An old ex-boyfriend once expressed the belief that climate change wouldn't be a problem -
Because we would come up with some sort of invention, or new technology, that would deal with it.
In thinking about this, what I wish I'd pointed out (well over a decade ago) is this:
That invention or new technology doesn't happen by magic.
Someone had to invest in the idea. Someone had to have the idea in the first place. An idea that probably required some STEM knowledge, which means it requires an education. Probably a lot of people with a great deal of different learning paths. These people had to have the skills, the idea, the resources... and some way of putting them in touch with the various elements needed. That is, the person with the idea has to meet or somehow know the person with the resources, and persuade them that the idea is worth investing in.
Systemic thinking. It's honestly not too different from the military. Or rather, let me put it another way.
As a platoon leader, the divide between what I do and what my platoon sergeant does is a flexible (based on people and experience) but the divide goes something like this:
The officer does all the prep and planning for the future, the NCO/PSG handles actually getting it done.
I might be coming up with the training plan to make sure our people are certified in the future, while the platoon sergeant might make sure that the training is happening today.
I might say "this tent needs to be put up", and the platoon sergeant figures out the how and gets it done.
I would have to put in the ammo request for our weapons qualification training next month. My platoon sergeant might assign a few people to go pick up the ammo.
Hmmm. That sounded clearer in my head.
As an officer, I'm concerned with making sure my people have the resources to do the job. Making sure they have the training, the supplies, the time, the people.
My platoon sergeant actually gets the job done.
There's definitely overlap, of course. A platoon sergeant might 'suggest' a new lieutenant remember to make that ammo request. An experienced platoon leader might give a little more direction on the how, but it's useful to remember the separation.
The Army says leaders "provide purpose and direction", which isn't a bad way of looking at it. They also say it's an art and a science... which is also true. There's so many books on leadership that, well, I can't possibly hope to cover everything.
"Purpose and direction" is a good start, but evaluating your course of action and adjusting it as needed is also part of it.
Or rather, you have to have good execution skills in order to go in the right direction and there's a world of difference between planning something on paper and executing it in the real world. (This is another thing I value about my military experience and subsequent jobs.)
There's a very good reason why the military operates on the KISS principle - the more complicated the plan, the more likely something will go wrong that will ruin it completely. Do some fancy maneuver that requires multiple forces arriving at a specific time and place? Good luck when one element has a vehicle break down, and another takes a wrong turn.
But lets take this back to new technology, and the resources required to develop it. I've talked before about game theory - the prisoner's dilemma and the tragedy of the commons - but it's been a while so I'll do a quick refresher.
The gist of it is that we all benefit if we cooperate on something, but the incentives for us as individuals is NOT to cooperate.
In the prisoner's dilemma, two people committed a crime together and were arrested. If they both refuse to talk, they will probably get a lighter sentence because there isn't as much evidence. If both confess, they both will get a harsher sentence. But if one confesses while the other stays quiet, then the one who confesses will get the lightest sentence of all (for cooperating with the police) while the one who stays quiet will get the harshest.
The tragedy of the commons has a similar dynamic - a village has a common area for letting their herds graze. If there are too many animals in the commons, they will overgraze and the commons won't be available any more. The village has an incentive to cooperate and limit how many animals are allowed in the commons.
But for each individual villager, the calculation is different. If everyone else holds back on adding animals to the commons, they can probably sneak one more in and everything will be fine. One more won't destroy the common area, and they can get an extra animal out of it. If nobody else refrains, then the commons is going to be destroyed anyway. You might as well add an extra animal and get what you can while the getting is good.
Figuring out how to get people to cooperate when it's in our best collective interest is quite the trick. Privatization is sometimes a good answer (iirc, privatization helped England deal with their issue with the commons. When you control the area yourself, you'd be a fool to destroy your chance at long term sustenance and will probably limit the size of your livestock to what you can safely care for.) Some situations don't easily lend themselves to that, though. Which is where I really liked Elinor Ostrom's work.
I mostly focus on the overall issue (public goods, importance of cooperation, etc) but it's important to look at some of the challenges to building cooperation.
Trust, for example. If you don't trust that anyone else will respect the agreement, then you're probably not going to cooperate. An enforcement mechanism (like government regulations, and fines for breaking them) can help build trust that people will actually cooperate, but it's not the only way.
