What is wrong with this country?
A full discussion of this question would take
many volumes. Here is a summary of causes, symptoms, and observations
jumbled together - the idea is to give a sweeping overview and
not a polished presentation. This focuses on the US, but similar
things are true of many other developed nations.
- It does a poor job of recognizing and dealing
with public good problems. We let politicians profit from selling
our public goods to businesses which exploit them without compensating
the public. More
effective methods such as privatizing goods or using evolved
common-law
customs which have stood the test of time are ignored. Instead,
naive techniques like trying
to make people feel guilty are used, which fail because of
innate human selfishness.
- It attempts to impose
its morality on others, or to "protect people from themselves".
This is a frequent and abhorrent phenomenon. Laws against obscenity,
drugs, prostitution,
gambling,
and many other consensual
crimes are caused by this.
- It uses intermittent conditioning. Our justice
system is a strange combination of severity and laxness, of absurdly harsh
penalties and ridiculous loopholes. This may be caused by
the diversity of views among members of the democracy, but the
result is a middle that is worse than either extreme. First-time
drug offenders often get
off with little penalty - unless they have the wrong color
skin or are in the wrong place or annoyed the wrong person, in
which case the punishment may be draconian. Juveniles can get
away with almost anything, serving little time, and having
their records expunged, until they hit the arbitrary age
of eighteen, when things change drastically. Heinlein
has an excellent discussion of the foolishness of these methods
in Starship Troopers,
where he compares dealing with people to raising a puppy. Some
modern support for this is provided by the lessons of Axelrod's
prisoners dilemma
tournament and the Tit
For Tat strategy, which teaches that punishment should be
immediate, in proportion to the crime, and then the slate should
be wiped clean.
- The government is huge, and uses
a substantial portion of societal resources. This leads to
lots of bad things, like a lack of individual responsibility.
When most of your income is taken
and spent on safety
nets, it becomes natural to step more carelessly. "Its
not my fault, I couldn't help it" is the cry of the modern
citizen, along with "Why doesn't someone do something
about it?".
- Democracies result in tyranny
of the majority. If 55% of the populace thinks it is correct
to steal from the other 45%, some of us think it is still stealing.
When the constitution is not strict enough or the courts are
unwilling to enforce it, the result is that stricture
after stricture that a majority can agree on gets imposed on
the population.
- It is composed of an ignorant populace. Imagine
a project to build a skyscraper in which the the engineering
and construction teams are created by voting among the city residents,
and important engineering decisions are made by ballot. In a
city where most people are not engineers, know little about physics,
yet all want the building to somehow serve them the result would
be unmitigated disaster. Economics
and evolutionary
psychology are the basic sciences which explain, respectively,
the rational and irrational behavior of people (the units of
which society is built), yet most people know very little about
either. Arguments
about trade deficits which have been the economic
equivalent of 2+2=5 for two
hundred years are still made unchallenged in the media, and
are common in political discussions. I am not suggesting that
this ignorance means that an autocracy is the right answer -
that we should let the elite decide for the proles. In more general
terms, that argument is "Well, most people don't know enough
to control everyone's lives, so lets try to carefully pick the
ones who do". Rather, I am saying "most people don't
know enough to control everyone's lives, and no one can be trusted
to do so, so let everyone run their own lives". Our situation
is rather like the former - with politicans as the elite.
- It ignores the implementation problem. People
assume that you if
you want to change something, you just make a law and it
magically happens. Maybe some people break it, but thats what
the cops and prisons
are for. In the real world, it doesn't work like that. Every
law creates changes, sometimes subtle, to the fabric of incentives
that structure our lives. Making drugs illegal doesn't make
people stop doing drugs - it puts the drug industry in the
hands of criminals. When a kilogram of anything costs $100 somewhere
in the world and sells for $10000 somewhere else, you are not
going to stop that incredible pressure from moving it without
taking extraordinary lengths. For another example, consider the
beginning of the first chapter of the book Law's
Order, by David
D. Friedman, which is a laymans introduction to the economic
analysis of law:
"You live in a state where the most severe criminal punishment
is life imprisonment. Someone proposes that since armed robbery
is a very serious crime, armed robbers should get a life sentence.
A constitutional lawyer asks whether that is consistent with
the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. A legal philosopher
asks whether it is just. An economist points out that if the
punishments for armed robbery and for armed robbery plus murder
are the same, the additional punishment for the murder is zero
- and asks whether you really want to make it in the interest
of robbers to murder their victims."
Most people do not think in terms of these incentive structures
or analyze law in this manner. Thus current laws are a patchwork
of miscalculated incentives. The implementation problem isn't
pretty. It makes governing much harder to not be able to say
"I want people to do / not do this", to have to figure
out whether what you want will cost more than it gains. But people
are selfish and the law is not magic, which legislators and do-gooders
often seem to ignore.
- It uses centralized, rigid planning and structures,
rather than decentralized, dynamic, organic methods of doing
things. Nature and life are full of astounding examples of global
coordination through local interaction (multicellular organisms,
for example). Explicit global coordination through centralized,
heirarchic structtures, though occasionally needed, is used much
too often.
- More to come later...
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Last Modified: February, 2001
Patri
Friedman / patri@izzy.com