Martin had something really interesting to say about institutions the other day, and I think it deserves a wider audience.
So, here is my philosophy of institutions.
Institutions do not care about people. That’s not their job, and assigning that to them leads to a lot of disappointment. Institutions are a mechanism for organizing people to solve problems that we cannot solve individually (this can be government or businesses). You still rely on the people in that institution to care about people, because that’s the real source of it.
You design institutions to do a given job. If you’re a business, that job is to make money – in the short term/in the long term. If you’re a government, that job (should be) to serve the voters. Sometimes that job is to consolidate power. Sometimes it’s to make money for yourself (graft).
Remember: ‘‘Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets’
If the system gets corruption, it was designed to get corruption. Someone did that. Someone made it that way. Democrats like to believe that government institutions have neutral designs. It’s a different kind of hagiography for the founders that liberals tend to believe that the constitution is this divine machine that will always spit out neutral results if only people stop fucking with it, when the only reason it spits out neutral results is because people within and without the institution demand that it do so. USSC is not departing from what the Supreme Court is supposed to do with decisions like Dobbs, because the only thing it really ever can do is a be a vehicle for the judgement of its members to inform lesser courts how to act. Its members are how the machine works.
What then matters with the design of the institution is how you identify the right people to work within it and how the institution gives them agency to do good work. This is a double-edged sword because that same agency usually allows bad work to be done as well – with the difference being found in who you invite into the institution.
So how you qualify people for the job is incredibly important. If the qualification is you must be a white male lawyer, well, you’re going to get a very specific set of outcomes. if the qualification is the you represent a different part of society and have experience in public facing, ideally hands-on policy, you’ll get a very different set of outcomes.
In the end we’re responsible for that, not just in how we individually vote, but in how we culturally shape who is qualified. If ‘government should be run like a business’, that will shape how people select. If ‘government needs to support the needs of the people’, that will shape it very differently. Democrats are very shy about expressing their theory of qualification. They need to unlearn that. It’s most of the game here.
Democrats also need to get real about how to wield institutions and stop pretending that they will naturally, of their own accord, revert to some mean of civility. That only ever happens when the people in the institution agree to do that. If half of them don’t agree, the other half need to respond to that, and stop pretending that they do agree.
This is the lesson of ‘tire rims and anthrax’. Not everything can be negotiated. Some things need to be coerced (and there are good and bad ways to coerce an outcome).
Your thoughts?
Totally open thread.
craigie
Very perceptive. My own take on this is that most of the institutions we rely on, especially the government ones, have more or less worked for so long people forget, or never knew, that that is not a given. Just because the lights have been on and the trash was collected and the government was funded for the previous X years of my life doesn’t mean that it can’t stop tomorrow, if different people are allowed to be in charge. A lot of people thing that “it will work out” because it has so far. That’s also why they feel comfortable voting for RFK Jr, say, or talking about “both sides.”
“So far so good, so I have nothing to lose by blowing up the system,” think a lot of people. Except that you do.
cain
Yep – legit. Same can be said about religion as well or anything that is organized as a group of people trying to do an outcome. From church groups, to student bodies, unions etc.
cain
Interestingly enough, I feel like that we managed to make it like this for quiet a bit longer than other countries. Corruption in other countries are way higher at the society level (eg cops, doctors etc).
Hell real estate is still the most corrupt business in any country.
bjacques
I like this, but saying a system is corrupt is because it was designed to be seems a bit deterministic and that can feed into “the whole system is corrupt” kind of cynical defeatism. I think it’s more accurate to say it was never specifically designed to prevent corruption, or it can be corrupted as easily as any other system. Democracy for example can certainly deliver outcomes as bad as dictatorships do, when it’s only a matter of declaring who is included in the demos and who isn’t. Only relatively recently did democracy ban slavery, and only with a fight.
At least democracies outperform dictatorships economically.
Urza
I’m not sure how, but also i’m not a lawyer or politician. But we need rules/laws in place that automatically take effect when someone is doing something outside the accepted norms of the institution. Such as Jan 6. Should have been automatically assumed expulsion from Congress for everyone known to be participating. Only with strict rules of evidence could they be reinstated. I know that goes against the guilty until proven innocent, but they did prove themselves guilty on camera. And we obviously can’t trust the institution to clean out the offenders when so many are on their side.
TBone
On topic:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00027162241233131
Omnes Omnibus
It is impossible for humans to design a system that the other humans cannot corrupt. You may argue that, at a certain point, any system has been so corrupted that it should be thrown out and replaced by something new. If you do that though, you shouldn’t pretend that you have made something incorruptible. You have merely made something that no one has yet corrupted.
As far as the civility arguments go, I think far too many people confuse perfomative assholishness with fighting for something. One of of the thing I like about the Biden administration is that it continues to observe the norms of government while still fighting hard for the American people. The other alternative is a race to the bottom. I, for one, would prefer not to go down that road.