There's a 'fear of being a sucker'. In the tragedy of the commons, if you decide to cooperate and limit how many animals you put in the commons and nobody else does - then not only do you lose the commons, you also lost the profit from the extra animal you might have snuck in. (Kickstarter allows people to be reimbursed if a project doesn't reach it's goal, and this allows people to donate without the fear of being a sucker. They either get the project they want, or they get their money back.)
There's also a problem with free loaders. If people decide that they would all benefit from some sort of public good and collectively donate to it... someone who doesn't donate to the project will still benefit from it.
Think about public roads, for example. Unless it's a toll road anyone can drive on it, regardless of whether they pay their taxes or not.
That's what the common about new technology reminds me of. If you're not the one making it happen, you're essentially free loading off the work of the ones who do.
If you want the result, you have to choose the actions that lead to that result.
I will freely admit my attitude towards a lot of things changed once I started looking at public goods this way.
Education? You like having employees that know how to read and write, don't you? Ones that can do basic math? And depending on the business, you might like having them know more advanced skills, like how to program, or accounting, or how to track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like quality and productivity. Or the expense per labor hour.
You are benefiting from their education, and much of the burden of making sure we have a pool of people with the required skills is taken on by our public education system. (Privatization might be useful in some cases, but if the government is paying the private school to educate it's still bearing the cost. And private schools can generally pick and choose who they accept, which means they don't have to deal with the more challenging students. Unless you've got a way of making sure even the poorest, most challenging children have access to a private education you're still going to need public schools. And they should be top quality.)
Roads? Even if you're entirely on the cloud, you probably order physical items. Paper, desks, whatever. The ability to easily and quickly get goods from one part of the country to another is a tremendous boost to businesses. If they were all toll roads, that would be yet another expense a new business would have to account for before launching... and the profit probably wouldn't justify the expense to some of the more obscure and out of the way locations. (Consider what the government had to do to make sure telephone lines were run to rural areas. As for the internet - I had an aunt and uncle that used dial up for far longer than the rest of us, simply because the area they lived in didn't have any other options. They finally got something faster around a decade ago. And btw... how many businesses could be run in rural areas if they had better internet access?)
Would Amazon be able to sell as much, if all the roads to rural areas were allowed to fall apart? And they couldn't get their delivery trucks to smaller towns? Or even to large cities like El Paso, if they're too far from anywhere else?
Trust and cooperation - they don't all require government action, of course. But it's easier to convince people that they're not going to be suckers if a large and well known organization with the power to enforce agreements is involved.
And as for free riders? Some of those are people without the resources in the first place. Public roads, for example, are often used by people who are too poor to pay much in the way of taxes (though as I argued above, the business still benefits. Not just in terms of sales either, but in having employees who are able to get to work on time.)
The real frustration for many are the free riders who actually do have the money. Namely all the corporations and wealthy people who scheme to get out of paying taxes. They benefit in thousands of ways, many hard to quantify, from a society that builds and maintains roads, provides education and healthcare... and they're trying to free load when they don't even need to.
It's not so much about wanting to take all their money. For me, at least. But my parents always tithed the church growing up, and I know Islam came to a similar view with the zakat... and even a similar percentage. 10%.
10% of your wealth should be given as a tithe, or zakat. I don't necessarily think it has to be to a church (especially since I think the ludicrously luxurious churches with pastors wearing luxury goods and driving luxury cars are probably not very close to God.) It doesn't even have to be to the charities I think worth giving to, but 10% is a value with a rather long history to it.
I've heard some people argue that they won't donate as much to non-profits because they expect the government to handle those issues now. Which, fine. Okay. Private donations have never really been enough to get the job done. (I hear the well off are donating around 1%? I came across an interesting article that said religious charities actually wanted the government to step in during the Great Depression, because the need was so far greater than they could serve... so okay, I don't really care if it's government, non-profit, or private so long as needs are being met without too much waste, fraud and abuse.)
But if that's the case, they really need to be paying their taxes.
Oh, and that whole bit about 'render Caesar what is Caesar's?' That should be above and on top of the 10% obligation.
I'm not a fan of forcing people to give up their money, but I am quite well aware of the historical trends whenever there's too much inequality. Whenever the wealthy and powerful become free riders and forget their obligations to society.
It isn't pretty.
But that wasn't the lesson I wanted to end on... so I'll go back to what started this all.
If you want nice things - if you want nice roads, or vaccines to a novel disease, or a pool of potential employees with the skills you need, or technology to help prevent climate change - then you have to put in the work to make it happen.
Otherwise you're just lucky that other people did the work for you.
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