It's weird that this article doesn't even attempt to grapple with the reason why governments can't run big policies as experiments and cancel them if they fail:
Every time the government hires a group of people to do X, that automatically creates a class of people who:
1. Depend on the government continuing to do X for their livelihoods
2. Are experts in X and know far more about it than any government official
This creates an automatic constituency that will fight tooth and nail to keep X going no matter what. And step one of that fighting will be to make sure that the official report answering the original research question "Did X work?" will never be a clear "No."
And God help any politician that ignores the official report and cancels X anyway. Now the problem that X was intended to solve is entirely their fault, and there's an army of X experts running to every media outlet in the country making sure the general public knows it!
1. An airplane crashes, everyone dies. Clearly a bad thing. Not so quick. For the funeral industry this means additional business, a good thing. And this is true for a LOT [1] of things, they are not good or bad, right or wrong, their judgment depends on perspective and personal preferences.
2. Which means that there is generally no policy that makes everyone happy. So you need a party with a program that aims at finding compromises that are acceptable for everyone.
3. But nobody will vote for such a party. Why would you vote for a party that gives you 50 % of what you want if there is a different party that is more aligned with your views and preferences and promises to give you 90 % of what you want?
4. In consequence the political direction tends to hop between extremes instead of settling on compromises. One group gets really unhappy with the current situation, shows up for elections, votes their party into power, moves the situation into the direction of a different extreme, until others get unhappy enough to start the process all over again.
5. Even in political systems where [sometimes] a coalition of parties exercises the power and they are forced to compromise, the outcome is all but ideal. Things move slowly because finding compromises is hard if you do not really want to compromise. Voters look down on the party they voted for because they are not delivering what they promised but only compromises.
I guess the moral of the story is that the voters have to realize that their view is not the only valid one and that voting for compromises would probably yield better outcomes than voting for extremes and either going in that direction for some time until turning around or maybe arriving at a forced compromise that no one voted for.
[1] Exercise for the reader, find something politically relevant that does not depend on perspective and personal preferences.
Plus the simple fact that, by the same logic, you can try to both-sides plain murder on the ground that the murderer wants to murder (and, again, that the undertakers and coroners and such must be kept in business). Clearly, whilst every policy will have supporters and detractors, some detractions are more worthy of consideration than others.
It doesn't work because politicians are not allowed to admit failure. A politician who admits that they tried something, no matter how small, and it didn't work, is fish food. This means there is no difference in downside, for the politician, between going all in on a big decision with huge risk versus taking baby steps. The politician is dead no matter what. They either keep claiming the bad decision was a good one in the hope that something turns up, or eventually resign or get voted out. But if they ever dare to publicly change their point of view in the presence of new evidence, they are accused of the worst crime a politician can commit. They are a "flip-flopper."
The thing is, there is no hive mind called "society". Everybody works in their own interest. Always, and in every "society".
Individual workers work on failing initiatives as long as they get paid. The outcome of the initiative may be bad for "society". But was it good for the individuals working on it? Maybe they got paid well. Maybe they enjoyed the work? Maybe the work was easy because they knew that it would fail anyway, so they didn't have to put much effort into it?
Maybe it was also good for the management or politicians? Maybe it was a step up in their career. And maybe, if they could jump ship before the failure became obvious, they could climb up the ladder to get to an even better position? You can always blame your successors for ruining the project.
And maybe it was good for whoever ordered it? If it's a local project, maybe they got subsidies from federal government bodies, and they don't even care whether it succeeds, as long as it created employment and the illusion of progress? Or if it's a private project, maybe they just tried a moon shot that, if it fails, was useful as a tax write-off?
In real life, there are so many layers to a 'failed' project. It can be a failure for some and a success for others. And those for whom it is a success will defend it, maybe even deceive to keep it running.
I agree with the problem, and I think it stems from a few core issues:
1. Societies are heterogenous, and some groups are always benefitting from the status quo, which will then rebel against any potential changes.
For instance, in Germany (and multiple other European countries), forming a GmbH (LLC) requires in-person sessions with expensive notaries, who will read the entire paperwork out loud.
This made sense when it was invented in 1892 because company formation was extremely rare, always required large facilities and upfront purchases, etc.
Today, this requirement only benefits notaries, as I reckon extremely few people would voluntarily hire a notary to form their company.
But of course notaries would be against making their services legally required! And of course, if anyone suggests loosening requirements, they will spell out all of the terrible fraud that would happen if company formation didn't require a thorough legal review.
That's an example for something relatively obvious. It gets much harder with genuinely complex topics (pensions? tax reform? healthcare?).
2. Many initiatives to improve society fail because they're viewed through a prism of administration/policy, not the actual people impacted.
Take modern urbanism, which cleanly separates where people live (residential areas), where they work (commercial districts), where they shop (malls), and where they spend their free time (recreational centers, etc.)
This beautifully serves people who plan and administer because it makes their work massively easier vs. a tangle of apartment buildings with a coffee shop and clothing boutique on the ground floor and a playground for the kids in front.
It checks the boxes of daily life, but the people living through it feel alienated from their community with these single-purpose urban areas.
3. We have a bias towards actionism.
We tend to think that big, complicated problems need big, complicated solutions, and politicians (who are evaluated on perception, not results) need to be seen designing and implementing those big, complicated solutions.
Massive amounts of infant mortality were prevented by simply making doctors wash their hands, and Semmelweis (who came up with the hypothesis) was so ridiculed for that idea that he died in an insane asylum.
It's sadly often unacceptable to say "we're going to make a little tweak that'll have a ton of downstream effects and solve this massive problem in 5 years".
The fundamental issue with this is that many problems have a time/energy/financial threshold for success. Trying to tackle such a problem with incremental iterative solutions will consistently fail, as each individual iteration will fail.
This is most obvious when network effects are present (e.g. local immunisation efforts vs country-wide immunisation), but it's surprisingly common in other government-related areas like welfare, childcare, social security etc.
Edit: Another comment has reminded me that affordable public transport is the perfect example of this: Incrementally building out a public transport system will almost always fail, as the initial lines (be they buses, light rail, etc) will typically not be successful enough to justify the cost of building the line. If, instead, a system is built out universally and simultaneously, the utility (and thus income) of each line increases due to the interconnected nature of the network.