I am sure many of you will explain why I am wrong and why a party full of left of center MTGs is what we really need.
Downpuppy
‘‘Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets” seems way off to me. Systems are designed by people, not GOD. There are flaws. Things change. Something can work well for a while, then not. As Martin goes into in the rest of the thought.
Chief Oshkosh
My experience leads me to agree with the membership aspect of the OP. Who “qualifies” to be brought into an institution – how that is set up and how those admission/retention rules are followed – drives outcomes. If you don’t like current outcomes, then the setup and rules need changing (even if informally).
Hence, DEI.
Chris
@Urza:
That is literally impossible. You can’t make a law self-executing. There’s going to have to be humans in the chain of command that take the action of enforcing that law (in this case, expelling persons X, Y, and Z), and there’s nothing you can write down that can make those humans enforce it if they don’t want to. That’s the whole problem.
H.E.Wolf
@Omnes Omnibus: I appreciate your and Martin’s thoughts in this post.
The arc of everything (not just the moral universe) is long. If we do the work, we can bend it toward what we want it to be.
“Toward” isn’t perfect; but it’s better than “not even close”.
Here’s to working toward!
Villago Delenda Est
The lament of the UNIX systems administrator: if the damn lusers weren’t around, the system would work perfectly all the time!
narya
@Omnes Omnibus:
Agree, wholeheartedly.
My only quibble with Martin’s original post–with which I agree, for the most part–is that we have to be clear about what the boundaries are for “an institution.” Part of why the USSC is corrupted, at this point, is that the other branches of government were corrupted. If the Rs hadn’t held the Senate, McConnell couldn’t have installed, or prevented the consideration of, specific justices. That is, there are links between and among what we sometimes think of as separate institutions. And we have to do that: if we think of all of government as “an institution,” it becomes too big to grasp.
Shit’s complex, in other words.
Frankensteinbeck
Between @Omnes Omnibus: and @Downpuppy: I think my opinions on this post are pretty well covered.
Villago Delenda Est
@Downpuppy: Madison had some thoughts about this!
cain
@Villago Delenda Est: as a former UNIX systems administrator – I completely agree! :D
Urza
@Chris: Couldn’t. AI might make it possible. AI can also be corrupted of course.
Spanish Moss
I love this, especially this part:
We are never going to design the perfect set of rules to handle every problem introduced by a bad actor, especially with a Congress full of bad actors who won’t pass the necessary changes. We need to prevent the bad actors from getting in there in the first place. Though we should still continue to improve our rules, the rules alone are not enough.
narya
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’m on your side on this one, not least because so much of what MTG does is merely performance. Even the Squad and their like have a damn point; I don’t always agree, but I generally value their perspective, because it’s NOT merely performance.
Another Scott
Speaking of institutions doing what they’re designed to do, … CrankyFlier.com – Boeing announces the new 797.
;-)
Seriously, Dan Davies has similar thoughts on business management systems, etc., and is usually worth a click.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Melancholy Jaques
@Omnes Omnibus:
Has anyone really argued for that? I haven’t seen it.
And many?
rikyrah
Mike Allen (@mikeallen) posted at 4:48 AM on Mon, Apr 01, 2024:
![]()
![]()
Trump allies plot anti-racism protections — for white people, @axios @AlexThomp reports:
If Trump wins, allies want to change interpretation of Civil Rights-era laws to focus on “anti-white racism” rather than discrimination against people of color![]()
https://t.co/rOPOsz0Qaz
(https://x.com/mikeallen/status/1774735617030582405?t=XjbLmyYVpKeXq00zNqFRzg&s=03)
rikyrah
I liked Martin’s comment from the other day. I thought that it was damn good.
My only quibble
If anyone other than a White Man had done all of what the Orange Menace has done.
There would be no complaints about the ‘strengths of our institutions’.
Because that person would already be under the jail.
Period.
Omnes Omnibus
@Melancholy Jaques: It was hyperbole. It is also the direction we head when we decide to abandon norm and get down in the gutter with the GOP.
Eyeroller
@Downpuppy: One can argue that it isn’t design but evolution that produces the results from a system.
hueyplong
@rikyrah: Yet another reason to beat them like rented mules at the polls in November.
way2blue
A quibble. Federal civil servants don’t ‘serve the voters’, rather they serve the American people—from within their niche. The constitution anticipates corrupt attempts to hobble its tenets. The founders however couldn’t anticipate the flood of (dis)information unleashed on the world wide web. As they didn’t anticipate automatic weapons would be deemed firearms. Or corporations would be deemed persons. Alas.
Albeit a vote for Trump is a vote for corrupt appointees in every corner of the government. And for civil servants to be shown the door…
peter
@Spanish Moss: And the bad actors in elected office are the (completely foreseeable) result of a political and social environment awash in lies and misinformation peddled by another set of institutions (the media) whose purposes, norms, and standards have changed drastically in the last 50 years.
