PoliGazette

In yesterday’s installment , we looked at Andrew Sullivan’s “politics of doubt” and the basis for such a politics as articulated by Paul Ormerod in his book, Why Most Things Fail . We then concluded with a series of questions, namely: How do we respond to the “Iron Law of Failure”? Do we give up? Stop trying? Allow the doubts of Sullivan’s brand of conservatism to entirely freeze us in our tracks, hopelessly resigned to our inevitable demise?

In a word, “No”   – and neither Sullivan nor Ormerod make such a recommendation. In fact, Sullivan would only paralyze government so non-government solutions can emerge.

The great irony, of course, is that a country with a government dedicated to doing as little as possible became the most prosperous, powerful, and culturally dynamic place on earth.
(p. 251)

In his turn, Ormerod   – drawing heavily on the work of two notable economists from the first half of the twentieth century, Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich Hayek   – suggests that the faint, slim hope we have for survival is rooted in the endless pursuit of new knowledge; the frenzied, innovative, iterative application of that knowledge; and the outright embrace of the constructive role of “creative destruction.”

… it is innovation, evolution and competition which are the hallmarks of a successful system. This is the fundamental message from Hayek and Schumpeter which shines to us across the decades.

Schumpeter coined the superb phrase ‘gales of creative destruction.’ He argued that innovation led to such gales that they caused old ideas, technologies, skills and equipment to become obsolete. The question, as Schumpeter saw it, was not ‘how capitalism administers existing structures … [but] how it creates and destroys them.’ This creative destruction, he believed, caused continuous progress and improved standards of living for everyone.

The model of evolution and extinction discussed and developed in this book possesses exactly these properties. (p. 228)

In most cases, Ormerod suggests, government (especially national government) cannot keep up with this pace of change.

In a Hayekian world, decentralized decision-making by individual agents is unequivocally superior to central planning. Indeed, a central plan may well be the worst possible institutional framework an economy could have. The decentralized, market-oriented model may not give the very best result, the optimal outcome, for in most circumstances we have no way of knowing what that is, but it delivers a satisfactory outcome, which benefits most or all of its component agents.

The visions of the world articulated by orthodox economics and by Hayek are fundamentally different. Conventional theory describes a highly structured mechanical system. Both the economy and society are in essence gigantic machines, whose behavior can be controlled and predicted. Hayek’s view is much more rooted in biology. Individual behavior is not fixed, like a screw or cog in a machine is, but evolves in response to the behaviour of others. Control and prediction of the system as a whole is simply not possible. (p. 225)

What Ormerod leaves unsaid is the fact that government, controlled by political players, is dis-inclined to accept “creative destruction,” because creative destruction typically involves the lives and livelihoods of voting constituents.

Accordingly, a government that is inhibited by a politics of doubt becomes a superior form of government because its checks and balances limit its ability to interfere with systemic innovation and the natural cycle of birth and death that results from competition – namely, competition within and between industries (and, presumably, countries) – all of which is “crucial … for the fitness of the system as a whole .” (p. 229; emphasis added)

Net: Despite all the attention we give and the importance we prescribe to national government; despite our fixation on the races and characters involved in presidential elections; despite the billions of dollars with which we fund those and lesser races and the government helmed by the victors   – the answers to many (if not most, if not all) of our challenges cannot possibly be found in presidents or national governments, but in the teeming mass of ideas and experiments generated among the teeming mass of individuals and the institutions those individuals most directly create and most closely control. (From this category, I would not exclude all forms of government, but limit it to those forms of government that are most responsive to the ideas and experiments of the people; namely, local and state governments.)

In other words, our best solutions   – our only real hope for survival as a society or nation   – is wrapped in what Surowiecki labels the “wisdom of crowds,” the aggregation of diverse, decentralized, independent points of view.

Case in point: NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s decision to set up a massive customer call center for Big Apple dwellers, analyze the inputs received, and then actually respond to them. From an article in the June 25 edition of BusinessWeek , we learn:

… New York has done an impressive job of data-mining the calls and quickly responding, says Stephen Goldsmith, the former mayor of Indianapolis and now a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. ‘Something special is going on in New York,’ he says. As far as the mayor is concerned, the numbers tell the story. Emergency 911 traffic is down by 1 million calls since 311’s inception, meaning first responders are being called to fewer non-emergencies. The Buildings Dept. uses 311 to streamline the permit process and the review of plans by inspectors. The average wait time for an appointment with a building inspector has dropped from 40 days to less than a week.

In summary: Like Sullivan, I embrace conservatism as a politics of doubt and paralysis because, like Ormerod, I recognize that most things fail and I don’t believe any of us should be quick to embark on doomed journeys. I further believe, like Surowiecki, that the only consistently reliable response to failure will be found in (a) the great masses of the U.S. and other countries and (b) the institutions, public and private, with which those masses most frequently and intimately interact.

Accordingly, national government is and should remain a last resort on most activities, except for those (defense, foreign policy, etc.) that naturally fit within its domain.* The framers of the U.S. Constitution anticipated and fostered just such a political philosophy. The string connecting the three books by three authors referenced in this essay reminds us of the soundness of their work.

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* In such activities, the nation is to the world what the municipality and state are to the nation; i.e., in a global context, the nation is the institution closest to and most responsive to its masses. It is    – or more accurately can be (even if it is rarely allowed to be)    – the incubator of innovation.  That’s not to say the nation’s role should be limited to defense/security/globalism; far from it.  In fact, on health care for instance, clearly one of the predominant domestic policy issues of the 2008 Presidential campaign, I believe national government can and must play a role, but only after reviewing and incorporating innovations tried in the states, and then only to the extent that it (national government) plugs the gaps the states cannot achieve on their own.  I’ll look more at that and related subjects in future essays, where I’ll focus on how the political philosphy articulated in this two-part essay might be applied to specific (domestic and global) policy issues.