I've been thinking about this too: why aren't we able to run safe political experiments?
We're missing guardrails to allow safe experimentation and we're missing institutions to provide affordances.
I think the difficult bit is figuring out how to seperate the goodness of centralized decision shaping and the badness of centralized power accumulation.
> The problem is not lack of experiments the problem is lack of political will to implemented known good solutions.
Indeed. We have extensive and widely repeated evidence that walkable streets, cheap mass transit, free healthcare, decriminalisation of drugs, and a 4-day workweek are all strict improvements over our current societies.
And yet somehow all of those are viewed as radical reforms.
There is mixed but often promising evidence depending on context. For example there is quite a bit of urban planning evidence that shows that walkable environments improve physical activity and health outcomes and other outcomes. And so on for the other topics.
It’s also worth noting that current systems are not the result of a unified scientific optimization process.
So even incremental changes that are supported by good evidence seem worth seriously exploring.
With disputed I mean mainly that whenever there is a study linked here for example (drug decriminalisation shows benefits) - there is a heated debate about it. And also links shown to other studies. I know that elements of the established medicine in germany for example are highly critical of decriminalisation. So - if something is disputed (rightfully or not) it is not hard to see why it is not allways implemented.
"Somehow." Indeed, it is a mystery. 0.01% of the population has direct control over something like 50% of society's resources. Society moves to enrich them, at everyone else’s expense. Curious that.
> I've been thinking about this too: why aren't we able to run safe political experiments?
Often, the reason is that some constituency, possibly a small one, that strongly benefits from the existing status quo, actively works against the political experiment using the judicial system; and the rest of the electorate doesn't care enough to fight them effectively to make the experiment possible.
This is actually a problem of decentralization, not of centralization. A stronger central planner would be able to just crush a small group of concerned citizens who are independently organizing to fight a political experiment that impacts them, and do that experiment anyway. This is a good thing if you expect that the political experiment is just fucking over some innocent people for no reason; and it's a bad thing if you think that the small, dedicated group of activists are actually rent-seekers in some sense who are benefiting themselves and making everyone else in society slightly and diffusely worse off.
Governments do run experiments sometimes, quite a lot of experiments on UBI have been run for example and we have good knowledge on whether its introduction would improve society. But I don't feel like leadership particularly cares about evidence and the right thing, they are far more idealogical than that and tend to gravitate towards policy based evidence from thinktanks and other powerful sources that produce bad science but the results they want to see.
The populace doesn't have much in the way of alternative choices for politicians that would follow the results of actual experiments nor fund them, its not really an option being offered, I think partly because its a tough sell compared to "we will do X". "We will test a variety of options and then do the best" requires more trust and its a low trust environment.
I think the UBI experiments were one-sided. They may have proven that the receivers have profited. But did they show that the givers profited as well, or at least did not suffer enough to significantly reduce their economic output and therefore risk the financing of UBI?
You'd need to check something like take a group of high-earners, increase their tax rate by say 100%, increase their cost of living, and validate that they neither leave the experiment nor work significantly less.
Honestly this is because an enormous segment of the population has offloaded their critical thinking skills and moral evaluation to large media conglomerates, who mostly serve the interests of those at the top who would not benefit from these things.
If a politician does want to shape policy based on research evidence for what would improve society, this captured segment of the electorate is weaponized against them.
The article gives examples of situations where projects have failed, and states a solution.
> The [solution] is to organize the work into the smallest possible learnable chunks and continuously alternate between doing and learning.
It would be more convincing if the article gave examples of where that solution had been tried and succeeded. I mean this must have been tried somewhere, surely.
A more nuanced version of this argument is, different people in democratic electorates disagree wildly on what constitutes an improvement to society. A practice or institution that is an improvement to one constituency is a detriment to another constituency, and that other constituency will seek to destroy the practice the moment they have the electoral power to do so.
Does it? There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies. There are plenty of failed projects.
The west in general used to be a lot more efficient. IMO the main cause is exactly the problem the Soviet Union used to have, and China still does: centralisation.
> There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies.
one thing I've come to respect about the Chinese is that while they make huge decisions that sometimes have disastrous consequences, they don't make the same mistakes twice.
At this point they have fed information from their environmental impacts into reforesting entire mountains and improving air quality.
They went in on Evs. not just subsidies but recognizing that you need an entire supply chain. so while americans bitch constantly about the failing power grid and how we can't switch to evs cuz it would be disastrous, the chinese built renewable energy projects and a massive DC transmission line accross the entire country. This is also a big part of why they can provide AI services for way less than america can.
But they do. Even if we limit ourselves to post-1949 China.
Once Mao died, the Party decided to never allow a single leader to arise again, and switched to an oligarchic model. But Xi was able to break that system and once again you have a sort of cult of personality with One Dear Leader at the top, although we have to admit that Xi is a lot saner than Mao ever was.
But the negatives are once again rearing their head, worship of a single person, personal loyalty triumphing over competence, and the Chinese economic machine, subject to whims of a single person, seems to be slowing down.
> worship of a single person, personal loyalty triumphing over competence, and the Chinese economic machine, subject to whims of a single person, seems to be slowing down.
The whole world is swinging in that direction. its not like the US is any better in that respect in our current political climate.
I would say that is swing as already over and the US was a late comer to the trend. Of the ur-strongmen of the democratic world, Orbán just got the boot and Erdogan's genuine popularity peak is also long over, although he might be able to hold on power by simply hijacking the state and jailing his opponents. And there are quite obvious marks of Trump fatigue on the non-MAGA American right as well.
The one genuinely popular populist leader who seems to be holding is Modi in India.
Technically, it would be kachní ocásek, not kachnuv.
Yeah, the US has been flirting with similar approaches quite heavily, but I don't believe that Trump will get 15 or more years in power out of it like Xi managed to.
I think "centralisation" is accurate but imprecise. Specifically, the professional class of financiers managed to capture government under Reagan, meaning that, in practical terms, we are largely governed by Jamie Dimon and his cohorts.
