America’s dilemma – Idealism vs pragmatism

Americans bear a special burden. Though the seeds of our idealism can be traced back at least to the early Greeks, we are the first major nation in the world to have been established from the beginning on the basis of ideals like individual freedom and universal equality. All other major nations evolved historically from more pragmatic principles of power politics – growing slowly and painfully from monarchies and autocratic regimes toward more democratic societies, and many still have a long way to go to achieve the freedoms Americans started with in the first place, even if they wanted to, and some don’t.

The problem this legacy poses for us is that we are always torn between our high ideals and pragmatic realism. The nation began with the tension between our ideals of universal freedom and equality and the reality of slavery. It continued with the tension between those ideals and the pragmatic conflicts between immigrant settlers and native Americans. More recently during the cold war this tension was evident in our uneasy support of unsavory dictators for the pragmatic reason that they helped, we hoped, to contain the spread of Communism.

And it continues today with the tension between those same ideals and the realities of world politics and cultural differences. On the one hand we would like to bring democracy to nations like Iraq, and human rights to nations like China and Russia. On the other hand, pragmatically, a democratic Iraq might very well be thoroughly hostile to us, and trying to meddle too much in the internal affairs of China or Russia might turn out to be thoroughly counterproductive, and even produce another great power confrontation.

There is no simple answer to this dilemma. I would hope we would never lose our high ideals; they are worth preserving and spreading to other nations and cultures when and as we can. On the other hand, naïve idealism can blind us to the realities of the world, and can be the cause of great damage to others.

The American burden is to learn to manage this tension between our ideals and what is actually possible in the world. “Spreading democracy” is a great ideal, but a very poor basis on which to build an effective foreign policy. If the world can avoid destroying itself in war over the next few hundred years, ideals like democracy and individual freedom may eventually, slowly, spread to other nations and cultures, but it will be a slow process, taking generations. We ought not to be so naïve as to think we can force it into any culture or on any nation in a few years. This is where pragmatism is neccessary.

How stupid stuff starts

I saw one of my dear friends, a teacher, at Starbucks today helping another teacher prepare some of her materials required under the “No Child Left Behind” Act – dozens and dozen of pages that every teacher is required to submit, but that probably no one at the state or federal level really reads. It reminded me of similarly stupid things that went on in companies I have worked in – such as 100 page “process documents” that cost the company tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare, but that no one read or used.

I have a theory about how these things come into being. Somewhere in the upper levels of management some senior manager proclaims a “thou shalt”, usually in response to some problem or mistake the company has just made, and usually without thinking about it very much. The underlings all race to implement something that will let them report in the next month or so that they have complied with the “thou shalt” and checked off the action item. The senior manager, if he/she even remembers issuing the “thou shalt”, eventually gets briefed that his/her action has been implemented, and never bothers to see whether the implementation is actually solving the problem it was supposed to solve, and the underlings of course all give glowing reports about how well it is going, and yet another really stupid idea gets foisted on the people who are trying to get the real work done.

I recall a retired chemist here at Los Alamos Lab telling me that he finally retired when he found it took two days of safety paperwork before he could pour a substance from one beaker to another. No doubt all this paperwork originated in some accident or near-accident that prompted some senior manager to require better record keeping ( a perfectly reasonable idea ), and that then ,through the inevitable bureaucracy, morphed into the ridiculous requirement that eventually emerged, impeding everyone’s work and costing the lab thousands of unnecessary labor hours.

In my experience in large companies, I would estimate something like 20-30% of the effort, labor hours, and budget is wasted on such foolishness. Goals like “zero defects”, or “documented processes”, or ISO9000 or CMM compliance or "six sigma" programs spawn whole departments that take on a life of their own and justify their existence by imposing yet more requirements on the people doing real productive work. It’s not that these ideas are bad – many of them are quite sound. It’s that the organization loses sight of what it is really trying to accomplish with these ideas, and morphs them into unnecessary and usually ineffective makework.

I don’t have a solution for this, and it may simply be inevitable in large organizations, but senior managers would do well to pay more attention to how their “thou shalts” are being implemented, and whether they are really effective. I recall that Robert Townsend, onetime CEO of AVIS (and the man who made them a real contender in the field), ruled that no new paperwork could be created anywhere in AVIS without his express approval, and it was hard to get his approval. That was smart.

Wasting our money on schools?

The US spent $536 billion on elementary and secondary education in 2004-5, the most recent year for which I can find comprehensive figures. We currently spend about $9000 annually per student, more than any other nation in the world except Switzerland and Norway. And what do we get for all this investment?

The 2006 version of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) International Student Assessment is a complex document (the key tables can be found at their site at http://www.pisa.oecd.org/). But however you cut it, the news isn’t good. On most measures of math, science and reading proficiency the US ranks 21st among the 27 OECD countries with available data, followed only by Spain, New Zealand, Portugal, Turkey and Mexico.

I suspect a surprisingly small fraction of the $9000 per student goes into paying good teachers – the majority almost certainly goes to support an immense local, state and federal education bureaucracy that manifestly contributes little or nothing to the quality of our children’s education.

