By Aaron Wildavsky
(Author's note: This essay was written upon reflecting on the implications of doctrines of progress, as discussed by the other contributors to this volume, on my understanding of developments in public policy; see my Speaking Truth to Power, Boston: Little, Brown, 1979).
In the 1960s America fell in love with the Rachel of social reform and found itself instead married to the Leah of big government. She was bigger, but she wasn't better. It proved more inspiring to long after the unobtainable objectives of giant governmental programs than to wonder if they were worth having. Overinfatuated with the good they sought to do, Americans overemphasized the evil they had done. The idea of progress in public policy was, if not speedily seduced and abandoned, at least slowly suspended, if not discarded. Unrequited love easily turns on its object. Along the way, characteristic American optimism was subject to severe shock. Retrogression rather than progress became the expectation. Why?
Americans were better educated, more talented, and richer in human and material resources than ever before. Their sense of social justice, though far from perfect, was certainly sharper than in earlier times. Challenged to put up or shut up, they opened their coffers so wide as to shame a Croessus. Where, in the early sixties, defense took up some 45 percent of the federal budget and social welfare programs around 20 percent, a scant decade later these proportions and priorities were radically reversed. Relatively and absolutely, social welfare, from food stamps to Medicaid to Social Security, loomed larger on the government horizon. For those who doubt the relative decline in defense spending, see Figure I [not included here], whose statistics are clear and convincing.
Why, then, weren't we-the-people happy? Why did we recoil from our fondest hopes, damning what we had so earnestly desired? Actually it wasn't all so bad or so consistent. Some social programs retain support. If not, they wouldn't be with us. Even so, the elan, the enthusiasm, the pure pleasure, the expectation of better things to come--all have gone. Wariness has replaced happiness. If the nation entered the seventies celebrating the change from warfare to welfare, it entered the eighties on a note of retrenchment. California's Proposition 13 became the lucky number for advocates of lower local real estate taxes; balance in public policy no longer signifies doing more to help the poor but now means restricting government spending. What happened?
Big government, which was supposed to institutionalize progres in public policy, has instead become identified as its main obstacle. There is little confidence that "doing more of the same" or "throwing money after problems," to use two of the current stock phrases, will make things better, and not a little that even bigger government will make them worse. At first blush, this reaction is surprising; the social welfare programs that have grown the fastest in the last two decades were introduced precisely as progress itself--sharing the wealth of the private sector in the form of redistribution by the public. Where the former was fueled by self-interest, the latter was said to be motivated by moral concern for the disadvantaged. Thus, a heightened awareness of duty to others less fortunate, a more exquisite moral sensibility, was to marry the wealth of society to the allocative efficiency of government to do good. Obviously, something happened on the way to public happiness.
On second thought, it is not surprising that something new, so much so soon, stumbled at the start. What would have been extraordinary, in view of our inexperience, would have been discovering that programs performed as intended, that each reinforced rather than crossed purposes with the other, so that social difficulties declined. Temporary dismay at the decline of high hopes is easy to understand; permanent disappointment leading to demands to dismantle the system of social welfare makes sense only if government is fatally flawed.
This essay is not a negation of the notion of public life. It is not a rejection of the sixties or a castigation of public policies to aid the poor. Not at all. I do not believe that the sixties were a dreadful decade. No people is wise to abandon its past, pretending it did not exist or preferring that it had taken a wholly different path (unless, of course, it was vile and mean-spirited, which ours was not).
For good or ill, our culture is self-conscious. We transport ourselves to the corners of our living rooms and observe our own behavior, subject and object together. If error recognition and error correction constitute the essense of right action, then we have had plenty of opportunity to learn in the school of public policy. Has there been progress, we ask ourselves, or only progression?