More precisely, our elected governments are governed by the financial class.
I am not suggesting that capital markets should not exist or that they should behave as governments compel them to; I just want the people who operate capital markets to be accountable to the people through the proxy of law and regulation. It should be an administrative profession, like accountancy.
>Does it? There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies.
"In the last 70 years" does a lot of work in your argument, as it includes a full blown revolution, counter-revolution, eras of political turmoil etc. How about the last 20-30 or so years after things stabilized there?
Also, isn't the point of the parent that it's OK to have "plenty of failed projects", as the question that starts this thread is about our inability to run political experiments. Obviously some of them will fail - that's what experiments are made to test, not guaranteed success.
That is exactly the point, though. Centralization starts to offer real advantages because the cost of complexity has increased significantly in decentralized Western societies. Yes, centralization can be inefficient, but it also makes decision-making much easier.
Public opinion in Western societies has become far more fragmented and heterogeneous, largely because of the internet. There is much more internal disagreement and constant contestation. I think that is a strong example of a factor that significantly increases the cost of complexity.
In a way, that is why we are now trying to emulate certain aspects of centralization. The United States does a relatively good job at this, and I am not making a judgment on whether that is positive or negative. But here in the European Union, we are so decentralized that we often struggle to reach agreement on major issues.
I think the repeated failure of centrally planned economies proves it generally does more harm than good, and IMO complexity makes central planning less workable not more.
The problem the EU has are when decisions are centralised (its an EU decision rather than a member state decision) but require agreement by multiple member states with different interests. In the US, AFAIK, the federal government makes decisions about things that apply to the whole of the US without requiring the agreement of states. The EU's problem is not lack of centralisation, its a mismatch between who makes decisions and where they apply. You could also solve the problem by delegating more powers back to member states (or by letting the Commission and Parliament make all EU wide decisions without requiring the agreement of member states).
The huge problem with centralization is that it allows you to make huge mistakes, up to literally continent-scaled ones. This is what ends empires, sometimes.
The US was able to bomb Iran and Russia was able to attack Ukraine because basically a single important person said so. Personally, I consider the War Powers Act to be one of the worst laws that your Congress ever voted in.
The EU cannot do such things before obtaining consensus of multiple nations and I am happy for that, as we have had a lot of disastrous decisions in our past already.
My favorite tidbit is the First World War. The Germans in Austria were gung-ho about attacking Serbia, but the Hungarians were not, and they had the power of veto. If István Tisza held firm, the war might have been avoided, maybe just for a few years, maybe indefinitely, or maybe at least Central Europe could have stayed out of it, leaving it to the German Empire and the British to duke it out between themselves.
But in a more federal Austria-Hungary, where the Czechs and the Poles would have their own vetos, that particular war of 1914 would definitely have been off the table. Neither of those nations was interested in a pseudo-colonial war of conquest in the Balkans against another Slavic nation.
It's the classic issue that centralisation moves the efficiency of an organisation toward the efficiency-level of the top of the organisation, for both the good and bad. From a risk management perspective, I'd argue that's generally not worth the risk, even though it can look astounding in good periods.
Centralization is an information problem. You can't make good centralized decisions if you don't have good information to base this on. China still has this problem; the data coming up the pipeline is often much more rosy than reality. But it has the problem to a much lesser degree than the USSR, because surveillance technology and data management are improving.
This is called the Local Knowledge Problem. It's why centralization can't work and has never worked, at least not until we have some ASI they can overcome it.
I think you are directionally correct, but too strong. South Korea ran a protectionist command economy for decades with great success. Clearly it can work. China is now a superpower. Clearly it can work.
>China still has this problem; the data coming up the pipeline is often much more rosy than reality.
Is that actually the case, or just old wives tales / cope, based on what used to be the case in USSR?
The question isn't even if the "data coming up the pipeline is often much more rosy than reality" to some degree, but if that's to a degree that's worse than the west or better, and enough to be a real problem.
> There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies. There are plenty of failed projects.
Failures are everywhere, even the OP acknowledged that. I think the more important question is what a system does with those failures and how well it can learn from them and improve. (And if course, what does "improve" even mean? What are the targets that the system optimizes for?)
So my question would be, could China learn from those failed projects and improve its policies? How many disastrous decisions were there in the last 5 years in contrast to 70 years ago?
China is not as hyper centralized as you think, the regions have quite a bit of power over policy as long as they deliver results. Some things are centralized, maybe to many in China. But for things like High Speed rail, such centralization is not bad. Not everything needs centralization but some kind of centralized decision making is need for grand decisions.
The US does this hilariously wrong. Like giving each state money for public metro system and then each state implements a unique incompatible solution that really only differs slightly from the alternative. In a competitive private market that fine, industry standards can emerge. But in terms of metro system that a country only builds very rarely having the system be the same between metros makes a lot of sense.
Its not like these are experimental concepts that nobody in the world knew about already.
What disasters, particularly relatively modern ones?
This reads as massive cope because China has lifted ~800M people out of extreme poverty [1][2] and the transformation of the ordinary lives of Chinese people is almost unbelievable. More cope here is "yeah but that's Tier 1 cities". But look at rural life in small villages. Even 20 years ago people were still drawing water from wells and didn't have indoor plumbing.
Now? High speed internet on smartphones, modern houses, indoor plumbing, reliable electricity, electric vehicles, etc.
What we have in the West is a captured system of parasitic wealth transfer from the young and poor to the old and rich where society and infrastructure is crumbling. My prediction is that the 21st century is going to show the central planning (in China) is going to produce far better outcomes for the vast majority of people.
Many nations have tried to plan their economy. Most perform badly and end up as footnotes in the history of the Democratic Republic of Tinpotonia. It takes a lot of skill to plan an economy.
The star performer in living memory was South Korea: best dictatorship! But it completed its succession plan and pivoted to free markets, so the example is forgotten.
Mao kicked off by outlawing sparrows, causing famine. His rule survived that, but it could have gone very differently.
Xi, and Wu before him, are probably just good at it. Even so: the demographic problem.
