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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
Jail time is a sure spiral into unemployment and homelessness, privations, and more jailtime.
> 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.
Notes:
0 - The crime is "unlawful camping".
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.
Often, the homeless programs provide aid to the homeless with food and clothing and health care, not necessarily to make them not homeless.
It is much harder and expensive for homeless programs to create shelters or homes. It is also difficult if not illegal to force people into housing.
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.
If this is true then a restructuring of the entire organizations might help. It seems the flaws are built in.
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.
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.
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.
A LOT of crime can be solved. A huge percentage of perps are multi-repeat perps. Putting them away permanently would solve a lot of crime.
"75% to 83% of released prisoners are arrested for a new crime" https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/2018-update-prisone...
"Solved" (heavy quotes) because instiutionalizing dozens of millions of people with no improvement is a massive crime in and of itself.
That's like those stories of LLMs saying "I fixed the vulnerability in your app" by deleting the project entirely
seems cruel and unusual…
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.
… in the US
Yes, kind of obvious from the .gov right?
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"
While I think your interpretation is possibly overly charitable, I agree my comment was unwarranted and unnecessary. I can't delete it at this point.
The interesting twist is: now what does that tell us about people who say they will cut the waste of government incompetence?
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.
Simply: the Bureaucracy exists to perpetuate the Bureaucracy.
Big Pharma is trying to preserve cancer. Wake up sheeple!
Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patie...
That report proposed three pretty reasonable approaches to this problem, and none of them were "avoid curing diseases."
Famously, a pharma company.
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.
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
Somehow made me think of every 'modern' HR department.
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.
Seems related to the four risk management strategies:
- Avoidance
- Mitigation
- Transference
- Acceptance
Sounds like the classic 5 stages ... Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.
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
There is a fourth that the author would never mention:
Hire consultants about the problem
Have unpopular solution or mitigation strategy, hire consultants, execute, blame the consultants
The pushing problems around under the guise of solving them for political gain is what corporate and government malfeasance is all about.
The better you are at the game the higher you climb!
reminds me of an old meme
> have "problem"; don't care: no problem
> … they inadvertently perpetuate the problem
“Inadvertently”? Seldom.
Do you think people look in the mirror and say “I’m going to be a terrible person today?”
They look in the mirror and say “good job playing the hand you’re dealt - keep it up!” even while what they do is objectively terrible.
Humans have an incredible capacity for rationalizing their own behavior.
> 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.
That’s definitely not “inadvertent.”
It is.
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.
A response that needs to be rationalized is sort of by definition not inadvertent
It might not be intentional but it's not inadvertent
> Do you think people look in the mirror and say “I’m going to be a terrible person today?”
Not so directly, but I do think that a lot of people don't put any effort into being a good person.
Think of the shopping cart problem. Good people return their shopping carts to the store or a cart return. Many people can't be bothered to do that.
People think "oh I'm not bad for leaving my cart in a parking spot" they think "stealing or damaging a shopping cart is what bad people do"
But they're still kinda bad people for not returning their carts. They're certainly choosing not to actively be good people.
The problems you have are solutions to the problems you don't want to admit to yourself are actually having.
Three more common ways of responding to a problem:
Weaponize it.
Study it.
Blog about it.
Not my problem - the best kind of problem.
There’s a fourth: deny
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.
My colleagues like this one.
or perhaps thats the first response?
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
Denying the problem exists is not the same.
Denying that the problem is a “problem” would be.
In the first case, the affected do nothing because there is no problem.
In the second, it’s “not a problem” because they did a thing and moved it elsewhere.
the other possibility is that the problem is somebody elses, rendering it invisible and therefor potentialy usefull in it's own right
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 person who decides owns the risk. The cost of waiting is spread across the whole team, so escalating is usually the safer move for the individual.
“Do nothing” can be a decision
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."
hug of death?