So while our local school boards across the nation are arguing about whether to forbid the teaching of evolution or force the teaching of intelligent design as a pseudo-science, and while our textbook publishers are busy dumbing down the textbooks so that no child will feel left out, the rest of the developed world is producing better-educated children. “No child left behind” really translates to “All American children left behind”. It shouldn’t take more than a generation or two for that difference to begin to have a profound effect on our economy.

What will it take to break us out of this morass?

In praise of our Armed Forces

I have written several times about the self-serving nature of Washington bureaucracies and political life, and I have not been especially flattering. But I want to make a distinction here between the other federal bureaucracies and the American Armed Forces.

Certainly the American Armed Forces are federal bureaucracies, and vast ones at that. And certainly they contain their fair share of incompetents, time-servers, martinets and bullies, and dirty office politics, just like any large organization. But there is something different here as well that I have sensed over the years from all the active and retired military people I have been privileged to work with. There is a prevailing sense of mission, a sense that there are causes beyond oneself that are worth fighting and even dying for, a sense of taking care of one’s people, a can-do spirit in the face of difficulties.

When there is a problem, the first instinct of the politician seems to be to find someone to blame, preferably from the other party. The first instinct of the bureaucrat is to be sure they can’t be blamed. But over and over again I have seen military leaders say explicitly. “It doesn’t matter how we got into this mess. Just tell me how we are going to recover.”

Perhaps if politicians and bureaucrats had to work on military pay scales, and risk their lives every now and then, they too would learn this spirit.

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Einstein and drugs

Einstein is supposed to have once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I thought of this last night as I was reading something about the “drug war” in America. We have been interdicting drug smugglers and prosecuting drug vendors and users for decades now, filling our prisons with drug-related offenders. Consider:

• “Overall, the United States incarcerated 2,320,359 persons at year end 2005….At year end 2005, one in every 136 U.S. residents was incarcerated in a State or Federal prison or a local jail.” Source: Harrison, Paige M. & Beck, Allen J., Ph.D., US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 2005 (Washington DC: US Department of Justice, Nov. 2006), pp. 1-2.

• "More than 9.25 million people are held in penal institutions throughout the world, mostly as pre-trial detainees (remand prisoners) or as sentenced prisoners. Almost half of these are in the United States (2.19m), China (1.55m plus pretrial detainees and prisoners in 'administrative detention') or Russia (0.87m)." Source: Walmsley, Roy, "World Prison Population List (Seventh Edition)" (London, England: International Centre for Prison Studies, 2007), p. 1

• "In 1995, 23% of state prisoners were incarcerated for drug offenses in contrast to 9% of drug offenders in state prisons in 1986. In fact, the proportion of drug offenders in the state prison population nearly tripled by 1990, when it reached 21%, and has remained at close to that level since then. The proportion of federal prisoners held for drug violations doubled during the past 10 years. In 1985, 34% of federal prisoners were incarcerated for drug violations. By 1995, the proportion had risen to 60%." Source: Craig Haney, Ph.D., and Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D., "The Past and Future of U.S. Prison Policy: Twenty-five Years After the Stanford Prison Experiment," American Psychologist, Vol. 53, No. 7 (July 1998), p. 715.

• States spent $42.89 billion on Corrections in 2005 alone. To compare, states only spent $24.69 billion on public assistance. Source: National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO), 2005 State Expenditure Report (Washington, DC: NASBO, Fall 2006), p. 35, Table 18, and p. 58, Table 32.

• Since the enactment of mandatory minimum sentencing for drug users, the Federal Bureau of Prisons budget has increased by 1,954%. Its budget jumped from $220 million in 1986 to more than $4.3 billion in 2001. Sources: US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 1996 (Washington DC: US Department of Justice, 1997), p. 20; Executive Office of the President, Budget of the United States Government, FY 2002 (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 2001), p. 134.

• According to ONDCP, federal spending to incarcerate drug offenders totals nearly $3 Billion a year -- $2.525 Billion by the Bureau of Prisons, and $429.4 Million by Federal Prisoner Detention. Source: Office of National Drug Control Policy, "National Drug Control Strategy: FY 2003 Budget Summary" (Washington, DC: Office of the President, February 2002), Table 3, pp. 7-9.

You would think we might have learned something from prohibition, which didn’t significantly impede the supply of alcohol, but did spawn a highly profitable smuggling trade run by organized crime, since it effectively produced a monopoly and drove the price of alcohol higher, even though the production costs stayed very low.

Our largely ineffectual attempts at constraining the supply of drugs to the US has had essentially the same effect – it has produced a highly profitable monopoly. Plants (cannabis and poppies) which grow like roadside weeds produce a product that can be sold for astronomical prices on American streets. This has produced an international narcotics business estimated to earn drug traffickers $300-400 billion per year, enough that they essentially own states like Afghanistan and Columbia.

I don’t know what the answer is – drugs are addictive and it is hard to wean people from addictions. But Einstein had a point – whatever we are doing now certainly isn’t working, and to continue just to do more of the same and expect anything to improve is the definition of insanity. It’s too bad that it seems to be political suicide to suggest we try a different approach, because that effectively constrains us to keep doing the same ineffectual things and wasting billions of dollars a year of approaches that don’t work.

I suspect if we spent even a fraction of those billions on treatments and education – trying to reduce the demand instead of focusing on the supply – we would have much better results.