Author Archives: Arnold Kling

On wicked problems and public policy

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Following a trail from this comment, I got to a 1973 paper by Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber.

The problems that scientists and engineers have usually focused upon are mostly
“tame” or “benign” ones. . .the mission is clear. It is clear, in turn, whether or not the problems have been solved.

Wicked problems, in contrast, have neither of these clarifying traits; and they include nearly all public policy issues-whether the question concerns the location of a freeway, the adjustment of a tax rate, the modification of school curricula, or the confrontation of crime.

The paper is filled with insights, such as

In the sciences and in fields like mathematics, chess, puzzle-solving or mechanical engineering design, the problem-solver can try various runs without penalty. Whatever his outcome on these individual experimental runs, it doesn’t matter much to the subject-system or to the course of societal affairs. A lost chess game is seldom consequential for other chess games or for non-chess-players.

With wicked planning problems, however, every implemented solution is consequential. It leaves “traces” that cannot be undone. One cannot build a freeway to see how it works, and then easily correct it after unsatisfactory performance. Large public-works are effectively irreversible, and the consequences they generate have long half-lives.

The paper is also notable for the way in which it describes–in 1973–the fallibility of experts relative to technocratic expectations.

Eric Weinstein and Tyler Cowen, partially annotated

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The podcast is here.

For the first hour, it reminds me of conversations I occasionally had at home as a teenager, in which I would climb onto an intellectual ledge and my father would try to gently talk me down. Here, Tyler plays the role of my father.

At one hour and six minutes, Tyler himself climbs onto a ledge. In talking about the stagnation that began in 1973, he speaks of the “feminization” of our society.

One possibility is that he was thinking, “Our society reduced its rate of risk-taking and novelty-seeking. Women tend to like risk-taking and novelty-seeking less than men. Therefore, it is fair to speak of feminization.”

The first two statements are controversial, but suppose that they are true. The conclusion still does not follow. We need some link that connects the premises to the conclusion at the level of society. Did women, starting around 1973, acquire significant power to direct corporate investment and/or the regulatory apparatus? Or did men in these positions lose their, er, manhood around this time? I don’t think that’s a ledge you want to stand on.

Another interpretation of “feminization” works much better but is somewhat less interesting. That is, we can say that because of the decline of manufacturing and the rise of the New Commanding Heights industries of education and health care, employment opportunities for women improved while those for men worsened. At the same time, widening the door for women to enroll in universities was like opening up professional sports to African-Americans in that the formerly-excluded were able to compete effectively and some of the formerly-protected were left worse off.

This latter interpretation allows “feminization” to explain why earnings of the median working-age male have shown at best disappointing growth over the past 35 years. But it does not work as a broad sociological explanation for other phenomena, such as a slowdown in scientific discovery or an apparent decline in the productivity of civil engineering.

About 15 minutes later in the podcast, Eric tries to interest Tyler in a comparison of mainstream and heterodox thinkers. Tyler will have none of it. He says that we are the last generation that will understand the distinction. His view appears to be that institutional brand names, such as “New York Times” or “Harvard Economics Department” will not impress the Internet generation.

So where does that lead? What becomes of what Eric would call society’s “sense-making apparatus”? One scary scenario is that it doesn’t get any better than it is today, so that the loss of the information Leviathans with which we grew up will lead to a sort of Hobbesian “war of all against all.” A more optimistic scenario would be a “cream rises” outcome in which to attain broad credibility you have to rise to a very high level of intellectual rigor. Think of Scott Alexander as an example.

PISA scores by race and country

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A reader points me to Steve Sailer’s breakdown.

I ritually point out that each race within the U.S. (see the red bars in my graph) did pretty darn good compared to the rest of the world.

PISA scores are measures of educational attainment or 15 year olds. Sailer points out that American Asians do pretty well compared with Asians in other countries, American whites do pretty well compared with whites in other countries, and so on. If you are trying to explain differences, race appears to be a more powerful variable than country.

Of course, this is consistent with the Null Hypothesis, which is that differences in education systems do not matter. Of course, as Sailer points out, most folks prefer to disregard the Null Hypothesis and instead condemn the “poor performance” of our education system.

Scientific progress and institutions

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1. Institutions solve the problem of “phase change” as groups get larger than the Dunbar Number, of about 150 people. Below that number, you don’t need market prices, organization charts, written reports, written rules, and other formal apparatus. Somewhere around or above that number, you do.

2. Historical examples of scientific institutions that made a difference: Royal Society, Encyclopedie, German universities, Manhattan Project, Bell Labs, Institute for Advanced Studies, Xerox PARC, DARPA, Internet Engineering Task Forces, Human Genome Project.

3. But institutions can be a problem as well as a solution. In his forthcoming book, Yuval Levin notes that institutional leaders can abuse their power. We don’t hear much about the scientific labs and projects that are dysfunctional, but I would guess that abuse of power by leaders plays a role in such cases. The other problem is that individuals focus on exploiting institutions for personal gain rather than contributing to the mission of the institution. I would argue that the NSF and the Federal grant-making process have been looted like this in recent decades.

4. There may be a “narrow corridor” in which scientific progress in an area requires some institutional structure but progress is inhibited by too much structure or the wrong structure.

5. How do you reform institutions or build better ones? My guess is that reform requires replacing a cadre of leaders with Young Turks. That probably is hard to do with something like NSF. It might be easier to do–but still quite difficult–at a tech firm or a pharmaceutical company.

6. My guess is that building new and better scientific institutions requires a fortunate combination of compelling mission and visionary leadership among the founding team. The leaders are sometimes strong scientists (e.g., Oppenheimer) but often strong scientists are not skilled at bringing out the best in others.

7. What would be a compelling vision today? Improving human longevity? Improving human cognition? Augmented reality sufficient to substitute for in-person meetings?

8. And how do you develop skill at choosing the founder or founders for scientific institutions? What qualities do great institutional founders have?