Scout211
I interrupt this lively discussion to post some fun facts from this morning. Link
Sometimes you just have to find a few things to smile about.
Dmbeaster
@Another Scott: As for the submarine analogy, someone tried the penny packet approach rather than the big convoy. Ask the Japanese how that worked for them.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
I agree that “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets” is way too determinative. There’s a reason we have something named “the law of unintended consequences.”
I’m an attorney. I remember once sitting in a law library and looking at all the reports of decisions and realizing that for the vast majority of litigants, being mired in litigation for years was never the goal.
(Of course, now that I’ve been in practice for a few years, I admit that for some litigants, being mired in years of litigation is sometimes the goal; a lot of corporate litigation, for example, is really just earnings management — something goes wrong, and company calls their attorneys and says, We can pay this, but not now, so can you please tie this up with a lawsuit until such time as we can pay? And then several years later the company can pay, and then settles. And this is really what some of the most expensive lawyers in the country do with their time, and why some simple cases that should be open and shut are not.
And while this may really really annoy people who would like the system to be set up to automatically work “the way it should,” that’s just not going to happen unless and until Skynet or some other machine takes over.
Dmbeaster
As for the coercion aspect of change, elections happen to be exactly that.
Brachiator
Institutions are not autonomous entities. They are created by people to perform a task. Corporations are not people. Neither are institutions.
Note that people can hide behind the rules set up to run institutions, but this is a separate problem.
Human beings can be weak, fallible, corrupt. It’s got nothing to do with the system.
As a wise man once sang,
You say you’ll change the constitution
Well, you know
We’d all love to change your head
You tell me it’s the institution
Well, you know
You better free your mind instead
Another Scott
@bjacques: +1
I probably come down between you two (after all, all generalizations are false).
Dean Baker makes similar broad-brush points about us not living in the best of all possible economic worlds. E.g. his free book Rigged:
Ultimately, a system or an institution is only as good as the people in it. But guardrails (laws and rules and norms) are always important even if they’re not sufficient.
Cheers,
Scott.
hueyplong
@Scout211: I’m mildly surprised it hasn’t dropped more and imagine that the downward trend might continue. The market isn’t all that fond of loser stink.
New Deal democrat
Sorry, but I disagree about this. A perfect example is one of my big Constitutional criticisms, the Supreme Court.
Remember that in Federalist #78 Hamilton argued that it would be “the least dangerous branch,” because it would consist of old men at the end of their careers, who wouldn’t serve very long, and would over time turn into dignified clerks, because they would be increasingly hemmed in by precedent. The would be “conservative” in the sense that they therefore could not do any radical rewriting of things.
How’d that turn out? As intended? No, it turns out that the arch-critic Brutus would be correct, that the Court would turn into a power hungry junta, answerable to nobody.
suzanne
There’s a critical step before this: have a clear and unambiguous vision for the goal of the institution, and make a case for that.
Government should be a force for positive development in all people’s lives. People lose faith in that and that’s when the “small government” nonsense gains traction.
different-church-lady
Almost immediate no: institutions designed to do good get hijacked by bad actors all the time. Sometimes good-intentioned institutions fail due to human nature, and sometimes they get deliberately corrupted after bad actors gain enough power. Yes, certainly there are many institutions that are corrosive and destructive by design, but the idea that the results always match the design just doesn’t scan.
different-church-lady
The other problem: it’s not that well-intentioned institutions don’t care about people. It’s that they care about a theoretical average person that doesn’t actually exist in a way that corresponds to that average without unintended downsides. The best you can hope for is that the pros outweigh the cons for the most actual people.
dirge
To expand, there’s also always some gap between the de facto institution and the de jure institution. A difference between the way things are actually getting done, and the org chart, rules, and procedures.
Because no set of formal rules can be complete and consistent, you must have para-institutional networks organized around the problems left unsolved by the formal system. Often those groups cut across boundaries between related institutions. Most of those groups will be more or less aligned with the intended goals, while some will be trying to solve “problems” like “our cushy sinecures are threatened,” or “people outside our group are getting ahead,” or “we ought to be in charge.”
A healthy institution will have formal and informal organizations that regularly adapt to mirror one another. An unhealthy one will have informal organizations weaponizing the formal system to suppress one another, often resulting in a ruling clique modifying the rules to keep themselves in power, at the expense of the stated goals of the institution. Once you’re far enough down that road, it’s almost impossible to fix.
Generally, if you can design the formal system such that individuals operating within it benefit more from serving its goals than from usurping power, you’ll see more functional adaptation and less toxic culture. But there’s no way to make an institution entirely immune from corruption.
New Deal democrat
@craigie:
This is a perfect example of the theories of Hyman Minsky, who argued that stability breeds instability in economic markets, because actors take the resilience of the system for granted, and therefore “push the edges of the envelope” until the system fails.
