A thought-provoking piece in Venkatesh Rao's Ribbon Farm by akkartik.
- Complexity and corner-cases aren’t just aesthetic concerns, though I’m certainly guilty of more than my share of programmer OCD. You can tell when your plant is about to die because it turns brown over a period of days. The institutions we neglect go bad over decades, something that’s much harder to notice. In addition, as rules grow more complex and bureaucracies accumulate forms, they become more intimidating to a newcomer to understand. If you hadn’t already been paying attention, it gets harder and harder to catch up. More and more, we treat them as externalities, an unpleasant task to be completed with dispatch and wiped from memory. As people shy away from the complexity, control is gradually ceded to a small coterie of insiders who grow more fluent with the complexity and increasingly (first unconsciously, later deliberately) work to maintain a ‘moat’ around their influence. This is how our institutions get captured: insensitivity to low ownership, being seen as an externality and oh-so-gradually creeping complexity. To round out the toxic cocktail, capture gives insiders further incentives to deliberately make rules more complex and inaccessible to latecomers.
What if it's not stable, though. What if societies are only metastable, which I think is far more likely. Metastability, for the uninitiated, is a situation in which forces can be balanced, but that perturbations in the system tend to grow with time, whereas in a truly stable system, perturbations decay with time. In the classic example, a ball at the bottom of a hill is stable, because if it is knocked a little to the left or right, it will fall back to its original spot. However, a ball at the apex of a hill is still forced balanced, but any bump, and it's never going to spontaneously return whence it came. Similarly, I think we would have a hard time arguing that our society is actually stable, although the analogy with pure physics might be a bit thin. Perhaps this is one reason that our institutions degrade over time. They need constant nudging back to the top of the hill, so we get layers upon layers of bureaucracy to keep the ball in place. Same thing with, say, support for the poor. Wealth is out of their grasp, so we invent complex institutions to make sure they stay above water. The situation not only son't be, but can't be, fixed organically, because it is energetically unfavorable. So, eventually, we run out of gas, and the ball rolls to the bottom of the energy well. How fast and how hard it falls depend on how much energy it too to prop it up in the first place. The Soviet Union, for example, only lasted mere decades, because it was a contrivance that required bureaucracy, brutality and relentless spying just to keep the whole thing duct taped together. The United States, on the other hand, has basically developed on its own, although in recent years has required a lot more top down maintenance to keep afloat. I think, however, collapse is not just likely, but inevitable, no matter what the system.A conservative regards history as full of examples of functioning societies that, for some reason or another, suddenly fell apart. Since the reasons for these failures are illegible, any kind of change is to be avoided, since we have that most precious of things: a stable, prosperous, free, safe society. While our society is not absolutely stable, prosperous, free, and safe, it is historically all of those things, and there are a lot more ways to break it than there are to fix it.
Anyway, I think you have the start of an interesting look at institutional failure, and I look forward to reading the next installment. Personally, I think a huge part of the problem, and what I would like to see explored in greater detail from journalists who cover government, and especially budget fights is this: We always hear of lobbying from without, but rarely of lobbying from within, an equally toxic problem. Moat building, as you call it, tends to crystallize bad policy, which leads to even more top down control being required to keep the lights on.As people shy away from the complexity, control is gradually ceded to a small coterie of insiders who grow more fluent with the complexity and increasingly (first unconsciously, later deliberately) work to maintain a ‘moat’ around their influence. This is how our institutions get captured: insensitivity to low ownership, being seen as an externality and oh-so-gradually creeping complexity. To round out the toxic cocktail, capture gives insiders further incentives to deliberately make rules more complex and inaccessible to latecomers.
In regards to the 'glimmerings of a solution', I was left wondering about the imperfectness and bias in information gathering. That is, your data is only as good as your ability to gather and interpret it. Sometimes the very process of outlining a problem imposes a bias upon which data is gathered, and the importance given to what is gathered, and what is not. Also, I wonder about issues of scale, and improper mapping. As a worst-case scenario, I can think of Chairman Mao being fed BS about how much collectivization was increasing crop yields. -I've read that crops were transplanted along railway lines that he was scheduled to travel on. I do buy that institutional decay occurs by imperceptible creep. However, I don't know that well-informed deliberate steps have an advantage over a messier evolutionary process of smaller, less-educated ones, considering that as the scope of information increases, so do the scope of assumptions buttressing it.
Yeah I agree with everything you said. Everything we do is imperfect, yes, but if we could write down our intentions then future generations could know where we were imperfect and biased, rather than guess and never be sure. That at least has a possibility of adding new biases that might destructively interfere with the old ones :) I think the analogy with unit testing is correct in a very deep way here. Even if after TDD you may have missed tons of tests you should have written, things that you unconsciously intended but forgot to be explicit about. But the presence of a growing set of tests still makes life easier for those who come after, and the accumulation of tests holds hope of one day being comprehensive.
Interesting idea, in light of the Hobby Lobby decision. In that case, the Court wasn't interpreting the Constitution, but rather the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The act was passed in the early 90s. Many of the legislators that crafted the bill are still alive, and many are still in Congress. They, therefore, could be interrogated directly. They filed an amicus brief on behalf of the government that said "THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE MEANT, AND WE CATEGORICALLY REJECT HOBBY LOBBY'S ASSERTION!" Justice Alito, in his opinion, interpreted what Congress "meant" as exactly the opposite of the original authors' clarification.Perhaps legislation should come with a Declaration of Intent, and commentary from those opposed.