Tag Archives: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon

Doing the Possible: When is it Impossible?

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.

Doing the Possible: Musings on good governance

I’ve been reading “If We Can Put a Man on the Moon,” which is a book that attempts to explain why some government policy succeeds and some fails. The book outlines how public policy requires a clear objective, a clear plan to reach that objective, and the ability to follow through with it. It all seems rather obvious when you write it out like that, but the book offers some definite insights.

A clear objective seems obvious, but is surprisingly easy to overlook. Gerald Ford promised to “whip inflation now,” but how exactly did he expect to do that? Supposedly the government would politely encourage citizens to do things like grow more food and use less fuel, to increase supply and decrease demand. It’s a nice idea, but polite encouragement doesn’t move the economy, and Fords “WIN” policy went nowhere.

A clear plan is also something that seems obvious, but often gets overlooked. When California reformed its electric grid in the 90s, no one had really thought through how the new system would work. They set mandates to ensure that prices were capped for consumers, but did nothing to ensure adequate supply. It was legal, for example, to buy power at a low price in California and export it for the uncapped price in other states. Then, if California didn’t have enough power, the utility was obligated to import power from other states no matter the cost, but was not allowed to pass this cost on to customers. This lead to companies easily gaming the system by exporting power for cheap, then re-importing it at a higher price. 

People like to blame greedy companies for the failed California power experiment, but companies are always greedy in all cases. The government should create a system in which corporate greed leads to societal good, such as how tech companies have given us ever better computers at lower and lower cost. Failure to plan leads to a system that is designed to fail.

The ability to follow through is a common complaint, but it too has unexpected pitfalls. The political class has different incentives than both the bureaucrats and the people, but they all work together for a plan to succeed. Politicians have an incentive to pass a bill and say they “fixed” something, that’s why most celebration happens on when a bill is pass instead of 5 years later when its effects are being evaluated. Bureaucrats are just career workers like anyone, and have an incentive to do their job and get paid. They aren’t incentivized to go above and beyond for the benefit of a politician who might not be there in four years. 

This is why it’s so common for politicians to take office promising “big changes” but still not accomplish much. Once the bill is passed and the photo-op is finished, it’s out of their hands and they don’t has a reason to keep caring. And when someone comes in saying they’ll “upend the stuffy bureaucracy,” well if they don’t meet the career employees halfway they’ll engender resentment in a group that can drag its feet and wait for the political will to die down.

All told, the book does have a lot of prescriptions for good governance:

  • Have an idea for how to fix a problem, and don’t make a plan of action without a strong idea. Likewise, seek out good ideas from everywhere, and be willing to challenge your own ideas to see if they’re actually appropriate.
  • Make a rational design for how the problem will be fixed. Focus on the design, not just on getting buy-in from the right pressure groups. Stress-test the design and hire people to poke holes in it. Then fix those design holes before passing a new law.
  • Ensure oversight and continued evaluation even after a law is passed. The job doesn’t end after the vote and the signature.
  • Understand that government is different than any other sector, and that you have to meet people halfway. You can’t treat public employees or the public at large as workers in your company or as cogs in a machine. 
  • Don’t assume the success of a plan. And don’t assume that just because it hasn’t failed yet that it won’t in the future. Look for any signs that cracks are forming, and fix them before they get too big. The space shuttle Colombia flew 27 missions, many of which showed problem signs, before the fateful 28th mission that ended in disaster.
  • Keep re-evaluating. If a program is no longer fit for purpose, fix it, replace it, or kill it. Be willing to see that something isn’t working and be willing to change it. And don’t keep trying the same program over and over without change, be willing to go back to the beginning and look for new ideas and new designs.

That, in a nutshell is what the book is about (or at least my reading of it). It’s certainly more uplifting that what you expect from a book about governance, but without ignoring the data and the details. I’ll have more to say on it later, but I think anyone who likes this sort of thing should check it out.