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Complexity

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Frustration with the leftist fools who don’t understand the knowledge problem:

Mr. Bouie insists that he is not simply trying to make an excuse for the president’s revealed incompetence in sundry matters, but of course that is precisely what he and other apologists for the administration are doing. If they were really interested in complexity as such, then they would bring it up on the front end of the policy debate, rather than on the back end.

I’ve seen this happen so many times that every other policy debate looks to me like an ancient rerun of Three’s Company: Do you think there’ll be a comic misunderstanding in this episode, too? It unfolds like this: Politicians on the Barack Obama model promise that they will muster their native intelligence and empirical evidence to bring order to, e.g., the health-care industry, through the judicious application of regulation. People like me tell them that the effects of such regulation are almost certainly going to be other than what was intended, because such markets are too complex to be understandable, predictable, or steerable, even in principle. Even if every bureaucrat who touches health care or the labor market has the brain of an Einstein and the soul of a St. Thomas Becket, it will not turn out the way it is intended. And then, when it doesn’t turn out as intended, Jamelle Bouie et al. protest that the toldya-so chorus “betrays an ignorance of the size and complexity of the federal bureaucracy.”

And they never even consider the question: If the federal bureaucracy is so vast and complex that its behavior cannot be adequately managed, how is it that the phenomena that the bureaucracies are tasked with managing—orders of magnitude more complex than the bureaucracies themselves—are supposed to be manageable? To consider the question with any intellectual rigor is to accept real, meaningful, epistemic limits on what government can do.

Can’t have that. It doesn’t allow them to run other peoples’ lives.

9 thoughts on “Complexity”

      1. Nope. If you’ve understood the knowledge problem, then Leftist solutions to anything are obviously incorrect. All those Leftist solutions – like, say, Obamacare – run headlong into the knowledge problem. There’s no getting around it, unless you’re in the habit of arguing even when you know you’re wrong.

        1. There are plenty of leftists who are aware of the knowledge problem, they just don’t see it as an argument-ending silver bullet.

          There’s no getting around it

          Sure there is. Your understanding of the knowledge problem would imply that European countries must be terrible places to live, since they rely so much on central planning. It would imply that Communist China with its Five Year Plans must be incapable of rapid economic growth. But in reality that isn’t the case — the median quality of life in Europe is very good, and China has boomed. There must be more to the story than the knowledge problem.

          1. Portugal, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain: besides being European, what do all these countries have in common? Bankruptcy.

            China’s “boom” is artificial. Sure, the government pumped lots of money into construction of empty cities. Now what? They’ve flooded the housing market and now that well is dry. I suppose they could continue building empty cities, and hope that people buy the apartments, but they’ve already gotten as much investment as they’re going to get.

      2. No. Claiming that the old USSR or Castro’s Cuba wasn’t “true socialism/communism” because they were/are repressive regimes is the no true Scotsman fallacy.
        Pointing out that the Left’s solutions always ignore the knowledge problem is just acknowledging reality.

        1. To put Ed’s comment in No True Scotsman form:

          Ed: Leftists don’t understand the knowledge problem.
          Jim: Lots of leftists understand the knowledge problem.
          Ed: They obviously don’t truly understand it; if they did they wouldn’t be leftists.

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