I recently wrote about “If We Can Put a Man on the Moon,” the book that wants to teach people how to do government well. Some of their message is simple: success in government requires a good plan executed well. But while they want their message to be non-partisan and universalist, I’m not sure it can ever work that way.

The big question I have is this: when is failure because of a good plan done poorly, and when is it because of an impossible plan that would never succeed? For instance, the book lays plenty of criticism at Nixon’s price controls and Ford’s purposeless “WIN” buttons, and it does so by saying that price controls and government nudging cannot control inflation. The book agrees with Milton Friedman than inflation is a monetary phenomenon, solved by Volcker when he hiked interest rates.

On the other hand, the book criticized many plans for their implementation rather than their ideas. Boston’s failed bussing experiment of the 70s is excoriated for how it was done with no real plan or input from the community. But is bussing ever a good policy for implementing desegregation? Many have looked back and said that no, bussing was never going to work. It was unpopular amongst both white and black communities. Just look at this blast from the past:

A majority of Americans continue to favor public school integration, but few people—black or white—think that busing is the best way to achieve that goal, the Gallup Poll reported yesterday.

Five per cent of the people in a recent survey by the organization—9 per cent of the blacks and 4 per cent of the whites—chose busing children from one, district to another rather than several other alternatives.

New York Times

Most of those interviewed preferred either changing school boundaries or providing low-income housing in middle-income neighborhoods as preferable plans for school integration. 

In the same vein, the book knocks the Iraqi occupation for having no plan for creating a stable, post-Saddam Iraq. But was that kind of “nation building” even possible for the US military to achieve? Especially in a country with such vast cultural and ideological differences to ours? 

I remember going to school with a guy who served in Iraq. He talked about how he was tasked with keeping Iraqis safe by removing weapons and disarming citizen. He once came to the tent of a Bedouin he thought had a gun and ammo. And when the Bedouin refused to let him search the tent, he simply ordered his troops to cut open all the Bedouin’s bags of rice, ruining his food but finding a hidden AK-47.

The soldier then said that he told this Bedouin “look, you should have just made this easy for us,” but all I could think of was “wow, this is why they fucking hate us.” This soldier just proudly violated the rights that we in America would call the 2nd and 4th amendment, and if he’d done that in America it would be a national scandal. Iraq may not have our constitution, but they still probably feel entitled to basic human rights of dignity and property. Even if we amended our constitution to remove the 2nd and 4th amendments, how would any American feel about armed military personnel breaking into their house, upturning all their belongings, and then stealing their stuff? 

So was “nation-building” even possible? Or was it, like bussing, an idea doomed from the start?

This is the difficulty in analyzing good governance, by focusing on the process you implicitly assume the idea is workable. Now, the authors do mention some ideas that they find impossible. They chide Nixon’s price caps because price caps can’t fix inflation, which is a monetary phenomenon. I happen to agree with them, but that’s because both I and the authors ascribe to an orthodox economic framework. A socialist would disagree with us, saying price caps are perfectly valid but that Nixon just used them poorly.

So a socialist might see Nixon’s price caps as a failure of implementation and not a failure of ideology. And while the authors see bussing and nation-building as failures of implementation and not ideology, a school choice advocate and a non-interventionist would disagree and say that for those ideas, a successful outcome was never possible. So how do you judge policies by their process, when people can’t agree on their possibility?

Ultimately, I think “a bad plan” vs “a good plan, poorly executed” is a political question for which there is no agreed upon answer. And to that, while the tenants of the book may be accepted broadly, it won’t do much to change the tenor of governance even if everyone in America agreed with it. All of politics is about the disagreement over “which plan is good,” and “how do we execute a plan well.” So telling people to “have good plans” and “execute them well” is sort of like telling a sprinter to “just run faster.” It’s advice that does nothing.

I think the book is good, I think it’s well worth a read by anyone interested in politics. I just think it’s impact will not be too great even in the minds of its readers.