PROGRESSION VERSUS PROGRESS
The concept of progress (a radical innovation for its time) was originally coined by Condorcet as a reaction against the nostalgic notion of a beatific past from which time things were going downhill. The "golden age" was not so much a "has been" as a "never was." No need to worry, however, for education would sweep away the vestiges of the past. By overcoming prejudice and superstition, indeed by scientific understanding of the principles of society, mankind could continuously improve. Evidently, education and science were important prerequisites of progress. But from that day to this, the idea of progress has hidden ambiguities about process and purpose that we wish to explore.
It was certainly comforting, to be sure, that all kinds of progress went together--material, moral, mental. Earlier traditions, imbued with the doctrine of original sin, were likely to view the will as the servant of the passions and both as directing the weaker moral and material orders. Earlier also was a view of cycles that societies passed through but did not transcend. Change was permanent, but betterment was not. Rise and decline were related; as politicians climbing the "greasy pole" of success observe, the first step up is also the first step down. Man, who labored ceaselessly, was more like Sisyphus than Prometheus.
Without religion, without an afterlife to justify this one, the ultimate purpose of progression--life as history and history as dates--was unsettled. Whether there was to be evolution or revolution (or both) in this world, whether its saints were to be Darwin or Marx, the question of motivation remained. The need for an answer was particularly poignant under Marxism because it promised to liberate mankind not only from superstition but also from need. How would people arrange their lives? What would motivate them when they no longer had to work? (Some say not only fame but necessity is the mother of scientific invention.) If there were a secular side to motivation, it was tied to the conversion of history into meaning, that is, progression into progress.
Progress was bolstered by evolution, for here was not merely a prediction of glad tidings but a method assuring believers that the best had been chosen by natural selection, assuring survival of the fittest. What Protestant predestination did for the moral universe, evolution justified for the material world. The closed cycle of yore became an upward spiral. From the very beginning, however, there were doubters, if not disbelievers, who thought it was all too neat.
Was there survival of the fittest, or did those who survive themselves fit? Was there, in a word, progress or only power in disguise? That one thing succeeds another is undeniable; but is succession (the day-to-day effluvia of historical deposits) success? Religion left ultimate goodness to God, the last things appearing in all their perfection after history was over. For those who lived in history, however, the question remained: was it a random series of events, or was there a successful social mechanism for discarding the worst and selecting the best? The answer depends not only on whether enlightenment leads to progress but also on which of the rival principles of progress we choose as our inheritance.
THE TWO ENLIGHTENMENTS
Just as every constitution is written against the last usurper, it is important to understand what the philosophers of progress were arguing against as well as what they were for. In the political sphere, this is fairly obvious. The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment found its government only moderately distasteful, but the French Enlightenment despised its nominal rulers. So the preference of the former for meliorative measures and the latter for wholesale housecleaning is understandable.
The economic sphere is more difficult to decipher. Leaders of the Enlightenment everywhere were opposed to mercantilism but not necessarily for the same reason. Though there is not entire agreement on the content of that doctrine, it apparently favored state control of commerce in order to export at the lowest possible price so as to accumulate gold with which to carry on grand projects of state. Unfortunately, a policy of export at all costs was interpreted to mean that wages had to be at the barest subsistence level. A gloomy doctrine, indeed, at least for most of the population.
Adam Smith and his teacher Adam Ferguson reacted against mercantilism by ridiculing and rejecting its vast array of intricate controls that got in each other's way. The French philosophers stressed the barrier of the state apparatus to its own restructuring. Between the conviction that the state should not act and the belief that it should act better lies an unbridgeable chasm.
What are the social sources of enlightenment? To the Scottish and English it is the interaction among individuals rather than the cogitation of any single one that produces wisdom. Social interaction, bidding in economics and bargaining in politics, represents a search for the most advantageous relationships. How is it known that people have done the best for themselves? By results. When is it known? Afterwards. What is the criterion of good decision? Agreement.
