronic surveillance, sensing, and large database manipulation – bailed out law enforcement and helped boost that factor (among many others) contributing to higher clearance rates and lower crime.

Something similar happened (oh so slowly, and many years behind the private sector) to the bloated bureaucracy. There was a lot of low hanging fruit when it came to automation and efficiency, but it was basically politically impossible to pick it (except in the military, where it’s much easier politically to ‘demobilize’ and simply dictate hundreds of thousands of layoffs, which is what Clinton did.)

But then the IT boom came in and bailed out the political problem, gradually allowing for some reduction in the overall federal civilian workforce.

A great line for a good point!

I thought Bryan Caplan’s “Open Borders” was a surprisingly effective format. Too bad it is not a book about Homo sapiens.

https://www.govexec.com/management/2013/04/what-reinvention-wrought/62836/

That “coming orthodoxy” is also a foundation of Rudolf Nesse’s Good Reasons For Bad Feelings: Insights From the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry.

I also liked Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Vice in Human Evolution. He begins with the observation that trying to put 150 chimps on an airplane would result in fighting, even death–a lot of “reactive aggression”. Very few animals can stay so close. But humans will board and sit and deplane peacefully. On the other hand, he says, no chimps would ever get together to put a bomb on a plane–much less planned aggression. His thesis is that humans “self-domesticated”; there is a lot in the book about the Belyaev fox domestication experiment.

More current is Robert Pondiscio’s How the Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice, about Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academies in New York City. He is a fan, though he is clear about how extreme they have to be to achieve what they do. After you finish it, check out Education Realist’s criticism, starting with the October 19, 2019 post.

Finally, Ray Locker’s Haig’s Coup: How Richard Nixon’s Closest Aide Forced Him From Office. Together with his Nixon’s Gamble: How a President’s Own Secret Government Destroyed His Administration (2016), it provides the only explanation I have seen that makes sense of all that gets called Watergate–but which could still easily be wrong! The amount of sloppy investigation and lying and destruction of potential evidence is amazing.

For instance, I am intimately familiar with many areas of operation in the Federal Government for which there is a lot of room for improvement in the low-hanging-fruit / high-bang-for-buck sense of small, cheap, and not-even-that-clever changes with likely big benefits for efficiency and outcomes.

And that’s a lot of potential improvement by what are really mere ‘tweaks’, and not nearly the scale of change one could expect by switching to significantly superior methods and institutions, for example, those that rely on more market-like incentives and mechanisms.

So, what happens is, a reform advocate (or various commissions or consultants or what-have-you) looks at a common big problem and proposes the obvious big-win solution.

Then you get critics that make the equally obvious criticism that the advocate is engaging in wishful thinking, giving too little weight to and being too naive about the institutional, political, cultural, structural … impediments to implementing such reforms, or occassionally being a little more sophisticated and going a little bit further and giving Chestertonian apologetics for those obstacles as frustrating but least worst options in the space of possibilities, the removal of which would break important functions and make things even worse.

So, there are institutions which could be improved, but meta-institutions which prevent that from happening, and which make any analysis about tweaks mostly a futile waste of time (and, my guess is, some subconscious awareness of everything being like this now and settling into a non-optimum local equilibrium, has lead to a sea-change in modal American attitudes in which the ‘fatalistic resignation’ about the way things just are, “we can’t have nice things” – such as one sees as prevalent in some less developed countries – is becoming much more common here.)

The higher level questions are what went wrong in getting stuck here, ‘root causes’, and how do we get it so that we can have nice things again, but without getting stuck again.

Which of course rely on achieving correct and effective consensus answers to even more upstream questions, but the overall point is that wherever one might feel safe stopping (i.e., Pyschology vs. Physics) it’s far, far away from naive proposals for obvious tweaks which will never see the light of day.