I would say that democracy has inherent problems: electability is a poor proxy for leadership quality; election cycles nullify the long-term view; electorates are incompetent and vacillating. I expect a committee to choose better rulers than hoi polloi, except in the dimension of accountability to the populace.
I see no reason to believe they are. China is poorer than Taiwan per-capita despite being the same culture. They recovered a little after Deng reduced the amount of centralization, but they are still lagging behind.
>China is poorer than Taiwan per-capita despite being the same culture
What does being "the same culture" have to do with anything?
Aside the fact that Taiwan is much smaller (and different situation), Taiwan was cold-war period favored partner to the west, and started modernized industrialization way earlier (in the 80s and 90s it was a dominant industrial partner, like Japan had become earlier).
China had to do this much more recently, and brought 100s of millions out of poverty in the process. Taiwan is city-size compared to China, whereas the China comparison includes like 70x the population, a large percentage in rural areas.
These improvements include installing suicide nets at factories making products for foreigners using overworked labour living in dormitories, imprisoning two million people for a decade because they are the wrong kind of religious, suppressing democracy protests, essentially criminalising the use of pictures of Winnie The Pooh for political satire, and burying forever the true scale of how many people died in the epidemic stage of COVID transmission by simply not counting the potentially millions of people who died unable to leave their homes.
> Do you have any notion what China used to be like?
Try not to be so patronising.
My observation, simply, is that in fixing the old centrally-imposed cruelties, they've created new ones. The current improved situation is predicated on the new cruelties. It is on any philosophical level incorrect to suggest things are better for everyone when they have become deliberately and systematically worse (actually quite recently) for particular underclasses. It is not, in fact, better for the majority if society mistreats the minority; it is an indication of a sickness in "progress" if it invents a new minority to mistreat because progress is predicated on new centrally-managed fears.
Because 15min cities are Soros funded projects to imprison us and the sheeple don't understandit. Renewable energy is a "gina" scam to destroy our economy. Healthcare is communism, socialism, fascism. Everything sucks but I don't want anything to change... /s
If a society makes every problem a culture war, there can't be any progress until it gets so bad it can't be ignored anymore. But I feel even that is bit too optimistic.
One of the fundamental issues is that some people so strongly tie their identity to a party that an idea can by definition not be good if the other side supports it. It's not a project to improve society, it's a game, a war, and the other side is evil and must be defeated.
This may be true in some cases, but when you have a system that entrenches two major parties, you don't get to vote for idea X, you have to vote for party A or party B. If you have some policies that are dealbreakers, and party A agrees with you and party B doesn't, you can't vote for party B even if they support idea X. So then you become a supposed "party B fanboy"
Billionaires can spend unlimited money convincing people to oppose anything that benefits them, and we have an entire industry of social media influencers who get rewarded for stoking conflict. Citizens United passed in 2010 and everything has gone dramatically downhill since then.
You frame this as an either-or choice. It's a false dichotomy. economic prosperity and environmental protection are often interconnected.
That said, ecology is more important to me in general. The economy exists within the environment, not the other way around. It's definitely a more nuanced relationship than "either-or" suggests though...
Trains, walking, bikes, solar or nuclear plants are all good for both.
Smart policies like land value tax are good for both.
Tons and tons of things are good for both.
In general economy is more important because people, but people also live in the environment. But not building a mine because of tailings is a bit silly as it just mean a mine somewhere else is built that handles tailings even worse. These things can be done reasonably.
And if you actually price in the environment destruction in the supply chain cost, we could do a lot of things.
My take is that it is kind of exclusive today, because the economy is designed and limited against the ecology, but that's not a fundamental given. It comes down from the choice of humanity to extract itself from nature. That's a choice and a story we can identify, criticise, and counter with another choice. Which would take some time, but... that's all we have.
This is why I left The Netherlands. They have been working on laws for both self employment and unrealized capital gains for the past ten years and in the meanwhile have implemented some unworkable “temporary laws”.
Just implement good laws, do it right once. Yes it will hurt to not have a smooth transition but it’s better than having meetings about it for ten years.
I think back to the first covid lockdowns. All of society was reorganized in a matter of weeks! Oil is worth negative money if they don't make us consume it! Work from home became mainstream, it turns out all those people with anxiety disorders or pain management issues could in fact participate in society! Generous payments were made for people who couldn't work, with no concern about who will pay for it!
The harsh reality is that all governments could solve most problems easily, they just couldn't be bothered.
A lot of people got extremely angry at the covid lockdowns; and extremely angry at the inflation caused by the transfer payments to (some) people (in ways that often had little to do with whether or not they could work); and extremely angry at the widespread fraud in applying for covid-related benefits; and extremely angry at (and increasingly distrustful of) the state/medical establishment's disease-related guidelines.
What one person thinks improves society, another person thinks makes society worse. In a democracy, they both can vote; in a non-democratic system, the one whose desires are constantly thwarted by the non-democratically-accountable governance officials might revolt.
It's weird that this article doesn't even attempt to grapple with the reason why governments can't run big policies as experiments and cancel them if they fail:
Every time the government hires a group of people to do X, that automatically creates a class of people who:
1. Depend on the government continuing to do X for their livelihoods
2. Are experts in X and know far more about it than any government official
This creates an automatic constituency that will fight tooth and nail to keep X going no matter what. And step one of that fighting will be to make sure that the official report answering the original research question "Did X work?" will never be a clear "No."
And God help any politician that ignores the official report and cancels X anyway. Now the problem that X was intended to solve is entirely their fault, and there's an army of X experts running to every media outlet in the country making sure the general public knows it!
1. An airplane crashes, everyone dies. Clearly a bad thing. Not so quick. For the funeral industry this means additional business, a good thing. And this is true for a LOT [1] of things, they are not good or bad, right or wrong, their judgment depends on perspective and personal preferences.
2. Which means that there is generally no policy that makes everyone happy. So you need a party with a program that aims at finding compromises that are acceptable for everyone.
3. But nobody will vote for such a party. Why would you vote for a party that gives you 50 % of what you want if there is a different party that is more aligned with your views and preferences and promises to give you 90 % of what you want?