Although this theory is economic, it is easy to see how the general axiom applies to other social sciences and beyond. In other words, one could as easily and accurately claim, “long term stability breeds instability and diminishes resilience in political and social ‘markets,’ due to the same psychological dynamics.
hueyplong
@New Deal democrat: Seems like we’re in trouble, because if “long term stability breeds instability,” the alternative breeder, “long term instability,” doesn’t sound too cool, either.
In fact, I’m now so offended at leftist navel-gazing that I feel I have no choice but to vote for Trump
[ducks]
WereBear
I have long thought that rigging motivations is key. I’m reminded of the truism that an institution that solves the problem puts itself out of business, and no one wants to do that, except the March of Dimes and they pivoted to preventing birth defects, which is still on mission.
TBone
@TBone: seems wishy washy, was hoping for feedback.
Jeffro
There’s only one “system” that keeps corruption to a minimum, and it’s called The Golden Rule.
The GOP is constantly pulling shit that they would never, EVER, accept if it were being done to them and their party.
Skippy-san
Great points. The only argument is the “perfectly designed” part. Sometimes, things are designed haphazardly and get unintended results. I’d also add to his role of government ” “provide services”. Governments exist to provide services. Some services should ONLY be provided by the government, no matter what the greedy capitalists tell you.
Baud
@Jeffro:
He who has the gold makes the rules?
Ruckus
@Urza:
Should have been automatically assumed……
This may or may not make the system work better. Given humans doing the running and working of the system, in overall I’d say that it’s more likely that it will make it worse. Because it is humans involved there will always be the angels and the devils, the overall and the details. Not all humans are good, not all humans are bad. It runs the entire range. And not all bad humans are bad all the time nor are all good humans good all the time. We make decisions, we can get them wrong – even given the best information and the best ideals. We are human. Many try to be as good as they can but not all succeed all the time. We are human. Some seem to try to be as bad as possible and sometimes they succeed. We are human. We run the entire range. I attended church, and school for 12 yrs with a woman who spent 50 yrs in jail for murder. I never expected any of this from this woman. No one did. We are human. We do good, we are murderers. I served in the military during a war. I never had to shoot anyone or even pull out my weapon but I carried a loaded weapon on in port watch. With orders to shoot to kill. I never had to do that but I know people that went to war and shot people. We are human. We are good, we can be great, we are shit and we can be worse. We are human. And we all have the ability to be good and even great and bad and even far worse. We are human. We can be both of those, good and bad. We are human.
TBone
The Big Quit:
https://digbysblog.net/2024/04/01/the-big-quit/
SoupCatcher
I always heard “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets” in the context of looking backwards to see why results happened, as a type of a failure analysis, and it was decoupled from intent. It was not so much “people set out to get these results” as “of course these are the results given the system.”
et: remove formatting
hueyplong
@TBone: So is the employer of Republican congresspeople and their aides (Trump) likely to complain that “people don’t want to work anymore?”
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
YOU ARE NOT WRONG.
UncleEbeneezer
I don’t think this is true. Dems have been clear and vocal about why Obama, Hillary (Secretary of State), Ketanji Brown Jackson, Anthony Fauci were qualified (and their Republican mirror images, were not). It’s just that Dems recognize that things are more complicated in our world than it is for the GOP (who lies about their theory of qualification because it amounts to naked partisanship and nothing more. See: Alito, Thomas, Coney Barrett, Trump, Betsy Devos, Stephen Miller, George W Bush, Sarah Palin, Ronald Reagan, Aileen Cannon etc…). Dems are constantly bashed because we prioritize people with lived experiences of marginalization and have been very clear in signaling that to the public. The whole backlash to “DEI” which really began with the Whitelash to Affirmative-Action, is all a result of the fact that Dems have been quite clear that we believe coming from a marginalized group is a good thing when it comes to qualifications for institutions. The whole GOP backlash to expertise that makes them reflexively support and nominate complete dolts is a backlash to Dems long-standing desire to have scientists and policy experts run our institutions. But we also acknowledge that what constitutes “qualified” will be different from one institution to another, and may be different over time based on circumstances. Republicans have the ability to keep things simple because their worldview is simple and ignores the complexity of reality. Democrats can’t do that. When they try to, we bash them for it.
Ruckus
@Villago Delenda Est:
How did I know that someone would bring up UNIX?
Redshift
I agree with this as long as we recognize the distinction between what it was designed to do and what the people who designed in intended it to do (which I think is the point.) It’s pretty tautological to say it’s perfectly designed to get the results it gets, and I think more informative to define how well it’s designed as how close the actual results are to the intended results.
Ruckus
@narya:
Shit’s complex, in other words.
Anything that involves humans is complex.
I spent a number of years as a mental health counselor. There is good and bad in every human. Many of us do not want to let the bad run free because we know it’s bad. A not insignificant percentage want the bad to run free because it might be better for them. An old saying, “There is no accounting for humans. Only for their behavior.”
dirge
Yes, like POSIWID, it’s intended to convey that if you’re getting unexpected results, then there must be a difference between the system as you understand it, and the system as it actually is. If you don’t like the results, go figure out what you missed.
