Fixer of Problems
Player of Games, Shooter of Troubles
The Boyd Institute asks:
How can America improve its problem-solving capacity?
It is a good question, because right now our national problem solving capacity is extremely bad. Most things run pretty well anyway, because in the past, Americans with better problem-solving capacity solved those problems and we inherited their (mostly) still-operational solutions. Which tells us that we used to have better problem solving capabilities, or else we couldn’t have built those systems in the first place.
In order to figure out how to improve that capacity today, we probably need to figure out how it got broken in the first place. And then we also run into another question: how did it ever work in the first place? How do you solve a problem like this?
The Problem With Problems
If you are a country, to solve a problem1, you have to do the following:
identify problem
figure out solution
determine if the solution to the problem passes cost-benefit test (Maybe it would be better to fix some other, more pressing, problem with those resources)
decide who is the best person to execute solution (Voting)
those people execute the solution (Policy)
make sure it was executed correctly and reward those who did it (Vote for them again - or not)
This is boring obvious stuff, it feels stupid typing it out. Let’s do something far more exciting: time travel. How did people in the past used to do it?
Old Timey Problems
Cave-man days: easy. Everyone (all 30 of us) could see the problem. The tribe’s chief was obviously the one who had to fix it. The solutions were obvious and simple: yes, we should all throw our spears at the tiger trying to eat us.
Kings and Things, feudal ages: basically the same, just with kings ruling over far larger societies, and the only people who mattered to consult on problems or solutions were the nobles/warriors. Again, problems and solutions were usually simple - and any problems that weren’t immediately apparent (such as the Black Death) just basically went unsolved, and wreaked their havoc unimpeded by human plans.
Modern states, republics, democracies: now things get interesting! Once countries became so large, and having granted the vote to enough people, that it was not always entirely clear what the problem was, or what the solution might be. Before the development of advanced communications technology and institutions for transmitting info about problems and solutions, countries that got too large (and problems too invisible, and solutions too opaque) basically collapsed into smaller, more easily managed states. The communication limits on problem solving was one of the major restraints on state size and reach.
Eventually, we did invent those advanced communications technologies And those things are the tools that we, the people, use to observe the world and decide how to act. The general technology resulted in faster, wider and more detailed communications, consisting of everything from the printing press to the internet, cameras or radio. The institutions of communications we called: the news, intelligence services and social media.
Old Timey Solutions
Now, anyone familiar with America’s past, and who remembers the Maine, is well aware that they did not work perfectly, or even close to perfectly. But they worked well enough that America basically outperformed every other country in the problem solving department for a quarter millennia.
But the effectiveness of the communications revolution has been unevenly distributed. Most Americans have lost their faith in their government’s ability to solve problems, and while sharing that lack of faith, American politicians have lost faith in the idea that they would be rewarded for solving problems, even if they could somehow manage it.2 While at the same time, it is possible to learn - from that informational firehose - about a wide range of problems3 that we do indeed face, and what solutions might be available. Now, instead of just comparing our performance to Britain or China, we have the tools to compare to an even more impressive society: the one we imagined we’d have. The American Dream. The obvious counter-factual world where we didn’t have all the stupid policies that hamstring our ability to achieve that hope. Flying cars and 280 characters.
So now, we’ve caught up to modern America - and our shameful lack of problem-solving capacity. Nearly everything in our society that works (from actual physical infrastructure, to the culture at our major institutions) was built generations ago. Or is just an entirely private institution (e.g. tech companies) that can innovate and operate because they work in a space that regulators were too slow to choke out of existence. Some of it still works very well, where uncreative maintenance can keep them humming along. You can complain about the roads or bridges, but mostly they work pretty well, even the really old ones! These kind of things don’t need creative new solutions.
Modern Problems
Other parts have degraded heavily, or become radically more expensive. No one really agrees on which parts are the worst problem, how to fix them, or who would be best placed to do it. But everyone can feel the general sense of “things are not heading in the right direction” - which is exactly why pollsters ask that question. Even though objectively, things might be doing all right for a given individual, we are adept at detecting (even if only subconsciously) which way the winds are blowing at a tribal level. Why exactly is our feelings only this so vague and unquantifiable? Why don’t we, as the critical mass of voters, actually know the specifics of what’s wrong, and how to fix it?
The specific broken part in this machine is step 6 from above: the informational connection between the problems/solutions and the rewards for executing them. Simply put: government problem solving is done by politicians who get elected, and those politicians do not get elected (or re-elected) for solving problems, because voters do not punish them for failing to do so4. In most cases, the problems (and accurate solutions) are not actually that hard to identify - that’s not the stumbling block! It’s a principal - agent problem: how to get the politicians to do what we want. We, and the founders, assumed this problem would be handled by the free press, acting as the grease between the principal (the voters) and the agent (the politicians). But like so many other solutions, this requires maintenance - and we have let that institution decay, in purpose and in culture, because we have let it stray from its intended course. They too, simply respond to incentives. We have to set them.
