Read Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better Online
Authors: Peter Schuck
†
Actually, it was a
private-sector
initiative—a series of widely read
Readers Digest
articles starting in 1952—that first highlighted smoking risks. And
private
litigation forced the industry to run health warnings three years before Congress banned tobacco ads on regulated media. Robert L. Rabin, “Reexamining the Pathways to Reduction in Tobacco-Related Disease,”
Theoretical Inquiries in Law
15 (forthcoming, 2014).
*
Consider James Q. Wilson’s observation, “One can stand of the deck of an aircraft carrier during night flight operations and watch two thousand nineteen-year-old boys faultlessly operate one of the most complex organizational systems ever created.” James Q. Wilson,
Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and How They Do It
(1989), 371.
*
A contemporary analogue might be the Federal Communications Commission’s power to free up the valuable airwave spectrum that it controls and allocates, although the spectrum is limited for technical reasons and competition for it is intense. Se Edward Wyatt, “U.S. Pushes Agencies to Free Up Spectrum,”
New York Times
, June 15, 2013.
*
The 1965 law does have its flaws. Relative to our population, the number of new admissions is now much lower than it is in many other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. I have proposed larger quotas, giving more weight to skills, and auctioning off at least some visas. See Shuck,
Diversity in America
, 123–31.
†
The 1965 law subjected Mexican and other Western Hemispheric workers to quotas for the first time, and shortly after Congress had terminated the long-standing Bracero Program that had brought many Mexican laborers here to work in recurring seasonal cycles.
‡
In practice, legal and illegal immigration are not wholly separate categories, but are linked in several ways. The tighter the legal immigration controls, the greater migrants’ incentive to enter illegally; many legal immigrants were once out-of-status immigrants; large illegal populations create pressure to accord them legal status; and so forth.
*
For example, the share price of Celera, J. Craig Venter’s private venture to sequence the human genome, collapsed in March 2000 when President Clinton announced that the genome sequence could not be patented.
PART 3
Remedies and Reprise
CHAPTER 12
Remedies: Lowering Government’s Failure Rate
T
he pages of this book are littered with scores of federal policy failures—programs that create fewer benefits than costs, are cost-ineffective, or are perversely targeted—and only a relative handful of major successes (see
chapter 11
). Even allowing for some disagreement about definitions and some of the assessments I have reported and presented, this is a deeply dismaying record. Moreover, as I noted in
chapter 1
, there are strong reasons to believe that these failures are but the tip of the iceberg—a longer book could have easily multiplied examples—and that the public increasingly senses this.
Unfortunately, this dismal record is not confined to a limited policy space or only a few policy instruments. To the contrary, the failed programs discussed in this book cover a vast range of domestic policies, as well as all of the specific policy tools discussed in
chapter 3
: grants, contracts, insurance, subsidies, regulation, and the rest. Nor are these failures marginal or insignificant. In fact, they include some of our largest, most durable, most visible, and most fiercely defended programs. Together, they account for a substantial share of total nondefense discretionary spending.
We saw in
chapter 11
that some major entitlement programs like food stamps and Social Security pensions can be counted as among government’s great achievements despite some significant fiscal, administrative, and policy design problems. We also saw that these programs tend to possess certain distinctive attributes that largely explain
their achievements, but that relatively few programs have these features or can realistically hope to adopt them. Indeed, as was noted there, demographic and fiscal trends have placed some of the successful ones at grave risk of losing the long-term solvency that underwrites their popularity and viability.
In light of this endemic failure of important federal programs in so many areas and forms, an urgent question naturally arises:
What can be done?
This is an exceedingly difficult question to answer. Indeed, even posing, much less answering, this remedial question begs many others. Two of the most basic are: What normative assumptions drive judgments about what “better” policy means? How incremental or comprehensive should the remedies be? I addressed the first question in
chapter 2
—defining the essential criteria for policy success and failure as efficiency, equity, and manageability—but the second question requires a bit more discussion. This book has shown that many, perhaps most, governmental failures are
structural
. That is, they grow out of a deeply entrenched policy process, a political culture, a perverse official incentive system, individual or collective irrationality, inadequate information, rigidity and inertia, lack of credibility, mismanagement, market dynamics, the inherent limits of law, implementation problems, and a weak bureaucratic system. But if the reasons for failure are structural, the reader then may well ask, why are the reforms that I propose in this chapter largely incremental rather than attacking these structures head-on? Are they not like bandages placed on a purulent infection?
Near the end of
chapter 1
, I defended a cautious incremental approach to reforming complex systems. Not only does political reality preclude radical change; the remorseless law of unintended consequences applies most strongly to attempts—especially when the reformers are politicians in the grip of the very failure-inducing forces detailed in this book—to alter sociopolitical structures in the face of immense complexity, opacity, uncertainty, and value trade-offs.
*
As political scientist Nelson Polsby warned, “The complexity
of the American political system may as well be directly acknowledged…. [It] stymies proposed reforms based on false analogies with simpler systems.”
1
Also cautious is Derek Bok’s magisterial, admirably balanced 2001 book, which analyzes why our government has fallen into such disrepute and how it might be fixed. Bok, a “melioristic realist” (like me; see
chapter 1
), canvasses many possible structural reforms but ends up being equivocal about almost all of them
2
—for reasons that help to explain why most durable public policies evolved gradually through a series of smaller steps rather than through comprehensive, radical lurches.
*
This is how my granddaughter is learning to walk and how our political system learns to improve policy. I shall elaborate on these points below in the “Policy Process” section.