By contrast, Condorcet or Diderot found truth in individual understanding. Knowledge is not about incessant error correction but about error prevention. Knowledge lies in the mind, which rationalizes all activity. When is it known? Beforehand. How is it known? By following the right design. The criterion of a good decision, therefore, was that it was correct, according to a previously ascertained body of principle. Although each enlightenment did believe in progress and each was opposed to the practices of mercantilism, their diagnoses and remedies were different. Though both believed that society was a product of human action, the French saw it as potentially a product of human design. To the French philosophers, the design of the world could be formulated in the mind and imposed upon society. The Anglo-Scottish believed just the opposite: the world was created by interaction among people, interaction that was wiser than any single mind. The Anglo-Scottish fled from error; the French sped toward truth. Where the French Enlightenment justified itself prospectively by the belief it could make over the world in its own image, the Anglo-Scottish justified itself retrospectively, claiming that social interaction had been superior to intellectual cogitation in view of the results achieved.
Both formulations of enlightenment embraced evolution. Characteristically, interpretations differed drastically. The Anglo-Scottish strain saw individual adaptation to local conditions cumulating in a societal selection better than anyone could have foreseen. Human action might be purposeful, but it could not be predictable. The French variant saw society not as a cumulation of consequences of actions taken on other grounds and for other purposes but as a direct decision. The most knowledgeable forces in society shaped its evolution in a predetermined direction.
SPONTANEITY VERSUS CONTROL
The clash between spontaneity and control, interaction and cogitation, lies at the heart of the idea of progress. Of course, no control can be total, and no reaction can be entirely spontaneous. Interaction is always bounded by constraints, and cogitation never quite gets it all. But what central controllers would call unfortunate unanticipated consequences, deviations from the blueprint of the future society, are the very staple of local social interaction. Only by knowing each situation as well as individuals do could all relationships be anticipated. The unexpected is the stuff of life that each person must communicate to the other precisely because no one else can possibly know. That is why it is so often observed that discoveries are made when the discoverer is not looking for them, at least not in the place they end up being found.
Serendipity is the rationale of spontaneity. Incessant search by many minds, it is claimed, produces more (and more valuable) knowledge than the attempt to program the paths to discovery by a single one. Why not go out after what is wanted? What is wrong with the commonsensical notion that the shortest path between two points is a straight line? For individuals to try and get what they want makes sense as long as it is understood that their objectives and the resources used to attain them are subject to modification with experience. What one wants depends on what one can get. The relevant others whose consent cannot be coerced sets limits to what would otherwise be an infinity of possible objectives. Formulating and reformulating objectives is sensible at the individual level. The question is whether it is similarly sensible at the collective level.
Not only markets rely on spontaneity; science and democracy do as well. In all three arenas, proof is retrospective rather than prospective. Looking back over past performance, adherents of free science, politics, and markets argue that on average their results are better than alternatives, but they cannot say what these will be. The foolishness and frustration of funding conferences (give us the money and we'll find something wonderful, especially if it is bound to be something we didn't expect) stems from the unpredictable character of social interaction.
The strength of spontaneity, its ability to seek out serendipity, is also its shortcoming--exactly what it will do as well as precisely how it will do it cannot be specified in advance (were it possible to specify what scientists would invent or who should get elected or how best to achieve economic growth, control could replace spontaneity).
The significance of serendipity lies in exploring why direct action may be counterproductive. Seeking social goals may undermine them. As soon as objectives get socialized, some people have to set them for others. It is not planning per se but who plans for whom that matters. Information is lost because objectives are necessarily attributed to all members that are in fact shared only by some. And other objectives that might emerge do not have an opportunity to manifest themselves. There can only be a small number of officially sanctioned goals on which social resources are employed. As these resources are used up opportunities for other lines of endeavor, which might have emerged, lack open avenues of expression. Society literally does not know what it is missing because there is no way of measuring the alternatives there might have been had there been fewer socially supported objectives. Consequently, when new challenges emerge, the variety of practices and solutions that might have met them has been diminished.