4. In consequence the political direction tends to hop between extremes instead of settling on compromises. One group gets really unhappy with the current situation, shows up for elections, votes their party into power, moves the situation into the direction of a different extreme, until others get unhappy enough to start the process all over again.
5. Even in political systems where [sometimes] a coalition of parties exercises the power and they are forced to compromise, the outcome is all but ideal. Things move slowly because finding compromises is hard if you do not really want to compromise. Voters look down on the party they voted for because they are not delivering what they promised but only compromises.
I guess the moral of the story is that the voters have to realize that their view is not the only valid one and that voting for compromises would probably yield better outcomes than voting for extremes and either going in that direction for some time until turning around or maybe arriving at a forced compromise that no one voted for.
[1] Exercise for the reader, find something politically relevant that does not depend on perspective and personal preferences.
Here's a recent blog post in a similar vein: https://benthams.substack.com/p/voting-self-interestedly-is-...
Although your plane crash example falls afoul of the broken window fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Plus the simple fact that, by the same logic, you can try to both-sides plain murder on the ground that the murderer wants to murder (and, again, that the undertakers and coroners and such must be kept in business). Clearly, whilst every policy will have supporters and detractors, some detractions are more worthy of consideration than others.
It doesn't work because politicians are not allowed to admit failure. A politician who admits that they tried something, no matter how small, and it didn't work, is fish food. This means there is no difference in downside, for the politician, between going all in on a big decision with huge risk versus taking baby steps. The politician is dead no matter what. They either keep claiming the bad decision was a good one in the hope that something turns up, or eventually resign or get voted out. But if they ever dare to publicly change their point of view in the presence of new evidence, they are accused of the worst crime a politician can commit. They are a "flip-flopper."
The thing is, there is no hive mind called "society". Everybody works in their own interest. Always, and in every "society".
Individual workers work on failing initiatives as long as they get paid. The outcome of the initiative may be bad for "society". But was it good for the individuals working on it? Maybe they got paid well. Maybe they enjoyed the work? Maybe the work was easy because they knew that it would fail anyway, so they didn't have to put much effort into it?
Maybe it was also good for the management or politicians? Maybe it was a step up in their career. And maybe, if they could jump ship before the failure became obvious, they could climb up the ladder to get to an even better position? You can always blame your successors for ruining the project.
And maybe it was good for whoever ordered it? If it's a local project, maybe they got subsidies from federal government bodies, and they don't even care whether it succeeds, as long as it created employment and the illusion of progress? Or if it's a private project, maybe they just tried a moon shot that, if it fails, was useful as a tax write-off?
In real life, there are so many layers to a 'failed' project. It can be a failure for some and a success for others. And those for whom it is a success will defend it, maybe even deceive to keep it running.
I agree with the problem, and I think it stems from a few core issues:
1. Societies are heterogenous, and some groups are always benefitting from the status quo, which will then rebel against any potential changes.
For instance, in Germany (and multiple other European countries), forming a GmbH (LLC) requires in-person sessions with expensive notaries, who will read the entire paperwork out loud.
This made sense when it was invented in 1892 because company formation was extremely rare, always required large facilities and upfront purchases, etc.
Today, this requirement only benefits notaries, as I reckon extremely few people would voluntarily hire a notary to form their company.
But of course notaries would be against making their services legally required! And of course, if anyone suggests loosening requirements, they will spell out all of the terrible fraud that would happen if company formation didn't require a thorough legal review.
That's an example for something relatively obvious. It gets much harder with genuinely complex topics (pensions? tax reform? healthcare?).
2. Many initiatives to improve society fail because they're viewed through a prism of administration/policy, not the actual people impacted.
Take modern urbanism, which cleanly separates where people live (residential areas), where they work (commercial districts), where they shop (malls), and where they spend their free time (recreational centers, etc.)
This beautifully serves people who plan and administer because it makes their work massively easier vs. a tangle of apartment buildings with a coffee shop and clothing boutique on the ground floor and a playground for the kids in front.
It checks the boxes of daily life, but the people living through it feel alienated from their community with these single-purpose urban areas.
3. We have a bias towards actionism.
We tend to think that big, complicated problems need big, complicated solutions, and politicians (who are evaluated on perception, not results) need to be seen designing and implementing those big, complicated solutions.
Massive amounts of infant mortality were prevented by simply making doctors wash their hands, and Semmelweis (who came up with the hypothesis) was so ridiculed for that idea that he died in an insane asylum.
It's sadly often unacceptable to say "we're going to make a little tweak that'll have a ton of downstream effects and solve this massive problem in 5 years".
The fundamental issue with this is that many problems have a time/energy/financial threshold for success. Trying to tackle such a problem with incremental iterative solutions will consistently fail, as each individual iteration will fail.
This is most obvious when network effects are present (e.g. local immunisation efforts vs country-wide immunisation), but it's surprisingly common in other government-related areas like welfare, childcare, social security etc.
Edit: Another comment has reminded me that affordable public transport is the perfect example of this: Incrementally building out a public transport system will almost always fail, as the initial lines (be they buses, light rail, etc) will typically not be successful enough to justify the cost of building the line. If, instead, a system is built out universally and simultaneously, the utility (and thus income) of each line increases due to the interconnected nature of the network.
I've been thinking about this too: why aren't we able to run safe political experiments?
We're missing guardrails to allow safe experimentation and we're missing institutions to provide affordances.
I think the difficult bit is figuring out how to seperate the goodness of centralized decision shaping and the badness of centralized power accumulation.
Many things don't really need 'experiments'. You can just do them. Like run good buses.
The US already does run experiments thanks to the states, and we run many simply by having many countries.
The problem is not lack of experiments the problem is lack of political will to implemented known good solutions.
Yes, but they're not safe experiments. And they're not experiments in the sense that we don't focus on shaping the reusable knowledge they produce.
It's not enough to try things, we also need a social system in place to allow trying to be safe and useful, even on failure.
> The problem is not lack of experiments the problem is lack of political will to implemented known good solutions.
Indeed. We have extensive and widely repeated evidence that walkable streets, cheap mass transit, free healthcare, decriminalisation of drugs, and a 4-day workweek are all strict improvements over our current societies.
