While attempting an analogy for smartphone reviews, technology reviewer and journalist Marques Brownlee once made The following observations about the Porsche 911:
Have you ever heard a car reviewer describe the latest generation Porsche 911? These cars have looked pretty much the same for the past 50 years, but have gone through a bit of evolution with each new generation. And literally every time I see or read a review, they always say this. “Oh, that’s so sophisticated! This is an engineering masterpiece that took generations to complete! “It’s a formula that has been developed in the same direction for many years!”
This, in a nutshell, captures what a certain type of aspiring social engineer aims to do. A key advocate of this approach to social engineering was Karl Popper. In his book the poverty of historicismPopper advocated what he called “piecemeal social engineering.” Unlike utopian social engineering, which aims to redesign society according to grand blueprints and five-year plans, piecemeal social engineering focuses on making small, minor adjustments, learning from the results, and using that information to make new adjustments. I put it. As this process is repeated, small improvements and improvements to social systems will accumulate, improving the situation in a particular society. Popper explained it this way:
The characteristic approach of a fragmented engineer is: Although he may cherish some ideals related to society as a whole, namely its general well-being, he does not believe in a way to redesign it as a whole. Whatever his goals, he strives to achieve them through small adjustments and readjustments that can lead to continuous improvement. The fragmented engineer, like Socrates, knows how little he knows. He knows that we can only learn through our mistakes. Accordingly, he will go his way step by step, carefully comparing the results expected and achieved, always alert to the inevitable and undesirable consequences of every reform. And he will avoid reforms of a complexity and scope that make it impossible to separate cause and effect and to know what one is actually doing.
But how optimistic should we be about the prospects of this piecemeal engineering? It is widely agreed that America’s health care system is seriously flawed. But this turned out to be the result of the kind of piecemeal engineering that Popper describes. in their books We’re Here to Help: Rebooting American Healthcare, Amy Finkelstein and Liran Einav explain how this piecemeal engineering gave rise to existing systems. A problem is recognized, a policy is put in place to solve it, that policy has its own problems that lead to new reforms, and through its own reforms, new problems continue to arise that are solved by new policies. And the end result of this process is not a Porsche-style “engineering masterpiece perfected over generations.” The result is similar to someone with no understanding of home improvement attempting a DIY project, continually reorganizing and rebuilding on top of their clumsy attempts, creating a monstrous, bulky result that is both overly complex and overly vulnerable. (The previous description may be based on home DIY projects I have attempted myself. I will neither confirm nor deny such speculations.)
Finkelstein and Einav argue that this is why further piecemeal engineering is not the way forward and requires rebooting the entire system. Their proposal is ultimately unconvincingIt is accurate to describe how our current system came about as a result of the piecemeal engineering advocated by Popper.
But certainly small improvements and piecemeal engineering can work in some situations, like the Porsche 911 or the Apollo space program. So what is the difference? Here are a few key points that come to mind.
First, there is the question of whether social engineers can have knowledge of social issues similar to the way automotive engineers understand car design. Popper’s view rests on the idea that social engineers can design reforms in a way that avoids “the complexity and scope that separates cause from effect and makes it impossible to know what one is actually doing.” Social engineers can make assumptions that are in themselves quite heroic, and these assumptions are blown to dust by Jeffery Friedman in his book. power without knowledge.
The second issue is the type of learning environment. at argument David Epstein, joined by Russ Roberts on EconTalk, talked about the differences between “friendly” and “evil” learning environments. A friendly learning environment has clear and reliable feedback methods that provide useful information, and what worked in the past will continue to work in the future. In a bad learning environment, feedback can be absent or point in the wrong direction, and lessons and outcomes do not repeat in the same way over time. As Epstein explanation Nowadays, “a friendly learning environment can be thought of as a situation dominated by stable rules and repetitive patterns. Feedback will be fast and accurate, and next year’s work will look like last year’s work… In a wicked learning environment, if there are rules, the rules can change. Patterns don’t just repeat. Feedback may be absent, delayed, or inaccurate. There can be all kinds of complex human dynamics involved, and what happens next year may not look like what happened last year.”
Crucially, a “friendly” learning environment does not necessarily mean that a given task is simple or easy. Automotive engineering can be very complex, but it’s still done in a friendly learning environment. Likewise, a manned mission to Mars will be very challenging, but it will still take place in a friendly learning environment. Learning about the human body and treating disease is complex, but still relatively benign. But the social engineering of the entire healthcare system of an entire civilization, whether total or piecemeal, will take place in an extremely nefarious learning environment.
Finally, even in a friendly environment, accurate feedback itself has no impact on the person receiving it and there is no incentive to respond in a productive way. In markets, price signals provide feedback and provide incentives. Even if you have no thoughts why The market price is sending you a given signal. it’s okay. You don’t have to understand why, just react.
Thus, it seems that piecemeal engineering can work in situations where engineers are restrained and informed, within a friendly learning environment where they have both accurate feedback and incentives to respond to that feedback in socially beneficial ways. But for engineering social policy, this confluence of factors seems far from the norm.
