From now until early November, U. S. citizens will be
bombarded by more political ads than most people care to hear. While I won’t take sides today, I sense
a general opinion that the U. S. Congress in particular, and perhaps the whole range
of U. S. political systems in general, is severely impaired if not quite broken
down. And during an election year,
it’s more noticeable than ever.
Support for this sense comes from a book by economist Arnold
Kling, who thinks the U. S. has outgrown a political system that may have
worked fine when the country was much smaller, but has now become antiquated
and needs serious overhauling. His
basic point is that while the knowledge needed to govern the country is
increasingly diffused by means of the Internet and other advanced technologies,
the present political system tends to concentrate power in the hands of a few
hundred elites: the President and
his executive-branch heads, members of Congress, quasi-independent bureaucrats
such as the Federal Reserve Board, and leaders of large private
corporations. This leads at best
to a kind of paralysis in which the elites do things that basically feather
their own nests, while the great mass of people have little voice or influence
on what the elites choose to do to them (I could have written “for them”
instead of “to them” but sometimes it’s hard to tell which preposition is more
appropriate).
Rather than just complain, Kling proposes some solutions,
and says some very nice things about engineers in the process. He cites the way that the Internet’s
technical rules are arrived at as a good example of “just-in-time
government.” Although the process
is somewhat different now, for many years the Internet was governed by a series
of ad-hoc Internet Engineering Task Forces (IETFs). A typical task force would be called together by an engineer
who thought there was a problem that needed fixing. Other engineers interested in the problem would volunteer
their time to form a working group which would have meetings (either virtual or
face-to-face) to discuss alternatives and agree on a plan of action. Eventually the solution would be agreed
upon and circulated in the form of a final draft. If nobody objected strenuously within a certain time, the
draft became Internet “law.”
Though Kling doesn’t mention it, many technical standards such as the
ones about how wireless devices interact (you may have heard of IEEE 802.11,
which is one such standard for local area networks) are arrived at by
essentially the same kind of task-force mechanisms.
Kling points out that in contrast to well-paid civil
servants, volunteers do not have an incentive to keep their problem alive so as
to justify their working on it indefinitely. They have their own jobs they’d like to get back to, and
fixing the problem expeditiously is more appealing than prolonging it. On the other hand, if you are the
government-paid Assistant Sub-Executive Secretary of the Department of
Circumlocution or something, you may be tempted to say that “further study is
needed” no matter what problem comes up.
Kling uses IETFs as an example of ways that societies can
govern themselves without the need for a superstructure of permanently
empowered individuals whose terms in office last for many years. He has other ideas as well that would
make government run more like a competitive business and allow individuals to
choose which regulatory and tax regime they would like to live under, without the
disagreeable necessity of moving from one place to another physically.
Kling makes a good point about the excessive concentration
of power with the following example.
If you divide the total budget of $4.3 billion for Montgomery County,
Maryland by the number of County Council members, the spending per legislator
is an astonishing $500 million.
There are few CEOs of private companies who can boast of controlling so
much cash. By contrast,
Switzerland is divided into 26 “cantons” with between about 50 to 100
legislators in each canton. The
highest per-legislator spending level in Switzerland—a nation, not a county—is
$76 million. And Switzerland
spends more per person on its relatively small population than the U. S.
does. When the U. S. was smaller,
the spending per legislator was closer to what Switzerland’s is today, and it
was probably easier for an average citizen to get the attention of a
legislator, simply because there weren’t as many citizens then as there are
today. We would need upwards of a
thousand congressmen in Congress today in order to move substantially closer to
Switzerland’s situation.
And that brings up the main problem with all these nice
ideas: as with many wide-ranging proposals to remake the political system, the
problem is how to get there from here.
It’s unlikely that anyone in Washington is going to look kindly on the
idea that we should have ten or a hundred many times as legislators as we do
now. And the alternative, to move
power from Washington back to the individual states, is also one that has a
rough time getting heard, although there are slight signs that the U. S.
Supreme Court is thinking it might be time to move that way.
In the near term, the best we average citizens can do is to
vote for people who might possibly be inclined to look beyond their own
interests and do what is right for the city, state, or nation, regardless of
whether it means a decrease in his or her own power. Such people are increasingly rare, but if you find one, I
encourage you to vote for them, while you still have the opportunity.
Sources: Arnold
Kling’s Unchecked and Unbalanced: How the Discrepancy Between Knowledge
and Power Caused the Financial Crisis and Threatens Democracy was published by Bowman &
Littlefield (Lanham, MD) in 2010.
Note to Podcast
Enthusiasts: I was recently
interviewed by Jeffrey Shelton and Chris Gammell of “Engineering Commons,” a
podcast they put together weekly.
The resulting podcast was posted Sept. 6 and if you want to hear your
scribe opinionate on a wide range of ethics-related matters, you can download
it at theengineeringcommons.com.
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