And yet somehow all of those are viewed as radical reforms.
I like all of that, but is there really a scientific consensus about those things? I don't think so. Most seems to be disputed.
Hmm what do you mean by disputed?
There is mixed but often promising evidence depending on context. For example there is quite a bit of urban planning evidence that shows that walkable environments improve physical activity and health outcomes and other outcomes. And so on for the other topics.
It’s also worth noting that current systems are not the result of a unified scientific optimization process. So even incremental changes that are supported by good evidence seem worth seriously exploring.
With disputed I mean mainly that whenever there is a study linked here for example (drug decriminalisation shows benefits) - there is a heated debate about it. And also links shown to other studies. I know that elements of the established medicine in germany for example are highly critical of decriminalisation. So - if something is disputed (rightfully or not) it is not hard to see why it is not allways implemented.
Also, do you trust the scientists? Or the scientific establishment that decides what practitioners rise to the level of being trustworthy?
Man you guys are so close.
"Somehow." Indeed, it is a mystery. 0.01% of the population has direct control over something like 50% of society's resources. Society moves to enrich them, at everyone else’s expense. Curious that.
> I've been thinking about this too: why aren't we able to run safe political experiments?
Often, the reason is that some constituency, possibly a small one, that strongly benefits from the existing status quo, actively works against the political experiment using the judicial system; and the rest of the electorate doesn't care enough to fight them effectively to make the experiment possible.
This is actually a problem of decentralization, not of centralization. A stronger central planner would be able to just crush a small group of concerned citizens who are independently organizing to fight a political experiment that impacts them, and do that experiment anyway. This is a good thing if you expect that the political experiment is just fucking over some innocent people for no reason; and it's a bad thing if you think that the small, dedicated group of activists are actually rent-seekers in some sense who are benefiting themselves and making everyone else in society slightly and diffusely worse off.
Governments do run experiments sometimes, quite a lot of experiments on UBI have been run for example and we have good knowledge on whether its introduction would improve society. But I don't feel like leadership particularly cares about evidence and the right thing, they are far more idealogical than that and tend to gravitate towards policy based evidence from thinktanks and other powerful sources that produce bad science but the results they want to see.
The populace doesn't have much in the way of alternative choices for politicians that would follow the results of actual experiments nor fund them, its not really an option being offered, I think partly because its a tough sell compared to "we will do X". "We will test a variety of options and then do the best" requires more trust and its a low trust environment.
I think the UBI experiments were one-sided. They may have proven that the receivers have profited. But did they show that the givers profited as well, or at least did not suffer enough to significantly reduce their economic output and therefore risk the financing of UBI?
You'd need to check something like take a group of high-earners, increase their tax rate by say 100%, increase their cost of living, and validate that they neither leave the experiment nor work significantly less.
Honestly this is because an enormous segment of the population has offloaded their critical thinking skills and moral evaluation to large media conglomerates, who mostly serve the interests of those at the top who would not benefit from these things.
If a politician does want to shape policy based on research evidence for what would improve society, this captured segment of the electorate is weaponized against them.
The article gives examples of situations where projects have failed, and states a solution.
> The [solution] is to organize the work into the smallest possible learnable chunks and continuously alternate between doing and learning.
It would be more convincing if the article gave examples of where that solution had been tried and succeeded. I mean this must have been tried somewhere, surely.
This thread from yesterday feels relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48746445
"Society" (i.e. northern European and Anglophone) doesn't want to be improved.
A more nuanced version of this argument is, different people in democratic electorates disagree wildly on what constitutes an improvement to society. A practice or institution that is an improvement to one constituency is a detriment to another constituency, and that other constituency will seek to destroy the practice the moment they have the electoral power to do so.
Normally "improvements" penalize group A to favour group B; if group A is the majority, they will outvote the "improvement" in any democratic process.
China seems to do a decent job of it. Why can't we?
Does it? There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies. There are plenty of failed projects.
The west in general used to be a lot more efficient. IMO the main cause is exactly the problem the Soviet Union used to have, and China still does: centralisation.
> There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies.
one thing I've come to respect about the Chinese is that while they make huge decisions that sometimes have disastrous consequences, they don't make the same mistakes twice.
At this point they have fed information from their environmental impacts into reforesting entire mountains and improving air quality.
They went in on Evs. not just subsidies but recognizing that you need an entire supply chain. so while americans bitch constantly about the failing power grid and how we can't switch to evs cuz it would be disastrous, the chinese built renewable energy projects and a massive DC transmission line accross the entire country. This is also a big part of why they can provide AI services for way less than america can.
"they don't make the same mistakes twice."
But they do. Even if we limit ourselves to post-1949 China.
Once Mao died, the Party decided to never allow a single leader to arise again, and switched to an oligarchic model. But Xi was able to break that system and once again you have a sort of cult of personality with One Dear Leader at the top, although we have to admit that Xi is a lot saner than Mao ever was.
But the negatives are once again rearing their head, worship of a single person, personal loyalty triumphing over competence, and the Chinese economic machine, subject to whims of a single person, seems to be slowing down.
> worship of a single person, personal loyalty triumphing over competence, and the Chinese economic machine, subject to whims of a single person, seems to be slowing down.
The whole world is swinging in that direction. its not like the US is any better in that respect in our current political climate.
I would say that is swing as already over and the US was a late comer to the trend. Of the ur-strongmen of the democratic world, Orbán just got the boot and Erdogan's genuine popularity peak is also long over, although he might be able to hold on power by simply hijacking the state and jailing his opponents. And there are quite obvious marks of Trump fatigue on the non-MAGA American right as well.
The one genuinely popular populist leader who seems to be holding is Modi in India.
> once again you have a sort of cult of personality with One Dear Leader at the top
Sounds hell of a lot like USA right now.
Technically, it would be kachní ocásek, not kachnuv.
Yeah, the US has been flirting with similar approaches quite heavily, but I don't believe that Trump will get 15 or more years in power out of it like Xi managed to.
I think "centralisation" is accurate but imprecise. Specifically, the professional class of financiers managed to capture government under Reagan, meaning that, in practical terms, we are largely governed by Jamie Dimon and his cohorts.
