Good government

In a workshop on creative thinking we speculated: If magic somehow would exist, what would be the highest form of magic? Surprisingly, but clearly, good government was the winner. Or, as it is called in business: good governance.

This reminds me of Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly, analyzing historical examples of foolish government. She distinguishes four kinds of misgovernment:  tyranny or oppression; excessive ambition; incompetence or decadence;  and folly or perversity. She adds that these kinds are unfortunately not mutually exclusive. Tuchman is eminently quotable:

Outside government, man has accomplished marvels: voyaged to the moon; harnessed wind and electricity, raised stones into cathedrals, wove silk brocades out of the spinnings of a worm, constructed the instruments of music, derived power from steam, controlled or eliminated diseases, pushed back the North Sea and created land in its place, classified the forms of nature, penetrated the mysteries of the cosmos. While all other sciences have advanced, confessed John Adams, government is at a stand; little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.

Tuchman concludes that most follies are unnecessarily activist. And once the action misfires, compounding the error by continuing and enlarging it. Her champion of wooden‑headedness is Philip II of Spain: No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.

She sees folly not as the child of limited mental powers, but as the child of power hunger, especially clinging to a position of power once gained: The chief force behind political folly is addiction to power, for fear of losing it. … Power breeds folly; the power to command triggers failure to think; responsibility often fades in exercising it. … Lure of office stultifies government performance. The bureaucrat dreams of promotion, higher officials want to extend their reach, legislators and the chief of state want re‑election; the guiding principle is to please as many and offend as few as possible.
As Winston Churchill quipped: Democracy is the worst system of government - except for all the others.

Henry Kissinger: Leaders in government do not learn beyond the convictions they bring with them. Learning from experience is absent.
Mental standstill fixes the principles and boundaries governing a political problem. When dissonances and failures of a policy appear, the advocates rigidify. Their rigidity increases investment and the need to protect egos; policy founded upon error multiplies, never retreats.

Already Machiavelli wrote that a prince ought always to be a great asker and a patient hearer of truth about those things of which he has inquired, and he should be angry if he finds that anyone who shrinks from telling him the truth. Government needs great askers. In the search for wiser government we should look for character, for moral courage.
One of the few who outright admitted error was Harry Truman. Famous was his smiling retort when a journalist asked him if he hadn’t made an error in a decision during the Korea War: A schoolboy’s hindsight is better than a president’s foresight.  A lonely example of reversing a policy, was when Sadat visited Israel and offered peace.

Tuchman: We cannot expect much improvement. We can only muddle on like we have done in those three or four thousand years, through patches of brilliance and decline, great endeavor and shadow. There you have it.

Solving unsolvable problems

Most news is about problems. Managers are dealing mostly with problems. Work is tiring. The world is tiring.
I found three viewpoints enriching. The first is to look at recurrent problems. The solution usually can be found in a system dynamics framework, Identifying the delays and the overreactions in the system.
The second is to look for persistent problems that continue whatever money, time and effort is spent. The Romans already knew what to look for: cui bono? Who benefits from the problem not been resolved?
The third is to look for historic success stories when whole societies took off and stayed successful for quite some time. The Roman republic is itself an interesting case, especially the time between 220 and 167 BC. The period to look for with the Netherlands is the decade 1588-1598. The creations of the early consulate in France, 1799-1803, survived the end of the Napoleonic era; many are still in place.

Here I want to discuss the issue of persistent, apparently unsolvable problems. So, who benefits? The most easy explanation, that pretty often hits the nail on the head, is that an unsolvable problem draws attention away from an other undesirable condition that has a whole group profiting. When attention and emotions are diverted, other muddy waters remain unexposed. It is the essence of stage magic: directing the attention of the audience away from what is really happening.

The obsessive attention of the McCarthy-area in the United States directed a lot of FBI-attention to suspected communists. The Maffia had a field day.
The obsessive - but quite natural - attention of the public with kidnappings and murders takes attention away from white-collar crime.
Government departments may knowingly include one very controversial item in their annual budgets, absorbing a lot of parliamentary attention, to have the rest of the budget more easily accepted.

We can also look into the internal dynamics of persistent problems. The first who benefit from such problems, are the groups whose raison d’être is that problem. Groups who point out environmental problems have a vested interest in not really solving the problems - or to find ever new ones.
Many individuals are married to their personal problems: they are getting a steady stream of attention and they have an excuse not to face their life and do something about it.

And think of the international problems of drug-use and drug related crime. Of course the producers of drugs have their vested interests. The War on Drugs ensures very large profits and many crime fighters earn a living from it. It makes drugs use risky and so interesting. Most people lead dull lives. Most of them do not actively engage in mayhem, but movies and games depicting sex and violence and horror have a captive market. So drug use may have the lure of the dangerous and the forbidden. Drugs are sexy.

So always ask when a problem remains in the spotlight: what remains in the (relative) shadow? The Greeks need to learn to behave more responsibly with public money. They sure do need that. But the banks also need that. And they, like the Greeks, learn only when it hurts long enough and bad enough. The financial problems are unsolvable because many people are doing whatever they can to avoid the solution. Shifting the burden: a well-known systems disease.