The model political actor for this “complete detachment of problem solving incentives from getting elected” issue is of course Donald Trump. To many people it seems like he has proven politicians can actually do and say whatever they want - that the old rules no longer apply. George Bush took lots of heat for breaking his “no new taxes” pledge - it seems comedic that such a standard would apply today. And yet, the frequency of “Trump Always Chickens Out” points to an important question: what exactly makes him chicken out?
Modern Solutions
The answer is always: “objective, un-gameable, not easily spun facts that tens of millions of voters actually care about.” If tariffs sent markets plunging, he became vastly more likely to dial them back. If a novel disease was going to kill 2 million Americans - well, no amount of shrieking “fake news” would make that go away - so better green light a vaccine crash development program. For Operation Warp Speed, Trump made the right decision because for once he was forced to accept that there was a number that was going to go down - morbidly, the number of Americans who were alive - and it would actually matter to him and his re-election chances. The information channel of “this a problem > it will cause serious harm > this is a good solution > we should do it > and totally claim credit for it so we get votes” was so simple and self-apparent that we didn’t need the news or the CIA to figure it out.5 In this case, America’s problem-solving capacity was incredible!6
How can we make more things like that? How can we make accurate signals7 that even the king of post-modern politics can’t ignore?
America’s Heartbeat
First: a publicly accessible, heavily advertised, nationwide dashboard of metrics that everyone agrees represent vital information about the country. GDP, inflation, labor force participation, military deployments, budget, anything from the Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis and obviously a wide range of private indicators or polls. Rates of disease, markets… anything. Something that is so widely accepted and undeniably vital to American’s interests that it can’t be handwaved away - something… like the stock markets that rendered such a negative opinion of tariffs. This is the information part of the solution.
Second: a carefully curated set of prediction markets8 about those metrics - not silly pointless sports or political horserace betting - but estimations about whether those numbers will go up or down. And, naturally, how they will respond to political events. If a politician who presents an excellent solution to a major problem (thereby making some number go up!), then the prediction market should reflect that - and the politician should be able to use that in their campaign ads! “Vote for me, I advocated for this brilliant policy, and look, it made (future, expected) unemployment go down!” This is the part that filters the information and improves how effectively we can use it.
Third: publicity. This is the hardest part. Someone needs to be the “news” agency that brings all this together in the public consciousness. Someone who provides the conceptual glue that ties “this problem will kill a million Americans,” “here is a potential solution for that problem,” “president Bob is suggesting a policy to fix it,” “look, the estimates for casualties are trending downward” with “therefore Bob’s poll numbers are going up because traders voters are recognizing it was a good plan.” Some celebrity endorsements couldn’t hurt! We live in a democracy - there is no way to get politicians to do good things without making it searingly clear that failure to do good things will be punished democratically. This is an informational problem - and as part of the solution, someone has to scream those pieces of information from the rooftops9.
The ideal end point is that instead of endless 24 hours news programs that pander to the lowest common denominator of viewer, and also the lowest common denominator of politician willing to spin it, you’d have something an authoritative source (like a stock market) that could be used to settle (in the loosest possible sense of the word) the issue. If the president sends a stooge on CNN to say “our new policy will have wonderful economic effects,” you want the reporter to say “but then why are all these markets on GDP, unemployment and the budget plunging in response to your announcement?” - and for it to obvious and generally accepted that those numbers were from a source other than CNN just making them up.
Even more ideally, just like we learned about disastrous economic policies (price controls, subsidizing demand, high inflation) from the negative shocks they created - and mostly learned not to repeat them - you’d want the administration to not even propose the terrible policy idea in the first place, because they’ll have learned that it will send those markets into a tailspin. And - just spit-balling here - maybe at some beautiful future nirvana state, they might actually go out and figure out (from past market performance, and checking with traders) what the best policy might be ahead of time - and just do it in order to reap the electoral benefits. You can, after all, just do things. But if you want politicians to do things, you need to accurately convey to them that doing those things well - and only that - is in their best interests.
So - do that.
Surely the Boyd Institute will appreciate my bastardization of the OODA loop
And post Obamacare, they are convinced they can’t
Unfortunately, some of those recent problems have been exaggerated for political gain, and negative ROI solutions identified, resulting in the entire process of “think about possible future problems” getting a bad name. Especially in the environmental area, particularly carbon and overpopulation.
What are the Ides of March - today - if not a form of this kind of democratic signal?
even Navarro figured it out!
And everyone so loved the fruit of this endeavor, and we applied the standard of cutting red tape for massive benefit to hundreds of other examples, and everyone lived happily forever (actually forever) after in their sweet cyber moon base habitats
This, incidentally, is why any answer to “how to improve problem solving” must come from the private sector and voters. Anything that starts with “congress shall pass a law that….” is dead on arrival. There is no chance that congress or the president are going to change the incentives for getting elected, because the old incentives are why they got elected! Why would you want to change the rules of the game to make it more likely that you will lose?
Robin Hanson shout-out
Tyler Cowen shout-out