People often attribute the government's inability to solve a problem even after throwing billions of dollars at it; as a sign of incompetence. While there is plenty of incompetence within government; I think the 'Preserve the Problem' response is mostly to blame.
If we 'solved' crime, homelessness, drug use, poverty, etc.; then budgets would decrease and political power would diminish. Those in charge of solving the problem often have the least incentive to do so.
Problems like those don’t just get “solved” one time. They require ongoing maintenance to keep levels low/manageable. If that isn’t understood by those in government, I would say that is a level of incompetence.
This can play out in a couple ways. People can avoid solving the problem, because they think at that point the work is done forever. This is incorrect. People can also be scared (for good reason) that whoever is in charge will mistakenly assume no maintenance is needed after “solving” a problem and let everyone go. This would be incompetence in leadership.
I see both of these things play out on a smaller scale at work all the time. We keep solving the same problems, because ever time it’s “solved” people move on to new projects the upkeep falls behind, and the problem grows again.
I'm genuinely curious about even a hypothetical more detailed example of how some group would go about preserving a problem like homelessness, even unintentionally. I can't wrap my mind about how it would actually happen beyond simplistic sayings.
I live in Portland, OR where we have a large homeless problem and I continually hear that the groups being given money to help are incentivized to keep homelessness high for their own purposes. Like, obviously people who are paid like to keep getting paid but how would they go about making this happen when their job is the opposite?
> how some group would go about preserving a problem like homelessness, even unintentionally
Simplistic version: San Francisco spends roughly $100,000/year on each homeless person. In services, salaries for people working on it, rent for office buildings etc. I am willing to bet many of these people would not be homeless if we just gave them $100,000/year without all the middle bureaucracy layers.
In the homelessness example, it's not so much that the programs and groups want to justify their continued existence (though that might be happening too). It's that the programs themselves incentivize more of the problem. When they give things to homeless people, such as food, shelter, clothes, social services, even needles and a "safe place" to get high in some cases, and often with few or no conditions, they make being homeless more tolerable. Word gets around, and people who could not feasibly be homeless where they are are drawn to Portland because they will get more support there.
None of those things make homelessness appealing in any absolute sense. Like, if people had a (reasonable-to-them) path to getting a home, the vast majority would go for it even if there were a bunch of services available.
The real answer is that the electorate is vehemently opposed to providing paths like that if those paths feel even remotely like "unfair handouts". Votes hate that idea even if it would be empirically cheaper. We collectively preserve the problem of homelessness because we feel like people who can't/won't work deserve to be unhappy, because we believe that we need the threat of homelessness to coerce people into working, because we believe people on drugs/etc are undisciplined and immoral, because... well, you get the idea.
> would go about preserving a problem like homelessness
My state chose to outlaw homelessness [0] and to make it illegal for cities & counties to offer places to lawfully camp unless the campsites are basically enough to be KOA Campgrounds.
Actually solving homelessness is politically unacceptable, therefore it will be criminalized & preserved.
You start by fixing the problem of people sleeping on benches and in tents. Then you go to those in cars, then those crashing on a couch, then those living 8 to a house, then families with small places, and so on. What the problem is keeps expanding until the resources allocated to it are spent.
Does anyone within the system genuinely feel threatened by the idea that something like "crime" can be "solved" to the point that they're avoiding solving too much crime? Same logic for the others.
The article is written from the perspective of a business / management consultant, rather than a public policy shop perspective. In general, I think social problems move slowly, and solving them in a three year business plan isn't realistic. You'll see many agencies use a version of Mayne's Framework or Contribution Analysis to report on progress for big social problems.
It's not that they perpetuate their own raison d'être, it's that they are addressing path dependent social problems, and changing a system with embedded systemic memory within a vast number of crevices (public, private, and cultural) to hide those memories is orders of magnitude more effort than creating the system at the start.
I don't think that anyone believes that some problems like crime and poverty can be solved such that it completely goes away. By 'solving', I meant take action such that the result is obvious in that the problem is greatly diminished.
And yes, I do think that individuals and departments feel threatened that they will be impacted if something like that actually happened.
It's not quite that black and white. You have fixed amount of policing resources and it goes to the most impactful crimes. If crime goes down then they start caring about petty stuff. If it goes back up then they stop.
This applies more directly to something like foster care. My state is going through a budget crisis and anecdatally the result is significantly fewer kids coming into and remaining in care. It moves at the margins so a borderline case that might have resulted in removal before now doesn't.
As you note it's unlikely that some problems can be completely solved. But our resource allocation is mostly fixed or varies based on circumstances beyond whatever problem is being solved.
This is exactly what "defund the police" is (IMO) trying to say. The justice system (really it extends to the courts, the law itself, etc.) we have is corrupt. To really solve the problem that currently-existing policing purports to solve means scrapping it altogether and starting fresh, with fresh people, culture, goals, and processes.
It's going to be a much more granular detail than all of crime. If your job is to investigate counterfeited 27B-6 forms, you are going to be threatened by that form moving to being filed digitally with cryptographic signatures.
The homeless provide a visible incentive to work harder and pay more in rent, and property owners and other taxpayers certainly engage city services (mostly enforcement) in competitive battle for the big bucks.
There’s a lot of unrecognized coercion built into the incentive structure underneath the f** y* money tiers.