Josie
@Melancholy Jaques:
I’d guess less than five.
Redshift
@cain:
Part of that, I think, is because the Framers were really really concerned about corruption, and a lot of their attention went to thinking about how proposed structures could allow corruption and then trying to figure out how to prevent it.
Obviously that alone wasn’t enough, and we’ve had periods when government was massively corrupt, but I do think it helped set us in the path where everyday corruption is less tolerated.
TBone
@hueyplong: my Rumpy neighbors’ son is currently employed in the comms staff of a rethug Congress person. He is functionally illiterate and I can’t fathom how this new generation of younuns is supposed to learn anything about how our government is supposed to function since all they do all day is shit post on social media.
scav
If someone falls off a jungle gym, it’s not that the system was perfectly designed to generate falls. Nor is it designed to encourage suicides if some jumps off it with malign intent. Everyone’s probably already covered the difficulties with perfection, but I also find myself fussy with the aura of human omnipotence and omniscience threaded through the assertion. If something goes bad or wrong, it’s because the context of the event was designed such! How powerful we are to have such precise machinations where human intent is infallible and inexorable! It’s not that there was an earthquake at an unexpected fault or a malign idiot spread butter on the rungs or Little Ingrid’s balance is just shit. The jungle gym has fulfilled its intended destiny.
Ruckus
@Scout211:
Old sales concept.
When you sell shit the only customers are the ones that like the smell of shit.
TBone
@scav: 👍 I’m remembering some chaos theory
schrodingers_cat
‘Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets’
Hard disagree. That means people who design a particular system can determine its trajectory for all time.
TBone
@Redshift: corruption is at all levels. 🤬
https://apnews.com/article/kidney-transplant-race-black-inequity-bias-d4fabf2f3a47aab2fe8e18b2a5432135
schrodingers_cat
That’s the last thing we need.
Melancholy Jaques
@UncleEbeneezer:
And the people who vote for Republicans totally rejected the very idea of qualifications because they don’t care to hear from people they dislike and they don’t want to hear about anything that makes them uncomfortable. They didn’t want to wear masks, their favorite bar was closed, etc., so Fauci was bad. Evil.
One reason we Democrats so often struggle to defeat Republicans is that a “worldview [that] is simple and ignores the complexity of reality” describes the political thought of a large percentage, maybe even a majority, of voters.
I will probably never fully recover from the stupidity of
“the guy I’d rather have a beer with” from 2000.
Ruckus
@hueyplong:
Speaking of sinking the ship to get the part above the waterline washed…….
Betty
I think of the USPS as an institution that has been corrupted by DeJoy and his apparently complicit Board who are treating it as a business when it was created as a public service. Some Democrats in Congress are complaining about it, but I don’t see them taking any action to correct it. As Martin said, the people are the difference.
UncleEbeneezer
@Melancholy Jaques: Agreed. The notion that everything must be a binary: good/bad, is just one prominent examples. Taxes are good or bad. Policing (the concept) is either good or bad. Etc. So many people can’t wrap their heads around notions like “X is good if/when it does Y, but not when it does Z.” They want things simple. And politics is never simple.
Redshift
@WereBear:
I disagree with that entirely, I think there are any number of organizations whose members would be ecstatic if the problem they were created to address were solved and they could disband or turn to a new problem. A lot of institutions address problems that can’t just be “solved” once and then they’ll stay solved, or that require political solutions or resources that are hard to get people to agree to. But the idea that there are institutions that could fulfill their purpose and choose but to because they want to keep operating just seems cynical to me, not a truism
RSA
We also need to be careful to separate out what we can control or predict from what we can’t. Otherwise I might say, for example, that my state’s Powerball lottery was perfectly designed to give these numbers last night: 12 – 13 – 33 – 50 – 52 – 23– x3.
That is, sometimes things go well or badly in spite of the best possible efforts.
wjca
Another, far more generally accurate, way to put it, for the case of bad results, is that it was not designed to avoid those bad results. At least not adequately designed.
While there are occasionally systems that are deliberately designed to provide bad outcomes (for those other than the designer), far more often the problem is lack of imagination. Those who would corrupt the system turn out to be more imaginative than the designers.
This tracks to our current political situation. We have a system which is designed on the assumption that most of those involved are acting in good faith. It can deal with people who are wrong. It is not well designed to deal with people acting in bad faith to sabotage the system. It can deal with a Strom Thurmond. But a Newt Gingrich (let alone a Donald Trump) can break it.
