I have rambled on here on many occasions about how we all grapple increasingly badly with Complexity.
I take my hat off to Kevin Williamson over at National Review Online for this magnificent readable analysis of just that issue. He explains why failure is vital to success, and why no one person who has ever lived knows how to make a pencil - yet there pencile a-plenty are.
So many quotable lines:
When I am speaking to students, I like to show them a still from the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street in which the masterful financier Gordon Gekko is talking on his cell phone, a Motorola DynaTac 8000X. The students always — always — laugh: The ridiculous thing is more than a foot long and weighs a couple of pounds.
But the revelatory fact that takes a while to sink in is this: You had to be a millionaire to have one. The phone cost the equivalent of nearly $10,000, it cost about $1,000 a month to operate, and you couldn’t text or play Angry Birds on it. When the first DynaTac showed up in a movie — it was Sixteen Candles, a few years before Wall Street — it was located in the front seat of a Rolls-Royce, which is where such things were found 25 or 30 years ago. By comparison, an iPhone 5 is a wonder, a commonplace miracle.
My question for the students is: How is it that the cell phones in your pockets get better and cheaper every year, but your schools get more expensive and less effective? (Or, if you live in one of the better school districts, get much more expensive and stagnate?)
...
Markets work for the same reason that the Internet works: They are not organizations, but disorganizations.
More precisely, they are composed of countless (literally countless, blinking into and out of existence like subatomic particles) pockets of organization, their internal structures and relationships to one another in a constant state of flux. Market propositions are experimental propositions.
Some, such as the iPhone and the No. 2 pencil, are wildly successful; others, such as New Coke or Clairol’s Touch of Yogurt Shampoo, are not. Products come and go, executives come and go, firms come and go. The metaphor of biological evolution is an apt one, though we sometimes draw the wrong conclusion from that — Social Darwinism and all that nonsense.
I could cut and paste the whole thing. But instead I order you to read the original.
Then ponder on the fact that almost everyone taking any political decision over us does not understand what Kevin is saying.
This, by the way, is why the EU is failing. It adds all sorts of the wrong sorts of complexity in all the wrong places. This concluding passage was not written with the EU in mind, but it hits the target spot on:
They fail because they attempt to substitute a single brain, or a relatively small panel of brains organized into a bureaucracy, for the collective cognitive firepower of millions or billions of people.
Put simply, they attempt to manage systems that are too complex for them to understand. Complexity is humbling, but politics is immune to humility.
