Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better (27 page)

Poor information systems have also hobbled immigration enforcement and policy making. For decades, Congress has chastised the immigration enforcement agency for continuing to rely on paper-based files on aliens and then often misplacing them, and also for repeatedly bungling its computerization efforts. Sometimes, the government’s ignorance is willful and self-inflicted, as with Homeland Security’s decision not to comply with a congressional demand for a reliable metric for assessing border security, a political sine qua non for a deal on immigration reform. According to the
New York Times
, officials resisted producing it “because the president did not want any hurdles placed on the pathway to eventual citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally.”
¹³

These examples, important as they are in policy terms, are merely the tip of the iceberg. Numerous federal agencies have neither digitized nor managed their own information systems competently, much
less coordinated them with those of other mission-relevant agencies and databases at all levels of government.
¹⁴
(The computer system’s failures as Obamacare operations began, discussed later in the chapter, are merely the most notable, far-reaching example.) These obstacles to well-informed federal policy are vastly magnified by the centralization in Washington of most key decisions, despite the fact that the information needed to formulate and implement them is located a universe away—in 320 million Americans whose needs, intentions, desires, and behaviors are remarkably diverse and opaque to even the most well-intentioned officials. How can central policy makers gather and aggregate all of this vastly dispersed information into effective policy?

The short answer is, they can’t—however smart they are and however hard they try. The famous Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek developed this simple fact into a body of work that, along with his more technical work on the business cycle, won him a Nobel Prize in 1974. In
The Constitution of Liberty
and other books, Hayek showed that officials’ efforts to centralize this dispersed information and then massage it into coherent policy was doomed to failure. Only markets, he argued, could elicit and process this immense amount of information and convert it into a workable “spontaneous order.” Centralized decision making would invariably, inevitably, and tragically (for the people subject to it) get it very wrong. Frustrated by the calamitous social consequences of these errors and determined to bend society’s complexity to their will, officials would need to increase their power so as to control and rationalize this disorder (as it seemed to them), which would only further distort and suppress what was in fact a stubbornly diverse and opaque complexity that is unknowable (“illegible,” in political anthropologist James Scott’s terminology) to any centralized intelligence.
¹⁵

Hayek famously depicted this cycle of centralized control, failure and frustration, redoubled efforts at centralized control, then further failure and frustration as “the road to serfdom,” and Scott’s analysis of the failures of grand state-driven “schemes to improve the human condition” (his book’s subtitle) lends empirical support to Hayek’s
road map to dystopia. (Hayek had experienced this firsthand as a refugee from the Nazi
anschluss
of Austria in the late 1930s.) Although this woeful cycle, this fateful journey to statist repression, has occurred in many societies, it is by no means inevitable—despite some conservatives’ hysterical hyperbole to the contrary. The growing power and reach of states—their often laudable but sometimes feckless efforts to improve the human condition—will never lead to anything remotely approaching serfdom in the United States or any other liberal welfare state in Europe. The slope may be slippery, but our political and social systems, our constitutions of liberty, provide many sturdy and deeply embedded footholds.
*

Nevertheless, Hayek’s analysis of the dynamics of information in complex societies remains true and profoundly important. In the remainder of this section, I shall briefly describe some applications of his analysis to our policy-making system.

Members of Congress, at the summit of our system, receive a veritable tsunami of information, but much or most of it is highly biased and selective. Their main sources—lobbyists, party organs, and staff—are self-interested, partisan, precommitted, and result-oriented, not objective problem-solvers. Members’ positions on many important issues are predetermined by their party affiliations and campaign pledges, and are usually not open to significant revision in light of new or better information. Preternaturally busy people, they typically spend most of their time on fund-raising, campaigning, subcommittee work, and constituency-tending. Consequently, they have little time to read or think deeply about issues, and in any event politicians are seldom drawn to such passive activities. Instead, they rely on cues, party and staff summaries, and various politics-specific heuristics and routines for processing information and voting. Some of Congress’s institutional staff organizations—the Congressional Budget Office, the Library of Congress, and the Government Accountability Office (GAO)—do provide objective, high-quality research support and
analysis, and indeed I propose in
chapter 12
to expand their resources, but members’ scarce attention is usually elsewhere.

Finally, an increasing amount of legislation is bundled into enormously complex omnibus bills often covering diverse subjects. This practice, which the majority ordinarily uses to advance its political-tactical purposes, can facilitate enactment of spending and other bills, but it adversely affects members’ ability to inform themselves about the legislation they are considering. (Most state legislatures limit this practice through single-subject rules.) It reduces their ability to focus on particular portions of the omnibus measure, to deliberate fully and knowledgeably, and to raise penetrating questions and make useful amendments.

Administrative agencies, in contrast, can conduct more systematic information-gathering, careful deliberation, and detailed analysis of policy issues.
¹⁶
Their staffs, at least, tend to be more technocratic and apolitical in their training and orientation. Moreover, some agencies fund a great deal of policy-oriented research. As noted in
chapter 3
, they also are usually the best loci within the government of fine-grained policy analysis, reflecting their more detailed focus and ability to elicit input on the writing and implementation of regulations from the interests that will be most significantly affected.