Soprano2
@Omnes Omnibus: I think you’re right. I think when “normies” start paying attention they’re going to see that Biden is a normal politician who does normal political things and seems to be trying to help, while TFG is none of those things. I think normal people were worn out by the constant drama surrounding TFG, and probably don’t want that back. Mostly what they want is for government to work at least halfway decently and to not have to think about politics too much.
fish bicycle
The reason Dems as a coalition party are so shy about providing an explicit theory of qualifications is that there usually has to be someone’s ox getting gored somewhere. It’s different than how the right wing does their divide and conquer, but some group is still gonna feel like they’re getting shafted, and that has to be ok to make any progress at all.
But it’s not ok to say that yes, we are going to support the needs of the middle and lower classes against the upper, at least not quite so explicitly. Because most people do not realize how bare knuckles politics and social struggle are. If that were made explicit, you’d have plenty of comfortable normies and lots more well intentioned affluent liberals turning against the project, and you do need those people in your coalition.
craigie
@New Deal democrat:
I haven’t seen that before but it seems exactly right.
Ultimately these systems depend on people, and people are wildly imperfect.
wjca
In reality, of course, it was designed as a tax on ignorance of statistics.** One which wouldn’t be opposed because it wouldn’t be perceived as a tax. For that purpose, it works rather well. Which just means nobody has figured out, yet, how to corrupt/sabotage/break the system.
** My chances of buying a winning lottery ticket are indistinguishable from my chances of finding a winning ticket accidentally dropped on the sidewalk. And keeping an eye on where I’m walking costs less.
Ksmiami
@Chacal Charles Calthrop: agreed. That’s why norms are so important: no system can be designed perfectly or to account for every situation. That’s why when one party decides to screw norms and just exist to obtain power, they can be very effective at stifling “the way things work…” until of course, it bites them in the ass and everyone gets destroyed.
Soprano2
@rikyrah: So they want to focus on something that’s mostly imaginary, because it’s based on them being butthurt every time a white man doesn’t get something he thinks he should have.
Soprano2
@New Deal democrat: I think this explains why some people voted for TFG in 2016. They didn’t like Hillary for whatever reason, and thought “we can take a chance on TFG, he’s a businessman/that person I saw on the Apprentice. Besides, if he’s too bad our institutions are stable and will rein him in”. Rarely has a belief been proven so disastrously wrong.
Soprano2
@Ruckus: This is so true. My husband killed people in Vietnam because he had to. One time he was walking point and he heard a “click”. He looked over and saw an enemy soldier not that far away whose rifle had jammed. He told me the man didn’t get a second chance. Hubby says he doesn’t know how many people he killed because when you’re in a firefight you’re never sure who you actually hit. These experiences affect him to this day. In any restaurant I can tell you where he’ll want to sit. He’s hypervigilant (or he was, not as much now). He’s always been a light sleeper. Even people who do these things because they have to pay a price for it.
Soprano2
@TBone: One of the problems with elected office these days on the R side is that they see how the performance artists get rewarded for constantly posturing and shit posting, so they all decide that’s the way to do it. That means nothing real gets done, though.
cain
@Redshift: It’s like software – people always forget the part where once you write the code, you still have to maintain it over the years. Even if a dept solves a problem as you say it doesn’t stay solved because things are never static like that.
randy khan
@wjca:
Periodically I take a look at the question of what the breakeven point in statistical terms is for buying a ticket (leaving aside the transaction costs of getting one) for the MegaMillions/PowerBall universe. It has been interesting to me that, while the jackpots go up, your expected payoff for a dollar spent on the ticket does not (and even goes down).
Last week, someone won a $1.13 billion prize in New Jersey, which could be paid out in $537.5 million in cash, with a ticket that had 1 chance in 302 million of winning. It costs $2 to buy a ticket, so not even considering taxes (which would take somewhere in the vicinity of 35-45% most places), the expected payoff of that $2 ticket was $1.78.
Martin
Hello. Late coming to this to clarify my thoughts. Between Ms Martin’s late night medicine routine (she’s doing great!) and my allergies, last night was a rough one. I’m going to read down and respond to things.
WaterGirl
@Martin: Oh Martin, I had forgotten about the health problems at your house; my timing is terrible!
Martin
@bjacques: So, I don’t necessarily mean it was designed to be corrupt from the outset – though some definitely are – the mob, the klan, etc.
Every system has design and implementation, and implementation has a freedom of operation that is to some degree constrained by its design (checks and balances, as one example – the veto process (design) helps keep the implementation of the legislature from getting too out in the weeds.
A lot of systems designed to work non-corruptly can be wrenched into a corrupt state through its implementation (Clarence Thomas, Donald Trump, Bob Menendez). This can simply be an individual act, a systemic/cultural one (police), or itself an institutional one (the freedom caucus). In my career I had countless opportunities to act corruptly that would never have been caught. Our system wasn’t terribly well protected from that – it relied on honest actors. I had colleagues that acted corruptly, and the system relied on honest actors serving as whistleblowers to stop that (which I did a number of times). I also had the opportunity as someone who was primarily on the implementation side, a policy officer (I enforced policy) and as a policy author to institutionalize corruption. I could (and did inadvertently a few times) implement policies in an unfair way, and write them in an unfair way.