About 50,000,000 hours every day are spent in incarceration, and however many salaries for corrections jobs. The same kinds of system have been around since medieval times.
I read the comment you're replying to as saying, "in the US, but other countries may have different policies that result in lower recidivism, and that might change the conclusion; maybe people aren't inherently criminally insane, but can become useful members of society, if given a chance"
Unusual? Only because we've made it so. Cruel? Nah. Locking someone up because they're criminally insane is less cruel than letting them roam the streets, both to the perpetrator and the people around them.
While preserving problems is undoubtedly a natural incentive, I think Hanlon's razor applies here. Just today I was reading Competent Bureaucracy - Rebuilding State Capacity (<https://cdn.sanity.io/files/d8lrla4f/staging/cf7eedaf5d21d27...>) on the topic of agency structure promoting success (the author has done a nice amount of work in the past - e.g. https://www.statecapacitance.pub into this history of this topic).
Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: every organization has two groups of people. The first group cares about the organization's main goal. The second group cares about the organization itself. Group two always wins, takes control, and writes the rules.
So NGO’s go from combating homelessness to being the organization about homelessness.
I sometimes think organizations should be set up with hard end dates. At which point the organization is disbanded and resources redistributed. If the problem still exists a new ord should be created with a new scope and new timeline.
I am not aware of any real tests of effectiveness of these organizations, but I am a huge proponent of progressive UBI so that the systems might actually serve people with chronic or recurring need and not simply being dragged along.
What we do as a democracy is cede the status quo to paternalistically penalizing the poor out of contention, and is pretty ethically corrupted bh it’s own effectiveness.
It becomes a "problem farming" situation. Someone who profits from a problem existing, will work to preserve the problem either consciously or unconsciously, or perhaps even just through a process of evolution.
This applies to both public and private spheres. Just as justice systems farm criminals, dating apps farm romantically frustrated people and so on.
Nice article, interesting to keep an open mind.
On "No. 0002. Preserving problems", it can happen to people too, no need for a complex system at the size of a company. I have often noticed recognized experts keeping the root of the problem unsolved because it was justifying their position. I may even have been subject of this curse. As an expert, you may know the root cause but have no incentive to solve it and it can be harder to mobilize ressources to solve the root cause than to keep solving the superficial issue. It is management or outside help role to identify and push for solving problems at their root, but it takes time and dedication because of expertise. As most of the time, incentives explain nearly everything.
In terms of the expert observation, I've seen this happen a number of times in conjunction with "not invented here" (and probably been guilty of it myself at times) - "the commodity solution doesn't do X that we want", "yeah our in house solution doesn't do x,y,z that the commodity solution does but just a little more effort and it'll be perfect"
Spoiler: neither the commodity solution or the in-house solution will ever be perfect, and you should be really self critical of whether you're building something in-house to scratch your own itch.
If you can find a commodity solution with the right extension points that's often the best solution, failing that many times it's worth accepting the limitations, rarely it's worth investing in the totally bespoke thing (outside of your core domain/proposition).
I often found the opposite can be be true, people can, for decades on end, be totally ignorant of what happens next door. When you show them the effect of their ignorance you often get something akin to the stages of grief. Definitely the anger, and with you in particular. The, 'I don't care whose fault it is, I'm not here to apportion blame' line only goes so far, especially since other managers and even the CEO might be very interested in apportioning blame. At least they are allies for the change that needs to happen
The "meta" problem is that political in-fighting usually results in local optimization everywhere. Various departments throw each other under the bus to steal budget/people/resources. When leadership finally decides to right the bus, they hire an outside consultant; this is an important signal to the departments to stop the nonsense and tell the consultant what everyone knows but doesn't want to talk about. Serious problems require serious solutions. It is much easier to say if Y department would give us X, then line go up forever.
Well, I guess both risk management and the 5 stages are inherently a human activity. Not too surprised that behaviour transfers across personal/professional boundaries. :D
> Do you think people look in the mirror and say “I’m going to be a terrible person today?”
There are plenty of people who are motivated by hurting/harming their "enemies". You may have heard them brag "own the libs", or similar rhetoric, while doing something objectively terrible.
Everyone rationalizes their emotional responses. Hangry. Rush-hour impatience in traffic. If you can avoid it, never appear before a judge just before lunch or the end of the day.
There's a 0th: empathy. They want to hear you say you heard them, hear you say the problem is a problem, and have you say the problem is making things harder.
The cool thing about this one is that you don't even have to understand what they said, just learn how to repeat it back to them with a sad look on your face.
in any case, as a hard core problem solver who is currently overwhelmed with problems
I am bieng forced into no choice paragmatic responses. where I have lost any reserve capacity, deflect, move, deny a problem and get some rest, eat, shave the yak, before rejoining the fray with enough energy to perform is just part of the routine now.
ie: triage or go under, which may be habit forming
The company for which I work seems to be run by engineers. When learning to be an engineer you're taught that doing nothing is always a valid option. In Army leadership courses we were taught that ANY decision is better than NO decision.
My company is stifled by a bunch of engineers in leadership positions who always choose to defer up the chain rather than make a decision themselves.
The most common response I see is "unfortunately this problem is impossible for us to fix because I can't be bother.. err I mean because of these technical reasons. Yes definitely that."