Once there are collective objectives, it becomes difficult to switch support away from them. They develop clientele and consequences, which only can be dealt with in the existing entrenched context. Instead of objectives being treated as variables, changing according to the needs of the time, they become constants, around which other endeavors must move. Thus, present solutions limit future ones. Evolution only works one way--by addition but not by subtraction. Social objectives and support staff grow bigger (the old that must be kept plus the new that must be tried) but not necessarily better.
To the extent that objectives are individualized and localized, their consequences are felt directly by their formulators. The more socialized and centralized the objectives, the more indirect and remote their consequences. Feedback becomes depersonalized. As the critical connection between causes and consequences is attenuated, the center becomes overloaded and out of touch. Evidently it can do evil as well as good. The manifest good it wishes to do becomes instead the very evil it wishes to avoid.
Since this basic argument is ordinarily buried beneath public discourse, it is worth glancing at a recent manifestation. In 1979 the Wall Street Journal carried this evocative headline: "Price of Progress? U.S.Inflation Blamed On Attempts to Avoid Slumps, Aid the Needy. Big Deficits, Flood of Money, Costly Regulation Ensue." This is not the place and I am not the person to argue about inflation. It is the form of the argument made by distinguished economists that is of interest:
An extensive search for answers from private economists, businessmen and government officials leads to a more fundamental explanation that is gaining acceptance among experts of all political persuasions. It is that the U.S. inflation is the inevitable result of the kind of economy and society that we have been shaping for decades, a society in which both individuals and businesses are protected against the worst economic hazards of earlier eras and consumption is favored over savings and investment.
LIBERALS IN AGREEMENT
Sitting in his book-lined office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Robert Solow, one of the nation's leading liberal economists, spells out a similar thesis. "The single most important reason for inflation is that we are a society that has tried to prevent deep recessions, to provide income security for people and to help those who suffer," he says. "We no longer let big businesses go bankrupt or people go unemployed for a long time." Mr. Solow's MIT colleague, Nobel Prize-winner Paul Samuelson, sees inflation as the price paid for "our becoming a more humane society."
According to those who hold this view, a series of social policies, desirable in and of themselves, reduced the variety and flexibility of responses to price increases so that these went up and up instead of up and down. If security, humanity, and (less) suffering, to name a few of the policy objectives mentioned, lead to what the reporter quoted Arthur Okun, the eminent economist, as calling "a chronic disease," which, Amitai Etzioni, the sociologist, added, "is threatening the psychological safety of people," and which the reporter concluded is "endangering the nation's social fabric," evil may indeed come out of good.
CRITERIA FOR CONSIDERING PROGRESS
What do these abstruse considerations have to do with progress and public policy? Everything. Is progress to be achieved by interaction or cogitation, a single mind or many, spontaneity or control? Is progress to be judged by process or by result, by whether it has followed the cogitators' initial design, or by whether conditions are better or worse than they once were? Even if progress has occurred according to some criterion, the causal connection is not necessarily self-evident. Has it occurred according to design or despite it?
Societies can interact but they cannot plan; only individuals can do that. What are called individualistic theories are in this sense misnomers. For it is only through social interaction that the preferences of individuals are known and valued. Collectivism, by contrast, contains an individualistic theory of decision--cogitation by a central supermind on behalf of others. Individualistic theories argue for the superiority of social interaction whereas collectivist theories are based on the superiority of a single supermind.
Summing up this tour of the horizon of ideas about progress, the men of the French Enlightenment believed that by stripping away the myths and superstitions of the past and by replacing them with an education based on science, mankind's essential morality would be set free. Enlightenment was then supplemented by evolution. To the learning of individuals was added the wisdom of the species. Each individual would benefit from the knowledge of others, about which he could not (and fortunately did not need to) know. There was coordination but without a coordinator. Some of the newly enlightened saw a benevolent social intelligence at work in the economy so that private interests willy-nilly produce public good whereas others placed this ultimate design in government, where professing public interests led to private good. The contradiction has never been resolved.
