The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government by Eric Liu, Nick Hanauer Page B
Authors: Eric Liu, Nick Hanauer
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bubbles, and to encourage and propel pro-social kinds like the Internet revolution and the attendant wealth creation. Government can do this effectively or ineffectively; but it must do it.
Prosperity, after all, is a consequence of our ability to innovate. Innovation requires ever-increasing amounts of technology. That technology, in turn, can only be created and managed by people with ever-increasing amounts of training and education. The number of hours of schooling it takes to train someone to plow a field is orders of magnitude smaller than to train them to write computer code. Prosperity also requires more trade. More trade requires more infrastructure—not just roads and bridges, or airports and train stations, but also treaties, trade agreements, contracts, and the people who create them.
These investments don’t just enable prosperity, they propel it. And the story isn’t just that government does this once and then gets out of the way; it is about continually investing to sustain positive feedback. Limited-government theory is anti-growth and anti-prosperity. It refuses to acknowledge the way these collective investments propel innovation, and must be continually renewed.
The Failure of the Left: Big What, Big How
Ah, but the left doesn’t fare much better. Though we think the left gets more things right than the right, it needs a wake-up call.
We have from progressives an approach to government that for decades has been on autopilot. At the center of this Obama has put forth some positive reforms that seek to re-imagine progressive governance, from Race to the Top in education to health-care innovation incubators to clean-energy challenge grants. But he has not made such initiatives the signature of his governing philosophy. More to the point, he has yet to spell out a governing philosophy, a big story of what government is for. For all the self-doubt and handwringing among progressives today, the reality is that we still live in a nation where the New Deal/Great Society template is dominant. Far too many of us accept a substantial state role in every aspect of society.
It turns out that the left is as prone as the right to the assumption that humans calculate their self-interest rationally. Where the left differs is in its penchant for top-down prescriptive solutions. This is a big what and a big how. This is progressive Machinebrain thinking. As James Scott describes in Seeing Like a State , his illuminating survey of social engineering schemes of the 20th century, the very idea of “social engineering” treats complex human problems as orderly, predictable, manageable. The trouble, of course, is that they are not. This desire to “bracket uncertainty,” as Scott writes, is self-defeating in three ways: sclerosis, impracticality, and crowding out.
Sclerosis. In a society as dynamic as ours, problems come too fast, and big institutions are too slow. Bigness—whether at GM, AIG, or HUD—is maladaptive and creates great vulnerability and risk. Bigness means too much complexity of organization, and “complexity catastrophes”—the seizing up of systems too densely packed with networks—are beginning to become the order of the day in public life. In juvenile justice or public education or health care, real people pay the price for bigness and complexity catastrophes. Once upon a time in all these realms, someone built, on an industrial model and metaphor, a machine for solving a problem of that moment. And then people stopped running or adjusting the machine. Worse, sometimes they have locked the machine in place so that it cannot change. For instance, while unions are important and have surely improved the lives of millions of Americans, they have also left us with protectionist workplace rules that can undermine the adaptability of both public and private organizations.
Impracticality. What makes big government non-adaptive is not only its size and slowness. It is also its substitution of
Prosperity, after all, is a consequence of our ability to innovate. Innovation requires ever-increasing amounts of technology. That technology, in turn, can only be created and managed by people with ever-increasing amounts of training and education. The number of hours of schooling it takes to train someone to plow a field is orders of magnitude smaller than to train them to write computer code. Prosperity also requires more trade. More trade requires more infrastructure—not just roads and bridges, or airports and train stations, but also treaties, trade agreements, contracts, and the people who create them.
These investments don’t just enable prosperity, they propel it. And the story isn’t just that government does this once and then gets out of the way; it is about continually investing to sustain positive feedback. Limited-government theory is anti-growth and anti-prosperity. It refuses to acknowledge the way these collective investments propel innovation, and must be continually renewed.
The Failure of the Left: Big What, Big How
Ah, but the left doesn’t fare much better. Though we think the left gets more things right than the right, it needs a wake-up call.
We have from progressives an approach to government that for decades has been on autopilot. At the center of this Obama has put forth some positive reforms that seek to re-imagine progressive governance, from Race to the Top in education to health-care innovation incubators to clean-energy challenge grants. But he has not made such initiatives the signature of his governing philosophy. More to the point, he has yet to spell out a governing philosophy, a big story of what government is for. For all the self-doubt and handwringing among progressives today, the reality is that we still live in a nation where the New Deal/Great Society template is dominant. Far too many of us accept a substantial state role in every aspect of society.
It turns out that the left is as prone as the right to the assumption that humans calculate their self-interest rationally. Where the left differs is in its penchant for top-down prescriptive solutions. This is a big what and a big how. This is progressive Machinebrain thinking. As James Scott describes in Seeing Like a State , his illuminating survey of social engineering schemes of the 20th century, the very idea of “social engineering” treats complex human problems as orderly, predictable, manageable. The trouble, of course, is that they are not. This desire to “bracket uncertainty,” as Scott writes, is self-defeating in three ways: sclerosis, impracticality, and crowding out.
Sclerosis. In a society as dynamic as ours, problems come too fast, and big institutions are too slow. Bigness—whether at GM, AIG, or HUD—is maladaptive and creates great vulnerability and risk. Bigness means too much complexity of organization, and “complexity catastrophes”—the seizing up of systems too densely packed with networks—are beginning to become the order of the day in public life. In juvenile justice or public education or health care, real people pay the price for bigness and complexity catastrophes. Once upon a time in all these realms, someone built, on an industrial model and metaphor, a machine for solving a problem of that moment. And then people stopped running or adjusting the machine. Worse, sometimes they have locked the machine in place so that it cannot change. For instance, while unions are important and have surely improved the lives of millions of Americans, they have also left us with protectionist workplace rules that can undermine the adaptability of both public and private organizations.
Impracticality. What makes big government non-adaptive is not only its size and slowness. It is also its substitution of
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