We tend to focus too much on leadership here. Trump didn’t need to implement policy corruptly (executive branch is mainly implementation, not policy creation) he could hire people he could trust to do that, or more likely people he just didn’t care if they acted corruptly or not so long as they acted loyally. This is always a bit of a come to Jesus moment for new institutional leadership when they realize that their subordinates (sometimes _very_ far down) often have more direct authority than they do. There’s only so much a mayor can do if their beat cops are motivated to harm minorities. Corruption comes from all levels.
So is the policing system corrupt because lawmakers designed it to be corrupt or because a collective set of decisions from top to bottom eroded away accountability so that it would act in a specific way (often at odds with what the lawmakers want) – to enforce a given social structure – which the beneficiaries of that structure would argue is not corrupt. If you want to maintain that system, simply hire people into it who think it should work like that and it’ll persevere.
George
Based on my ongoing experience working in a federal agency, institutions are nothing more or less than a reflection of the upper management at any given time. The institution is not an entity separate from upper management, but rather just an aggregate of what upper management wants with regard to self-preservation and self-aggrandizement.
This is something I’ve seen first hand as I’ve pursued harassment and discrimination claims against my former supervisor. Upper management will claim that the decisions it makes are in the “best interests of the agency,” but that is merely the faint camouflage it uses to allow the hierarchy to evade accountability and responsibility.
Martin
Most of them don’t do either. One of the harder things to come to terms with – and this applies to government and industry – is how institutions prioritize consistency over correctness.
One problem with an organization of thousands of people is that each of them will have their own interpretation of what is correct. This inconsistency in application creates chaos up the organization as leadership loses the ability to predict outcomes and respond to issues. In a lot of ways it’s easier to explain why you denied every insurance claim for breast cancer treatment than it is to explain why you denied some, but not others.
So there’s this whole component to policy making and implementation centered on how much agency those civil servants should have. How much do you want to give to border patrol? How much to your postal worker? And so on.
So the main thing the civil servant is serving is the system. Understanding what kind of cog you are in the system and what your kind of cog is intended to do helps a lot. Workers can reinforce the intention of the system or it can undermine it. Election workers sit right in this sweet spot now. You’re supposed to process all ballots received by 5PM. If the postal worker’s truck is in the parking lot having a mechanical problem and you can see them struggling to get a box of ballots into the building and they finally get in at 5:02 – do you process them or not? Every effort was made to get them in by 5:00. The spirit of the law says to process them but the letter says not to. What happens comes down to that civil servant. It’s entirely reasonable to refuse to allow a citizen that shows up at 5:02 to drop off a ballot while allowing a postal worker to bring in a box of ballots. The voters in the latter case had no agency – they trusted the USPS to arrive on time. The voter in the former case presumably had opportunities to vote earlier and didn’t take advantage of them. But every civil servant will handle this a little differently, and give somewhat different (possibly entirely valid!) justification for their decision. They aren’t wrong to refuse the USPS at 5:02 if that’s what the rule says.
You can’t throw up enough rules to get everyone doing the same thing because there are always these issues. Who you hire into these jobs, how you frame their job, how transparent the task is (is NBC standing there at 5:02 filming this?), how much agency other workers have, how responsive other parts of the system are – can an election worker call up a judge and ask ‘should I accept these’? And while the judge might have their own corruption, the more parts the system you aggregate you will revert generally to a consensus and the rationale for that consensus will be internalized.
So the civil servant is really serving the people indirectly. They’re serving the system and trusting that the system they are a part of serves the people. And when those seem to be out of alignment, does the system allow them to either correct that directly, or to put their hand up and say ‘this part isn’t working properly’.
Brachiator
@Martin:
What are the actual rules for accepting and processing ballots in, for example, California? Or even just Los Angeles County. To talk about the agency of the civil servant here seems wrongheaded without context.
And aren’t their mechanisms for addressing potential problems related to processing ballots, including legal challenges?
A consequence of your argument might be that Trump had every right to ask Georgia to find him more votes. He was just standing up to the system. Is this what you intended?
Martin
@Chacal Charles Calthrop:
Except that in a lot of cases that litigation last years not because they want it to, but because we don’t want to pay the taxes needed for a more responsive legal infrastructure. In some cases it’s because the institution itself doesn’t want to make a decision – USSC decided the emoluments clause just doesn’t matter.
There’s an awful lot of situations (probably _all_ of them) when the system can operate faster, down to not overburdening public defenders, lessening the overhead of the system itself, and so on. At the same time, there’s a collective responsibility here as well – we offer opinions on how much we want to pay in taxes to support this system, but we are generally either ignorant or apathetic to the system itself. Who gives a shit if Google spends years in litigation. But when it’s my custody case, or my kid being arraigned, suddenly I have an opinion and I start to demand the institution work differently.
