China seems to do a decent job of it. Why can't we?

I've been thinking about this too: why aren't we able to run safe political experiments?

We're missing guardrails to allow safe experimentation and we're missing institutions to provide affordances.

I think the difficult bit is figuring out how to seperate the goodness of centralized decision shaping and the badness of centralized power accumulation.

Just remove billionaire caste with massive influence on politics and society

This thread from yesterday feels relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48746445

"Society" (i.e. northern European and Anglophone) doesn't want to be improved.

The article gives examples of situations where projects have failed, and states a solution.

> The [solution] is to organize the work into the smallest possible learnable chunks and continuously alternate between doing and learning.

It would be more convincing if the article gave examples of where that solution had been tried and succeeded. I mean this must have been tried somewhere, surely.

In general we don't have a good system design thinking around politics and organizing society.

I think back to the first covid lockdowns. All of society was reorganized in a matter of weeks! Oil is worth negative money if they don't make us consume it! Work from home became mainstream, it turns out all those people with anxiety disorders or pain management issues could in fact participate in society! Generous payments were made for people who couldn't work, with no concern about who will pay for it!

The harsh reality is that all governments could solve most problems easily, they just couldn't be bothered.

Governments do run experiments sometimes, quite a lot of experiments on UBI have been run for example and we have good knowledge on whether its introduction would improve society. But I don't feel like leadership particularly cares about evidence and the right thing, they are far more idealogical than that and tend to gravitate towards policy based evidence from thinktanks and other powerful sources that produce bad science but the results they want to see.

The populace doesn't have much in the way of alternative choices for politicians that would follow the results of actual experiments nor fund them, its not really an option being offered, I think partly because its a tough sell compared to "we will do X". "We will test a variety of options and then do the best" requires more trust and its a low trust environment.

The fundamental issue with this is that many problems have a time/energy/financial threshold for success. Trying to tackle such a problem with incremental iterative solutions will consistently fail, as each individual iteration will fail.

This is most obvious when network effects are present (e.g. local immunisation efforts vs country-wide immunisation), but it's surprisingly common in other government-related areas like welfare, childcare, social security etc.

Edit: Another comment has reminded me that affordable public transport is the perfect example of this: Incrementally building out a public transport system will almost always fail, as the initial lines (be they buses, light rail, etc) will typically not be successful enough to justify the cost of building the line. If, instead, a system is built out universally and simultaneously, the utility (and thus income) of each line increases due to the interconnected nature of the network.

It doesn't work because politicians are not allowed to admit failure. A politician who admits that they tried something, no matter how small, and it didn't work, is fish food. This means there is no difference in downside, for the politician, between going all in on a big decision with huge risk versus taking baby steps. The politician is dead no matter what. They either keep claiming the bad decision was a good one in the hope that something turns up, or eventually resign or get voted out. But if they ever dare to publicly change their point of view in the presence of new evidence, they are accused of the worst crime a politician can commit. They are a "flip-flopper."

This is why I left The Netherlands. They have been working on laws for both self employment and unrealized capital gains for the past ten years and in the meanwhile have implemented some unworkable “temporary laws”.

Just implement good laws, do it right once. Yes it will hurt to not have a smooth transition but it’s better than having meetings about it for ten years.

It's weird that this article doesn't even attempt to grapple with the reason why governments can't run big policies as experiments and cancel them if they fail:

Every time the government hires a group of people to do X, that automatically creates a class of people who:

1. Depend on the government continuing to do X for their livelihoods

2. Are experts in X and know far more about it than any government official

This creates an automatic constituency that will fight tooth and nail to keep X going no matter what. And step one of that fighting will be to make sure that the official report answering the original research question "Did X work?" will never be a clear "No."

And God help any politician that ignores the official report and cancels X anyway. Now the problem that X was intended to solve is entirely their fault, and there's an army of X experts running to every media outlet in the country making sure the general public knows it!

The thing is, there is no hive mind called "society". Everybody works in their own interest. Always, and in every "society".

Individual workers work on failing initiatives as long as they get paid. The outcome of the initiative may be bad for "society". But was it good for the individuals working on it? Maybe they got paid well. Maybe they enjoyed the work? Maybe the work was easy because they knew that it would fail anyway, so they didn't have to put much effort into it?

Maybe it was also good for the management or politicians? Maybe it was a step up in their career. And maybe, if they could jump ship before the failure became obvious, they could climb up the ladder to get to an even better position? You can always blame your successors for ruining the project.

And maybe it was good for whoever ordered it? If it's a local project, maybe they got subsidies from federal government bodies, and they don't even care whether it succeeds, as long as it created employment and the illusion of progress? Or if it's a private project, maybe they just tried a moon shot that, if it fails, was useful as a tax write-off?

In real life, there are so many layers to a 'failed' project. It can be a failure for some and a success for others. And those for whom it is a success will defend it, maybe even deceive to keep it running.

1. An airplane crashes, everyone dies. Clearly a bad thing. Not so quick. For the funeral industry this means additional business, a good thing. And this is true for a LOT of things, they are not good or bad, right or wrong, their judgment depends on perspective and personal preferences.

2. Which means that there is generally no policy that makes everyone happy. So you need a party with a program that aims at finding compromises that are acceptable for everyone.

3. But nobody will vote for such a party. Why would you vote for a party that gives you 50 % of what you want if there is a different party that is more aligned with your views and preferences and promises to give you 90 % of what you want?

4. In consequence the political direction tends to hop between extremes instead of settling on compromises. One group gets really unhappy with the current situation, shows up for elections, votes their party into power, moves the situation into the direction of a different extreme, until others get unhappy enough to start the process all over again.

5. Even in political systems where [sometimes] a coalition of parties exercises the power and they are forced to compromise, the outcome is all but ideal. Things move slowly because finding compromises is hard if you do not really want to compromise. Voters look down on the party they voted for because they are not delivering what they promised but only compromises.

I guess the moral of the story is that the voters have to realize that their view is not the only valid one and that voting for compromises would probably yield better outcomes than voting for extremes and either going in that direction for some time until turning around or maybe arriving at a forced compromise that no one voted for.