Education was the pathway to success. Accordingly, public officials with ever higher education should be more competent than people like them were before. Whose knowledge about whom--citizens about their own circumstances or experts about other people's--would matter most was unclear. Whether central controllers could be more competent than their societies was a question without an answer.
Even if they were not, the significance of evolution was that there existed a process for selecting good programs and discarding bad ones. Government was not only supposed to grow quantitatively but qualitatively as well. That sheer size might cripple quality was not considered, for with size went wealth. Growth of government was presumed to proceed apace with (not apart from) growth of society.
In the past, partisans of progress expected risk to be countered by resilience. Each generation would not only be richer than the one before; it would also be more resilient in the face of new challenges. It was not necessary, therefore, for each generation to pay all the costs of rapid technological change. These could be left to the future on the assumption that it would be more capable. Without faith in progress, without the belief that deficits would be made up by development, few would venture so far so fast. All of these conditions of progress as it has been understood--edu--tion, selection, growth, resilience--have then subject to severe challenge by experience with big government.
BIG GOVERNMENT AND LITTLE PROGRESS
By "big" I mean (1) large historically relative to the private sector; (2) large absolutely compared with past programs; and (3) large increase in number of programs, (4) in their diversity, and (5) in their impact on people's lives. Difficulties may arise along any of these dimensions.
Think of public programs as spheres existing in policy spaces. When these spaces are unoccupied, new programs have only their own consequences to consider. As these programs grow larger and are joined by others, they bounce off of one another. The larger the number of big programs, therefore, the more they bang into others, the more varied and indirect their consequences become. A new income maintenance program, for example, would have far-reaching effects on housing, consumption, transportation, and medical care, and far more than can be recounted here. The result is that complexity overcomes theory. Ability to control consequences by program design diminishes as unanticipated consequences increase. Even as available knowledge accumulates at a steady pace, the point is, the knowledge needed for large programs in big government grows by leaps and bounds. There is progress in understanding but retrogression in public policy.
Past progress, moreover, creates future problems. Just as yesterday's pneumonia victim is today's geriatric problem, overcoming easy difficulties may leave government stuck with intractable problems. The medical inflation we suffer from today is a direct result of subsidizing hospital construction, pouring money into Medicaid and Medicare, encouraging medical insurers to push comprehensive coverage, and otherwise flooding the medical market with money, thereby driving up prices. New programs--cost containment, second opinions on surgery, restriction of hospital beds, on and on--become necessary in order to cope with past consequences. When programs get big, involving millions of people and billions of dollars, they become such a large part of their sectors of policy that, by their very presence, they alter its outcomes.
The larger government grows, the more policies become their own causes. The more government does, the more it needs to fix what it does. The larger government gets, the less it responds to events in society, and the more it reacts to the consequences of its past policies. In an era of big government, policies increasingly become their own causes.
Just as any football coach knows that victories are in part a function of scheduling weak instead of strong opponents, capacity to control public policies depends on what one tries to do. The justification of big government must be that it does grand things. The upshot is that government undertakes tasks that no one knows how to accomplish--raising the cognitive abilities of deprived children, reducing crime and recidivism rates, and improving health. No matter how much money is spent, reading, health, and recidivism rates do not improve because there is no known way of doing these things. (By the way, Europeans are no more successful than Americans; they just don't advertise their failures as much.) A characteristic feature of all such programs is that change resides within the individual, not within government. Where governments seek to change their own behavior, the variable over which they have the most control, they sometimes succeed. The radical reorientation of priorities from defense to social welfare is evidence of that. But where government seeks to alter deep-seated human behavior, it often fails. Health, education, and welfare speak eloquently on this subject.
If it cannot do what it says, what does big government do? What it can. Government governs by input--the resources it controls. It pours money over problems as a sign of good intentions. It reorganizes itself endlessly. It tries everything at least once and some things, like tying welfare to work, many times. This is how the widespread impression of change for its own sake is created.