More precisely, our elected governments are governed by the financial class.
I am not suggesting that capital markets should not exist or that they should behave as governments compel them to; I just want the people who operate capital markets to be accountable to the people through the proxy of law and regulation. It should be an administrative profession, like accountancy.
>Does it? There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies.
"In the last 70 years" does a lot of work in your argument, as it includes a full blown revolution, counter-revolution, eras of political turmoil etc. How about the last 20-30 or so years after things stabilized there?
Also, isn't the point of the parent that it's OK to have "plenty of failed projects", as the question that starts this thread is about our inability to run political experiments. Obviously some of them will fail - that's what experiments are made to test, not guaranteed success.
That is exactly the point, though. Centralization starts to offer real advantages because the cost of complexity has increased significantly in decentralized Western societies. Yes, centralization can be inefficient, but it also makes decision-making much easier.
Public opinion in Western societies has become far more fragmented and heterogeneous, largely because of the internet. There is much more internal disagreement and constant contestation. I think that is a strong example of a factor that significantly increases the cost of complexity.
In a way, that is why we are now trying to emulate certain aspects of centralization. The United States does a relatively good job at this, and I am not making a judgment on whether that is positive or negative. But here in the European Union, we are so decentralized that we often struggle to reach agreement on major issues.
I think the repeated failure of centrally planned economies proves it generally does more harm than good, and IMO complexity makes central planning less workable not more.
The problem the EU has are when decisions are centralised (its an EU decision rather than a member state decision) but require agreement by multiple member states with different interests. In the US, AFAIK, the federal government makes decisions about things that apply to the whole of the US without requiring the agreement of states. The EU's problem is not lack of centralisation, its a mismatch between who makes decisions and where they apply. You could also solve the problem by delegating more powers back to member states (or by letting the Commission and Parliament make all EU wide decisions without requiring the agreement of member states).
The huge problem with centralization is that it allows you to make huge mistakes, up to literally continent-scaled ones. This is what ends empires, sometimes.
The US was able to bomb Iran and Russia was able to attack Ukraine because basically a single important person said so. Personally, I consider the War Powers Act to be one of the worst laws that your Congress ever voted in.
The EU cannot do such things before obtaining consensus of multiple nations and I am happy for that, as we have had a lot of disastrous decisions in our past already.
My favorite tidbit is the First World War. The Germans in Austria were gung-ho about attacking Serbia, but the Hungarians were not, and they had the power of veto. If István Tisza held firm, the war might have been avoided, maybe just for a few years, maybe indefinitely, or maybe at least Central Europe could have stayed out of it, leaving it to the German Empire and the British to duke it out between themselves.
But in a more federal Austria-Hungary, where the Czechs and the Poles would have their own vetos, that particular war of 1914 would definitely have been off the table. Neither of those nations was interested in a pseudo-colonial war of conquest in the Balkans against another Slavic nation.
It's the classic issue that centralisation moves the efficiency of an organisation toward the efficiency-level of the top of the organisation, for both the good and bad. From a risk management perspective, I'd argue that's generally not worth the risk, even though it can look astounding in good periods.
Centralization is an information problem. You can't make good centralized decisions if you don't have good information to base this on. China still has this problem; the data coming up the pipeline is often much more rosy than reality. But it has the problem to a much lesser degree than the USSR, because surveillance technology and data management are improving.
This is called the Local Knowledge Problem. It's why centralization can't work and has never worked, at least not until we have some ASI they can overcome it.
I think you are directionally correct, but too strong. South Korea ran a protectionist command economy for decades with great success. Clearly it can work. China is now a superpower. Clearly it can work.
>China still has this problem; the data coming up the pipeline is often much more rosy than reality.
Is that actually the case, or just old wives tales / cope, based on what used to be the case in USSR?
The question isn't even if the "data coming up the pipeline is often much more rosy than reality" to some degree, but if that's to a degree that's worse than the west or better, and enough to be a real problem.
> There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies. There are plenty of failed projects.
Failures are everywhere, even the OP acknowledged that. I think the more important question is what a system does with those failures and how well it can learn from them and improve. (And if course, what does "improve" even mean? What are the targets that the system optimizes for?)
So my question would be, could China learn from those failed projects and improve its policies? How many disastrous decisions were there in the last 5 years in contrast to 70 years ago?
China is not as hyper centralized as you think, the regions have quite a bit of power over policy as long as they deliver results. Some things are centralized, maybe to many in China. But for things like High Speed rail, such centralization is not bad. Not everything needs centralization but some kind of centralized decision making is need for grand decisions.
The US does this hilariously wrong. Like giving each state money for public metro system and then each state implements a unique incompatible solution that really only differs slightly from the alternative. In a competitive private market that fine, industry standards can emerge. But in terms of metro system that a country only builds very rarely having the system be the same between metros makes a lot of sense.
Its not like these are experimental concepts that nobody in the world knew about already.
What disasters, particularly relatively modern ones?
This reads as massive cope because China has lifted ~800M people out of extreme poverty [1][2] and the transformation of the ordinary lives of Chinese people is almost unbelievable. More cope here is "yeah but that's Tier 1 cities". But look at rural life in small villages. Even 20 years ago people were still drawing water from wells and didn't have indoor plumbing.
Now? High speed internet on smartphones, modern houses, indoor plumbing, reliable electricity, electric vehicles, etc.
What we have in the West is a captured system of parasitic wealth transfer from the young and poor to the old and rich where society and infrastructure is crumbling. My prediction is that the 21st century is going to show the central planning (in China) is going to produce far better outcomes for the vast majority of people.
[1]: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...
[2]: https://amro-asia.org/an-exemplary-journey-in-eradicating-po...
a) survivorship bias, and b) long-termism.
Many nations have tried to plan their economy. Most perform badly and end up as footnotes in the history of the Democratic Republic of Tinpotonia. It takes a lot of skill to plan an economy.
The star performer in living memory was South Korea: best dictatorship! But it completed its succession plan and pivoted to free markets, so the example is forgotten.
Mao kicked off by outlawing sparrows, causing famine. His rule survived that, but it could have gone very differently.
