Yeah. I work in municipal development and people think we’re just a bunch of officious pricks making people do unnecessary paperwork.
Things you don’t think about can kill people. Yeah - you don’t see a lot of people dying from building collapses and fires, but that’s because we make people address the complicated issues. Want to build a guesthouse? Great. We don’t care. What we do care about is that you put in a safe building and don’t grade in the floodway blocking the path of water causing the house to get carried away or diverting the natural watercourse into your neighbor’s house or the street.
Yes - you have to hire an engineer, and no, you can’t just do whatever you want because it’s your property. What you do impacts neighbor’s, the city, its infrastructure, your guests, and the next person who owns the property. It’s complicated and expensive no matter how much you contractor insists he does good work and you don’t have to worry. Contractors are liars who don’t know what the hell they’re doing half the time because they operate based on their gut and whatever is cheapest.
Yeah, let’s not fool ourselves. Civilization is difficult. There are no simple answers to getting millions of people to coexist. The answers that sound simple are usually just sweeping the difficult parts under the rug.
That said: humans are historically really good at solving complex problems. We have the capacity to address these things despite their difficulty. The problem is, like the OP says, a lot of people with tons of money and power would prefer that our aggregate problem-solving capability is directed towards complex problems that give THEM more wealth and power, rather than lifting up those with little.
I think there’s two edges to this sword. Engineering the solutions to problems can be complex and difficult, from the perspective of the bureaucrats assigned the work. Building out a rail network or setting up a central bank or establishing a universal protocol for data transmission has all sorts of challenges and nuances to it. And, as a result, people who demand large-scale, rapid reforms will often stumble over the finer details to inflict a great deal of unnecessary pain as a result.
But the broader policy questions are often more straightforward, once the propaganda has been pierced and the outcomes of given policies are made plain and apparent. You can see this most recently in the fight over AI Datacenter construction, which very nakedly benefits a handful of socio-economic insiders at the expense of virtually everyone else alive.
The twist is that outcomes of policies don’t accrue to everyone immediately on their implementation. So you can mystify the relationship between policy and outcome with effective propaganda. Trump can start a war with Iran, constricting international trade of fossil fuels, while displacing the blame for higher energy prices onto environmentalists who have been advocating de-growth and caps on consumption for decades. National media can blame the rise of domestic fascist politicians on insidious foreign actors, while the media infrastructure is gobbled up by domestic oligarchs and the national police are turned on hapless immigrant communities. Generational divides can be created and exploited among the working class, such that “The Boomers” or “The Millennials” or “The Alphas” are to blame for housing prices or wage stagnation or some culture-war bullshit distraction. And then you’ve got The Epstein Class pitting Youngs and Olds, Rurals and Urbans, Whites and Coloreds against one another when it comes time to pillage another tranche of social wealth or enclose another chunk of the commons.
Complexity can be manufactured in order to obtain consent for panaceas. And complexity can be introduced to foul up the public’s ability to see what is in their straightforward social interests.
If you ever look into how the Apartheid Government of South Africa functioned, one of their most powerful tools was to create increasingly thin micro-ethnicities and stack-ranking them in the legal hierarchy. The complexity of the apartheid system became its strength, as everyone was given a social cohort to stand atop (except the weakest and most vulnerable native peoples). Once the ANC peeled away those layers of complexity, the appeal of the Apartheid system collapsed.
Many solutions ARE complex though.
Our problem as a society is literally voting for idiots who promise simple solutions to complex issues.
Yeah. I work in municipal development and people think we’re just a bunch of officious pricks making people do unnecessary paperwork.
Things you don’t think about can kill people. Yeah - you don’t see a lot of people dying from building collapses and fires, but that’s because we make people address the complicated issues. Want to build a guesthouse? Great. We don’t care. What we do care about is that you put in a safe building and don’t grade in the floodway blocking the path of water causing the house to get carried away or diverting the natural watercourse into your neighbor’s house or the street.
Yes - you have to hire an engineer, and no, you can’t just do whatever you want because it’s your property. What you do impacts neighbor’s, the city, its infrastructure, your guests, and the next person who owns the property. It’s complicated and expensive no matter how much you contractor insists he does good work and you don’t have to worry. Contractors are liars who don’t know what the hell they’re doing half the time because they operate based on their gut and whatever is cheapest.
Yeah, let’s not fool ourselves. Civilization is difficult. There are no simple answers to getting millions of people to coexist. The answers that sound simple are usually just sweeping the difficult parts under the rug.
That said: humans are historically really good at solving complex problems. We have the capacity to address these things despite their difficulty. The problem is, like the OP says, a lot of people with tons of money and power would prefer that our aggregate problem-solving capability is directed towards complex problems that give THEM more wealth and power, rather than lifting up those with little.
I think there’s two edges to this sword. Engineering the solutions to problems can be complex and difficult, from the perspective of the bureaucrats assigned the work. Building out a rail network or setting up a central bank or establishing a universal protocol for data transmission has all sorts of challenges and nuances to it. And, as a result, people who demand large-scale, rapid reforms will often stumble over the finer details to inflict a great deal of unnecessary pain as a result.
But the broader policy questions are often more straightforward, once the propaganda has been pierced and the outcomes of given policies are made plain and apparent. You can see this most recently in the fight over AI Datacenter construction, which very nakedly benefits a handful of socio-economic insiders at the expense of virtually everyone else alive.
The twist is that outcomes of policies don’t accrue to everyone immediately on their implementation. So you can mystify the relationship between policy and outcome with effective propaganda. Trump can start a war with Iran, constricting international trade of fossil fuels, while displacing the blame for higher energy prices onto environmentalists who have been advocating de-growth and caps on consumption for decades. National media can blame the rise of domestic fascist politicians on insidious foreign actors, while the media infrastructure is gobbled up by domestic oligarchs and the national police are turned on hapless immigrant communities. Generational divides can be created and exploited among the working class, such that “The Boomers” or “The Millennials” or “The Alphas” are to blame for housing prices or wage stagnation or some culture-war bullshit distraction. And then you’ve got The Epstein Class pitting Youngs and Olds, Rurals and Urbans, Whites and Coloreds against one another when it comes time to pillage another tranche of social wealth or enclose another chunk of the commons.
Complexity can be manufactured in order to obtain consent for panaceas. And complexity can be introduced to foul up the public’s ability to see what is in their straightforward social interests.
If you ever look into how the Apartheid Government of South Africa functioned, one of their most powerful tools was to create increasingly thin micro-ethnicities and stack-ranking them in the legal hierarchy. The complexity of the apartheid system became its strength, as everyone was given a social cohort to stand atop (except the weakest and most vulnerable native peoples). Once the ANC peeled away those layers of complexity, the appeal of the Apartheid system collapsed.