When programs do not work at all or as well as they might, expectation is that efforts at error detection and error correction take place. Efforts there are, but accomplishments are something again. Actually, error correction goes on all the time; it is just that the solution is almost always larger than the problem.
If evolution were accompanied by devolution, the size of problems might be reduced to an intelligible scope. And if evolution took place in the midst of competition, the politically or economically fittest might survive, leading to public approval. Instead, what you see is what you get: the Dinosaur Syndrome operates so that every solution increases the size of programs without simultaneously increasing the intelligence of those who design and administer them.
This size syndrome operates according to well-known principles. Small errors are easy to correct but difficult to detect because it is hard to trace consequences to a multitude of possible causes among innumerable governmental programs. Large errors are easy to detect but difficult to correct because so many people and programs are connected to them that the effort appears disproportionate to the result.
How is opposition to large-scale change, requiring numerous adustments in related programs, overcome? Decreasing size worsens internal competition by setting off a struggle for resources. The trouble with competition is that you can lose. Increasing size has happier internal consequences; everyone gets more as change is exchanged for growth. The inexorable collective consequence is giant government.
No better illustration of the dependence of change in public policy upon growing larger can be found than in social welfare. The principles are well known. No group once having received benefits may be denied; no level of benefits once raised may be lowered; with a choice between maximizing eligibles versus minimizing ineligibles, supporting the deserving is preferable to denying the undeserving. Notice that no change other than increasing income is compatible with these conditions, which do not permit decreasing either benefits or beneficiaries. Consequently, change in welfare policy can only be achieved by simultaneously raising benefits and broadening classes of beneficiaries. (When insiders talk about "upgrading" benefits, so that all receive the highest levels or "overlapping" categories, so that no one who might be entitled is left out, they are putting these principles into operation.) Since perfecting programs by cutting categories or benefits is not allowed, reordering program elements can only be accomplished within a larger matrix--more benefits and more beneficiaries. Progress appears to be guaranteed; no beneficiary is allowed to be worse off while some are bound to be better off.
A sad side of this situation is that size is incompatible with equality. Put differently, the original motive behind welfare policy--redistributing income to increase equality--is at odds with increasing size. Why this should be so is one of those entirely obvious observations that is perhaps too evident to be noticeable. When programs originate, they're designed to meet a need. A relatively small group is targeted to receive aid. Since the cash comes from the general population of taxpayers, people of plenty, so to speak, are paying for the poor. This is how programs begin but not how they end. Either the original beneficiaries want more money, or previously uncovered groups want to be included.
The way to do this, which adds to initial support, is to have large benefits for a broader array of people. When this process has run its course, however, there are many more beneficiaries from more diverse social groups receiving higher levels of benefits. The people paying and the people receiving, though by no means identical, have come to resemble each other much more than they did before. Naturally, when proponents of redistribution check out these programs, they discover that their early egalitarian impulse has been much attenuated. The broader the social base and the higher the benefits, the less egalitarian the program. The end result is that though ever larger amounts are spent on ever larger numbers of recipients of welfare programs, there is less reduction of inequality.
"Learning" might be thought of as rules for retaining the best and discarding the worst of old solutions while trying on new ones. The process of learning prevents piling up of all solutions (old and new, good and bad) by establishing processes within which all have to compete because not all can survive at the same level. Just saying what we mean by "learning" is sufficient to make us uneasy, for we are aware, without quite saying so, that there is movement up but not out. Somehow the system does not discard but changes only by growing larger. Size substitutes for selection. Progression (one thing following another) prevails over progress (one thing improving another).