And institutions do balance these things. They do put more of that budget to the custody cases and less to the corporate ones, because we’re (rightfully) more sympathetic to the woman who leaves an abusive spouse than fucking Google (I know they aren’t the same courts, but you get the point). Budgeting is one of the biggest ways that institutions get designed. I mean, it’s not that the engineers who designed the Francis Scott Key Bridge didn’t want a bigger stronger bridge, but the pile of money there were handed was a certain size. So they made decisions, and we have the consequences of those decisions. They weren’t malicious or negligent decisions, they were the best decisions they had agency to make.
Martin
@schrodingers_cat:
No. The constitution has built into it a mechanism to change itself. We barely went a decade before we changed it 10 times. And part of the design of systems is hubris. If you think you are smart enough to determine its trajectory for all time, you’re going to make a shitty system – and people do that all the damn time. And we live with those results. You can also design systems knowing damn well that shit is gonna happen, and you design them to be revisited frequently, to defer authority to other parties, to have escape clauses, and so on.
Should we talk about abortion policy? We’ve debated this for decades. We know damn well you can’t predetermine the trajectory of a pregnancy, or even the circumstances that might lead to one, and yet, here we are making no exceptions policy. You think that’s by mistake? You think they just don’t know?
Martin
@WaterGirl: That’s okay. I was more allergies than that in this case. My wife deserves flowers. Doing my best to tolerate them.
frosty
@Villago Delenda Est:
True! I once heard the head of maintenance for Chicago commuter railcars tell us “We could run a damn fine railroad if it weren’t for all these passengers!”
I suspect this is a common complaint in any service industry and they all know it’s tongue-in-cheek.
schrodingers_cat
@Martin: Who is “they”
You seem to be conflating two sets of people, framers of the constitution, and current crop of R politicians.
And no I don’t think that the American Constitution is infallible. As for the current crop of Rs they are malevolent buffoons.
Martin
@Brachiator: Well, you’ve really sort of crossed up wires on this one because nearly all rules in an election exist to serve the voter, not the candidate. Apart from asking for a recount, which Trump absolutely had the right to do, asking for more votes isn’t just a direct opposition to the laws (which is why there’s a criminal indictment) it’s also a breach of the intent of elections being decided by voters and not by candidates or administrators (which speaks to intent here).
Of course context matters, which is why I provided context – the case of the individual looking to cast a vote after hours and the case of the institution itself failing to meet the deadline, which the voter had no ability to influence and should have been able to trust the institution to do.
And there certainly are mechanisms related to processing ballots – what of a batch that was misplaced, military votes that maybe were destroyed in transit, and so on. That forms part of that decision path, informs what *kind* of agency workers have, and how they should adjudicate each decision. You handle deviations to local policy differently from deviations to federal law for this very reason. You also handle deviations to federal law different to deviations to federal law differently when the context for that law changes. How we handled minor immigration issues changed a LOT after 9/11. Things that previously we would have deferred in favor of the student (an ambiguous answer on a form) we got much stricter on, because we now had a situation where the student wasn’t the only possible victim of the policy – something we didn’t previously consider (nor did the federal officials that we worked with, for that matter).
So no, there is no slippery slope here which leads to Trump asking for more votes. That was not only plainly illegal, it was a plain violation of who the law serves. Even Georgia Republicans understood that clearly enough.
Martin
@schrodingers_cat: No I’m not. The framers of the constitution were the ones who amended it 10 times in the first 3 years. They understood damn well how infallible they were – after all, they’re right there patching up their own gaps and mistakes. It’s a modern failing that we are afraid to amend it further, deeming the document too perfect to change, treating the founders as uniquely wise, when all evidence shows they didn’t think of themselves that way.
The abortion debate doesn’t intersect with the constitution in any meaningful way. ‘They’ only refers to current legislators.
Anthony
To support Maryin’s comments about systems, when I moved to the South, my eyes were awakened to that fact that things are the way they are on purpose. You don’t have to be a mastermind, or even that smart, you just have to have power.
randy khan
@Martin:
I work with civil servants constantly, mostly at the FCC, but in other federal and state agencies as well. My experience is that the overwhelming majority of them are very much concerned about the public interest and what is the best thing to do. Sometimes they’re timid (often when something is new and they don’t yet have their hands fully around it), and sometimes they’re annoyingly stubborn, but as a rule they want to be helpful, they want to find ways to allow people to do good things, and they actually care about the agency’s mission. I can’t tell you the number of times people at the FCC have helped fix problems not of their own making, and they do that as much for little unknown companies as for big ones (in fact, probably more willingly for the little ones.
In fact, the greatest frustration I’ve seen at the FCC came when one of the chairs, a guy named Kevin Martin, literally wouldn’t let people on the policy side of the agency do their jobs unless he specifically directed them to. People were miserable, even though they were getting paid for doing nothing. They thought it was a just wrong.