That said, several factors severely constrain agency information-gathering and analysis. As Charles Wolf noted, even the most systematic of agencies lack the quality and quantity of policy-relevant information that the supply and demand side of markets quickly, cheaply, and automatically generate, integrate, and assess. Instead, as also noted in
chapter 3
, agencies must rely for their policy information on adjudication (notoriously slow and narrowly confined to the particular parties and facts in the litigation), on rule making (usually better at generating valuable policy information, but also so protracted that the information often becomes stale before the policy makers can actually deploy it), and on staff research efforts (limited by budget and narrow peripheral vision). And although agencies are required to collect performance data by laws like the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act (GRPA) and the 2010 GPRA Modernization
Act, these reports often remain unused and irrelevant, perhaps because those laws did not take into account the wide diversity of agency operations and because agencies seldom collect performance data in a systematic fashion—a failure much criticized by the GAO itself.
¹⁷
Especially lamentable is the dearth of information about the performance of government-funded medical procedures, where the now conventional call for evidenced-based medicine almost always goes unanswered.
¹⁸

Relatively well-organized and well-funded private groups are ordinarily in the best position to generate the information, much of it self-interested, that Congress and the agencies need to do their policy work. These groups operate at the core of civil society—ordinary people, business firms, media, communities, scientists, markets—and thus know more about the diverse sources of valuable policy-relevant information “out there.” Even environmental, consumer, and other “public interest” groups that are not well-funded often command other valuable resources that can influence agency policy makers and policy outcomes, including a patina of widely shared ideals, an image of selflessness, and access to important politicians, information, and media. This may be the best explanation for why Head Start, an immensely popular and well-connected program, has flourished politically for so many decades. Its budget grew from about $400 million in 1968 to almost $8 billion in 2011, including under Republican administrations.
¹⁹
Yet many carefully conducted studies have consistently found that its initial beneficial effects largely dissipate within a few years; some effects do not survive the summer breaks. According to the Brookings Institution’s educational policy center, a government study published in 2010 demonstrated that children’s attendance in Head Start has no significant impact on measureable outcomes such as their academic, socio-emotional, or health status at the end of first grade.
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When the government then extended the study to third graders, it found the same dissipation of benefits.
²¹
(Nobel economist James Heckman’s research may help to explain why; it suggests that even Head Start begins years too late to help disadvantaged children.
²²
Preschool programs in other countries have also had mixed
results, with no clear patterns explaining why some succeed more than others.
²³
) Nor is Head Start alone in these dismal results for such efforts: the Even Start Family Literacy Program failed to improve child and parent reading, at a cost of over $1 billion before it was finally defunded; the Scared Straight programs that bring at-risk youngsters into prisons to learn about what might await them actually increase their criminal behavior; and 21st Century Community Learning Centers fail to improve academic outcomes but increase suspensions and other forms of discipline, yet receive more than $1 billion a year in federal funds.
²⁴
A July 2013 Brookings research report on pre-K programs finds little or no success in random assignment studies.
²⁵

At the bottom of the information chain are judges, who typically know little or nothing about the policy considerations, technical concepts, and political values that underlie the legal texts that they review. As lawyer-generalists, they are untrained in such matters. They instead rely almost entirely on their common sense, their inexperienced law clerks, and especially the tendentious briefs that opportunistic lawyers on each side submit, briefs that are often designed to conceal information damaging to their client’s cause rather than call attention to it. This ignorance by federal judges is especially worrisome because they increasingly use preemption and federal common law doctrines to shape legal and policy domains that were always governed by state law and informed by states’ in-depth expertise and experience. Examples are domestic relations, intergenerational wealth transfers, insurance, and torts, to name just a few.

This account of information flow to policy makers bears a disturbingly close resemblance to the theoretical predictions made by Hayek and Wolf about the poor fit between the complexity of social facts and the simplistic, distorted information that officials in Washington rely upon for their decisions and propagate to the public. The classic example of this problem is the official poverty index, devised back in 1963 for a different purpose and one that all experts agree, regardless of their differing views on other issues, overstates the poverty rate substantially, which misinforms the public and distorts policy choices. Experts also largely agree on how to revise the index in
line with recommendations by a National Academy of Sciences task force in 1995. Yet the government, fearing strong objections from groups whose policy positions the 1963 index favors, will probably never abandon it.
²⁶

This inability or refusal to update the misleading poverty index after a half century provides an excellent segue to the problem of governmental inflexibility.

INFLEXIBILITY

The technological, economic, political, and normative conditions that generate and define tough policy problems are not static; they often change, sometimes rapidly and dramatically. To achieve or maintain policy effectiveness, policy makers who wish to avoid irrelevance—or worse, perversity—must adapt their goals, instruments, or both to these changes. Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls this approach “antifragility,” emphasizing its special importance in complex systems.
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The government, alas, is especially ill-equipped to do this.
*
Although it may be able to act nimbly in a genuine crisis situation,
†
government (fortunately) seldom makes policy under such conditions.

Public policy is driven by public expectations, which are often created and reinforced by politicians and interest groups. Having accumulated over a long period of time, these expectations are now so deeply embedded that they seriously constrain policy choices, often predetermining outcomes that maintain a socially undesirable status quo. One example is the expectation of cheap energy, particularly gasoline and home heating fuel, resulting from our historically abundant supply of oil and natural gas. Indeed, presidential popularity ratings are far more highly correlated with gasoline price levels than with unemployment rates.
²⁸
Politically, it is almost suicidal to propose
raising federal gasoline taxes, despite strong policy reasons to do so; they have not been raised since 1993 (although some individual states have raised them).