Why, in a period of enlightened social programs, in which huge sums are spent to right social wrongs, is there progression but not progress? Solutions create new problems faster than they solve old ones. Problem creation overtakes problem solution. Knowledge required to control public policy grows geometrically whereas under. standing of them increases only arithmetically. The ability to measure failure ("evaluation," it is called) leaps ahead of capacity to cause success. Since people who give consent to public policies are often the same ones who are unwilling or unable to change their own behavior; they have every reason to know that particular programs are not working. Selection, citizens see, has given way to collection. This was not, needless to say, the way the system was supposed to work.
The radical reorientation of political philosophy by the framers of the American Constitution embodied a mixed idea of political progress. By the work of their own hands and minds, Americans would be able to create the political institutions under which they would govern themselves. This optimism about institutions was matched by pessimism about human nature. Motives were not to be made moral. In number 10 of The Federalist Papers, Jaimes Madison emphatically rejects this possibility. Individuals will always be tempted to act adversely to others; it is the task of government not to deny human nature but to mitigate its worst aspects. Interest is to be turned against interest. Institutions are to be arrayed so as to encourage cooperation on common grounds and obstruction on actions adverse to others. Put into the systems simile of John von Neumann, the framer's belief was that institutions would interact so that the whole was more reliable (and, the framers would add, more just) than any of its parts.
Instead, big government has gone just the opposite way. By seeking to make each part superreliable, that is, by attempting to guarantee material progress to each and every part, it has reduced the reliability of the whole. The redundancy, the surplus resources, the resilience of the whole--all have been used to prevent any of the parts from suffering. Hence the only element in danger or failing is the whole.
MAKING PROGRESS POSSIBLE
Contemporary critiques of public policy are parodies of progress. Insisting that government move simultaneously in opposite directions is stultifying. Insisting that services be supplied and that people are becoming too dependent on government leaves no way out. Promoting safety and environmental measures while condemning decreased productivity is a paradox not a policy. Insisting that immense amounts be spent on income transfers while condemning the results as inegalitarian efforts to buy support increases anger without insight. These are not criticisms of public policy but condemnations of democratic ament, which is programmed to fail no matter what it does.
There are two ways to do better--change the criteria and improve performance--and I propose we do both. The idea that problems are solved should give way to the notion that man-made solutions also create man-made problems. Policies do not succeed so much as they are superseded. It is not policy resolution but policy evolution that should be our concern. How well, we should be asking, have we detected and corrected our errors? More to the point, are we better able to learn from today's errors than we were from yesterday's?
Thinking that social ills are puzzles that can be solved instead of problems that may be alleviated or eventually superseded tends to make us despondent when these ills do not yield to our ministrations. A good comparison is to do something, as opposed to nothing, and then evaluate the result. The rub is that you do not know whether some other action might have been better or worse. A better comparison is to contrast the problems we have now with those we had before. Instead of thinking of permanent solutions, we should think of permanent problems in the sense that one problem replaces another. Then we might ask whether today's problems are more moral or more effective than the solutions that they replaced. Are today's inflated medical costs preferable to yesterday's restricted access to medical care? I think they are. The capacity of policies to generate more interesting successors and our ability to learn from them what we ought to prefer may be their most important quality.
But how is quality to replace quantity as the measure of governmental success? By imposing limits on the size of government. The problem is to make existing knowledge more adequate for proposed public policy. The objectives sought and the intellectual resources available to achieve them should be brought into greater consonance. Whereas incentives inside government favor error protection, they should be altered to favor error correction. Selection should overtake size as the prevailing principle in government. And when crises occur, the new streamlined model should serve us better than the cumbersome creature we have come to know in recent times. Without going into detail, limiting the sheer size of government, for a time if not forever, would enforce selection. As soon as subtraction becomes part and parcel of decision making, government, if I am permitted a little rhetorical license, should look less like a dinosaur and more like a dolphin.
This essay is from Progress and Its Discontents, edited by Gabriel A. Almond, Marvin Chodorow, and Roy Harvey Pearce (University of California Press). Copyright © 1982 The Regents of the University of California. Reprinted with permission from the publisher. Do not reprint without permission.