Xi, and Wu before him, are probably just good at it. Even so: the demographic problem.
I would say that democracy has inherent problems: electability is a poor proxy for leadership quality; election cycles nullify the long-term view; electorates are incompetent and vacillating. I expect a committee to choose better rulers than hoi polloi, except in the dimension of accountability to the populace.
> I would say that democracy has inherent problems:
It is indeed the worst possible system except for all the others.
I see no reason to believe they are. China is poorer than Taiwan per-capita despite being the same culture. They recovered a little after Deng reduced the amount of centralization, but they are still lagging behind.
>China is poorer than Taiwan per-capita despite being the same culture
What does being "the same culture" have to do with anything?
Aside the fact that Taiwan is much smaller (and different situation), Taiwan was cold-war period favored partner to the west, and started modernized industrialization way earlier (in the 80s and 90s it was a dominant industrial partner, like Japan had become earlier).
China had to do this much more recently, and brought 100s of millions out of poverty in the process. Taiwan is city-size compared to China, whereas the China comparison includes like 70x the population, a large percentage in rural areas.
> "They recovered a little after Deng"
The understatement of the millenium.
https://x.com/CNLiberalism/status/1397764323553034242
This would seem to me to rely on an extremely selective interpretation of "improving".
Not really. I mean compared to 70 years ago. Its not really a question. The difference in living standard now compared to 70 years ago it gigantic.
Even to 40 years ago.
This is just objectively true for the waste, waste majority of the population.
These improvements include installing suicide nets at factories making products for foreigners using overworked labour living in dormitories, imprisoning two million people for a decade because they are the wrong kind of religious, suppressing democracy protests, essentially criminalising the use of pictures of Winnie The Pooh for political satire, and burying forever the true scale of how many people died in the epidemic stage of COVID transmission by simply not counting the potentially millions of people who died unable to leave their homes.
Yeah and 70 years ago they were living in socialist utopia where honey flowed from trees. Do you have any notion what China used to be like?
You need to get a grip and get some perspective on what China is like for most people.
You can be critical of current day China without losing your brain.
You could be considerably less rude.
> Do you have any notion what China used to be like?
Try not to be so patronising.
My observation, simply, is that in fixing the old centrally-imposed cruelties, they've created new ones. The current improved situation is predicated on the new cruelties. It is on any philosophical level incorrect to suggest things are better for everyone when they have become deliberately and systematically worse (actually quite recently) for particular underclasses. It is not, in fact, better for the majority if society mistreats the minority; it is an indication of a sickness in "progress" if it invents a new minority to mistreat because progress is predicated on new centrally-managed fears.
> China seems to do a decent job of it. Why can't we?
Like the One-child policy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_child_policy
Or the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
Or the persecution of Uyghurs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...
Or the 2021 Hong Kong electoral changes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Hong_Kong_electoral_chang...
Because 15min cities are Soros funded projects to imprison us and the sheeple don't understandit. Renewable energy is a "gina" scam to destroy our economy. Healthcare is communism, socialism, fascism. Everything sucks but I don't want anything to change... /s
If a society makes every problem a culture war, there can't be any progress until it gets so bad it can't be ignored anymore. But I feel even that is bit too optimistic.
One of the fundamental issues is that some people so strongly tie their identity to a party that an idea can by definition not be good if the other side supports it. It's not a project to improve society, it's a game, a war, and the other side is evil and must be defeated.
This may be true in some cases, but when you have a system that entrenches two major parties, you don't get to vote for idea X, you have to vote for party A or party B. If you have some policies that are dealbreakers, and party A agrees with you and party B doesn't, you can't vote for party B even if they support idea X. So then you become a supposed "party B fanboy"
Billionaires can spend unlimited money convincing people to oppose anything that benefits them, and we have an entire industry of social media influencers who get rewarded for stoking conflict. Citizens United passed in 2010 and everything has gone dramatically downhill since then.
What is more important for you - economy or ecology?
You frame this as an either-or choice. It's a false dichotomy. economic prosperity and environmental protection are often interconnected.
That said, ecology is more important to me in general. The economy exists within the environment, not the other way around. It's definitely a more nuanced relationship than "either-or" suggests though...
Trains, walking, bikes, solar or nuclear plants are all good for both.
Smart policies like land value tax are good for both.
Tons and tons of things are good for both.
In general economy is more important because people, but people also live in the environment. But not building a mine because of tailings is a bit silly as it just mean a mine somewhere else is built that handles tailings even worse. These things can be done reasonably.
And if you actually price in the environment destruction in the supply chain cost, we could do a lot of things.
Why should any be exclusive of the other?
My take is that it is kind of exclusive today, because the economy is designed and limited against the ecology, but that's not a fundamental given. It comes down from the choice of humanity to extract itself from nature. That's a choice and a story we can identify, criticise, and counter with another choice. Which would take some time, but... that's all we have.
In general we don't have a good system design thinking around politics and organizing society.
This is why I left The Netherlands. They have been working on laws for both self employment and unrealized capital gains for the past ten years and in the meanwhile have implemented some unworkable “temporary laws”.
Just implement good laws, do it right once. Yes it will hurt to not have a smooth transition but it’s better than having meetings about it for ten years.
I think back to the first covid lockdowns. All of society was reorganized in a matter of weeks! Oil is worth negative money if they don't make us consume it! Work from home became mainstream, it turns out all those people with anxiety disorders or pain management issues could in fact participate in society! Generous payments were made for people who couldn't work, with no concern about who will pay for it!
The harsh reality is that all governments could solve most problems easily, they just couldn't be bothered.
A lot of people got extremely angry at the covid lockdowns; and extremely angry at the inflation caused by the transfer payments to (some) people (in ways that often had little to do with whether or not they could work); and extremely angry at the widespread fraud in applying for covid-related benefits; and extremely angry at (and increasingly distrustful of) the state/medical establishment's disease-related guidelines.
What one person thinks improves society, another person thinks makes society worse. In a democracy, they both can vote; in a non-democratic system, the one whose desires are constantly thwarted by the non-democratically-accountable governance officials might revolt.