I don’t follow why “focus on fixing the current problem” doesn’t work, or at the very least why the anecdote you gave is sufficient to generalize a single failure incident into a universal axiom.
There could have been a variety of reasons why your seemingly reasonable fix wasn’t adopted as policy. Maybe your team didn’t fully understand your explanation, maybe they understood but held a grudge against you for unrelated reasons, etc. People are not perfectly rational which is why being persuasive is a skill in itself. Just because FCCC failed to fix an existing problem that one time doesn’t mean it’s the wrong approach for a benevolent ruler (especially one who has the unquestioning loyalty of his/her followers no?)
I’m not sure why you think I’m generalising from one example. Sure, I wrote only one example, but this article is not the sum of my knowledge. There are many, many examples of this.
I’ll give you another one. Policymakers in the area of university funding saw that universities were underfunded by about 15%. Their solution? Increase student fees by 15%. At no point did they ask themselves, “Why does funding get out of sync every decade?” Or “How could we design a system of scratch so that this will never be an issue, and so that degrees are always priced appropriately?”
Focusing on fixing the current problem is often an incremental approach. It assumes that if we just tweak the dials a little, the problem is solved. And maybe it is. For a while. And then it stuffs up again. Or maybe it creates new issues, because they weren’t focused on the things they couldn’t yet see. The problem is basically that you can’t polish a turd. And a lot of policy is pure shit. No underlying deductive argument with reasonable assumptions. Just “Oh, this sounds alright” and then they go with it.
I don’t follow why “focus on fixing the current problem” doesn’t work, or at the very least why the anecdote you gave is sufficient to generalize a single failure incident into a universal axiom.
There could have been a variety of reasons why your seemingly reasonable fix wasn’t adopted as policy. Maybe your team didn’t fully understand your explanation, maybe they understood but held a grudge against you for unrelated reasons, etc. People are not perfectly rational which is why being persuasive is a skill in itself. Just because FCCC failed to fix an existing problem that one time doesn’t mean it’s the wrong approach for a benevolent ruler (especially one who has the unquestioning loyalty of his/her followers no?)
I’m not sure why you think I’m generalising from one example. Sure, I wrote only one example, but this article is not the sum of my knowledge. There are many, many examples of this.
I’ll give you another one. Policymakers in the area of university funding saw that universities were underfunded by about 15%. Their solution? Increase student fees by 15%. At no point did they ask themselves, “Why does funding get out of sync every decade?” Or “How could we design a system of scratch so that this will never be an issue, and so that degrees are always priced appropriately?”
Focusing on fixing the current problem is often an incremental approach. It assumes that if we just tweak the dials a little, the problem is solved. And maybe it is. For a while. And then it stuffs up again. Or maybe it creates new issues, because they weren’t focused on the things they couldn’t yet see. The problem is basically that you can’t polish a turd. And a lot of policy is pure shit. No underlying deductive argument with reasonable assumptions. Just “Oh, this sounds alright” and then they go with it.