There is another reason for caution: any serious reform proposal must be subjected to an analysis far more extensive and probing than is possible here. The analysis must clarify the proposal’s conflicting goals; adduce and scrutinize the relevant facts; predict the proposal’s downstream political and policy effects; and compare its benefits and costs to the status quo and other alternatives, all with special attention to the easily ignored costs borne by “invisible victims” (discussed in
chapter 2
); and consider any other trade-offs that it entails. This requires a deep immersion in a program’s operational details and political context by analysts with no ax to grind. Any responsible reformer, whether incrementalist or radical, should demand this.
I organize this chapter around three approaches, in declining order of generality. The first two—cultural changes conducive to better policy, and structural reforms of a constitutional nature—are each unlikely to appear on the policy horizon, albeit for somewhat different
reasons that I shall explain. The third approach, which constitutes the bulk of the chapter, is much more achievable. It proposes an array of reform ideas that could improve performance across a wide variety of policy domains, ideas whose details can of course be designed only after careful analyses of the kind just described. For fixes specific to particular programs, the reader must look elsewhere, including the endnotes attached to my discussions of those programs in earlier chapters.
CULTURAL CHANGES
In
chapter 4
, I explored ten features of American political culture (while treating an eleventh, its broad deference to market forces, separately in
chapter 7
). These features are more or less distinctive among liberal democracies, although just
how
distinctive is unimportant for present purposes. I also observed there that “our political culture is one important reason, along with others analyzed in this book, why the United States is a difficult nation to govern effectively.” Given the impediment to sound policy making posed by these cultural features, it is tempting to think that they can be changed. But as I noted there, the nature of our political culture makes this hope as unrealistic as it is understandable.
I do not believe that these features of our political culture represent past choices that are readily reversible. Quite the contrary: some of these cultural values are constitutionally inscribed and all are so deeply embedded in our national psyche that they are alterable, if at all, only slowly and at the margins, particularly since there is no evidence of any widespread popular wish to repudiate them. Nor do I contend here that these values
should
be abandoned, even on the doubtful assumption that they
could
be. To responsibly support such a change, one would first have to clarify and then assess the intricate normative and empirical trade-offs. Such an analysis far exceeds this book’s scope.
Nor are these the only obstacles to changing our political culture. A culture, after all, is not a discrete thing that can be isolated, manipulated
, and then reformed. It comes as a package, a
gestalt
, a composite of many interpenetrating beliefs, modes of thinking and feeling, patterned behaviors, and multifarious, often fluid, identities. Much of a culture is ineffable and opaque even (perhaps especially) to those who practice it. And because we only dimly understand what it “is” and how it “works” (and even that, only at a fairly high level of abstraction), we know little about how it changes, much less how
to
change it. Even attitudes about specific policy issues—abortion, gun control, and campaign finance regulation, for example—tend to evolve slowly (or not at all
3
) and in ways and for reasons that are difficult to disentangle. (Attitudes toward gay people and same-sex marriage are a striking exception to this attitudinal stability.
4
) Finally, even if we can imagine culture changing within a reasonable time frame, two questions remain that are highly relevant to our inquiry here: first, how
public policy
—as distinct from other, less instrumental, less manipulable social forces—can bring it about; and second, how certain we can be that changing a particular cultural feature (supposing that it is tractable to policy) will be good
on balance
, given that the change may sacrifice its more desirable aspects.
Of the particular cultural features identified in
chapter 4
, only four—decentralization, protection of individual rights, acceptance of social and economic inequality, and suspicion of technical expertise and official discretion—seem remotely tractable to policy-driven change. Although our political system has institutionalized decentralization in many different ways (discussed in
chapter 4
), the policy system as a whole has grown more centralized over time. (Recall the “new system” described by James Q. Wilson and John DiIulio in
chapter 1
.) Still, the advantages of decentralization and the sources of resistance to centralization are both very great, and I see no evidence that Americans are willing to forego either the advantages or the resistance. As for Americans’ obsession with individual rights, many respected commentators—beginning with Alexis de Tocqueville—have criticized it, calling for more emphasis on communal responsibilities.
5
Little has come of this critique; the rights revolution continues its way, most recently with the protection of gay people and the disabled
, albeit individualism here is often couched in communal terms, as with same-sex marriage. Social and economic inequalities have been the subject of bitter contention from our earliest days. Today, the debate over the causes, effects, and remedies for the stalled mobility experienced in recent decades is a prominent feature of our politics, with no clear resolution in sight. There are many plausible proposals to reduce these inequalities, but the logically prior question is what policies, if any, might alter public attitudes about inequalities in the first place. The answer to
this
question is not at all clear. Finally, widespread suspicion of experts and discretion shows no signs of waning, despite eloquent pleas for greater public trust.
6
And as with decentralization, a healthy skepticism in these matters is advantageous in a democracy like ours, so only a modest increase in earned deference would be desirable.
CONSTITUTION-LEVEL REFORMS
Americans may view the Constitution as a sacred document, specifying our most fundamental political principles, but it is not wholly sacrosanct—nor is it much emulated abroad today.
7
Two and a quarter centuries after its adoption, it occasions constant, countless controversies among lawyers and citizens over not just what it has been understood to mean but what it
ought to provide
. I have just explained why in a political and social system as intricate and interrelated as ours is, we should view proposals to reform our political system in its most fundamental respects with a skepticism and caution that are every bit as profound as the deep structures that would be transformed. Unforeseen consequences in such situations are not just probable; they are a certainty. And some of those consequences are likely to be as unwelcome as they are unexpected. The following discussion should be read with this caveat very much in mind.