September 24, 2004
The best laid plans
Why do so many government programs fail? We've seen it time and time again. A need is identified, a program is formulated and put into place, everything starts out well enough, and then, perhaps over time, something happens. The program doesn't achieve its goals. Or the amount of resources needed for it to achieve its goals are vastly more than expected.
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There are only two known organizing principles in modern societies^1: bureacracy and the unpredictable large scale group behaviors of complex systems known as emergent phenomena. Reliance on emergent phenomena to solve the great problems requires an enormous amount of faith and hope.
But if we rely on the grand solutions we'd better be prepared for a lot of failure and to spend more than we can really afford.
More brilliance at the linked post:
An emergent phenomenon in a complex system is a large scale, group behavior that cannot be predicted by an understanding of workings of the individual components of the system. There's a word used to describe the condition under which such phenomena emerge--synergy--and a description: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Quite a few of the things that are absolutely the most important to us are emergent phenomena: life, consciousness, history, the Market (Adam Smith's Invisible Hand), and the workings of a free and democratic society are all emergent phenomena and, as such, are highly distasteful to those who look for a simple, tidy, elegant, and orderly universe. And that group, in turn, includes a truly remarkable group of unlikely allies including both Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, Marxists, and bureaucrats of every religion, philosophy, and political party.
He's making a fair bid to replace the Clueless.
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