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Making things happen in politics typically requires convincing at least some threshold number of largely disparate groups that they each stand to benefit (in so

Making things happen in politics typically requires convincing at least some threshold number of largely disparate groups that they each stand to benefit (in some tangible, direct way) from your proposal, or at least won't be harmed by it. This tends to constrain the space of possible solutions in awkward ways, as an initially simple proposal may accrete peculiar exceptions, irrelevant attachments, and other cruft until enough people are happy. If you're lucky, the final result of the process will still fulfill the purpose of the original proposal. If you're unlucky, the crufting process will have completely undermined the original intent and you'll have to either vote against your own proposal (which is embarrassing) or pass it anyway (wasting taxpayer money on all the useless cruft). That said: smart people are often prone to underestimating the complexity of problems outside of their domain of expertise, and it's easy to propose solutions when you're not the person implementing them. So it's probably a bit of both.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago
It seems based on your reply that we will never know, then, whether initial assessments of complexity were correct. If the description of a problem never matches the solution, it becomes very difficult to have a conversation about whether a solution actually addressed a problem, no? The problem mutates from it's original nature and becomes assembling and coordinating disparate groups. I note that there are many examples of solutions to problems in legislative circles done in a direct fashion -- I'm not certain this is as much a requirement of legislative solution-creation as much as a certain style of decision-making. I don't have any conclusions, just the observation that if the goal is to gain support of various groups, then it's not really about solving the initial problem any more, because with just a small number of groups it's very easy to over-constrain a solution. Very interesting. Is it a bug? Or feature?
- camccann 17y ago
  I note that there are many examples of solutions to problems in legislative circles done in a direct fashion -- I'm not certain this is as much a requirement of legislative solution-creation as much as a certain style of decision-making. Well, it's a feature of politics-in-general, not legislating as such. One could probably observe the same dynamics arising semi-spontaneously in any context where a group with a diffuse distribution of influence has to make a collective decision. It's the old "design by committee" problem, just writ very large when we're talking about the US federal government. Very interesting. Is it a bug? Or feature? That's more of a value judgment than I'm prepared to make. I'd call it an inevitability, for decisions made in certain environments.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

It seems based on your reply that we will never know, then, whether initial assessments of complexity were correct. If the description of a problem never matches the solution, it becomes very difficult to have a conversation about whether a solution actually addressed a problem, no? The problem mutates from it's original nature and becomes assembling and coordinating disparate groups. I note that there are many examples of solutions to problems in legislative circles done in a direct fashion -- I'm not certain this is as much a requirement of legislative solution-creation as much as a certain style of decision-making. I don't have any conclusions, just the observation that if the goal is to gain support of various groups, then it's not really about solving the initial problem any more, because with just a small number of groups it's very easy to over-constrain a solution. Very interesting. Is it a bug? Or feature?

camccann 17y ago
I note that there are many examples of solutions to problems in legislative circles done in a direct fashion -- I'm not certain this is as much a requirement of legislative solution-creation as much as a certain style of decision-making. Well, it's a feature of politics-in-general, not legislating as such. One could probably observe the same dynamics arising semi-spontaneously in any context where a group with a diffuse distribution of influence has to make a collective decision. It's the old "design by committee" problem, just writ very large when we're talking about the US federal government. Very interesting. Is it a bug? Or feature? That's more of a value judgment than I'm prepared to make. I'd call it an inevitability, for decisions made in certain environments.