Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [12]
Looking back, it may seem as if the failures of high modernism—whether centrally planned economies or centrally designed cities—are a thing of the past, a product of a naïve and simplistic belief in science that we have since outgrown. Yet politicians, bureaucrats, architects, and regulators continue to make essentially the same mistake all the time. As the economist William Easterly has argued, the foreign aid community has been dominated for the past fifty years by large, bureaucratic organizations that are in turn run by powerful individuals whose ideas about what should and should not work inevitably play a large role in determining how resources will be devoted. Just as with the high modernists before them, these “planners,” as Easterly calls them, are well-meaning and intelligent people who are often passionately devoted to the task of helping the people of the developing world. Yet in spite of the trillions of dollars of aid that planners have devoted to economic development, there is shockingly little evidence that the recipients are better off for it.18
Closer to home, and over roughly the same period of time, urban planners in the United States have repeatedly set out to “solve” the problem of urban poverty and have repeatedly failed. As the journalist and urban activist Jane Jacobs put it fifty years ago, “There is a wistful myth that if only we had enough money to spend—the figure is usually put at a hundred billion dollars—we could wipe out all our slums in ten years.… But look what we have built with the first several billions: Low-income projects that have become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.”19 It is ironic that around the same time that Jacobs reached this conclusion, work began on the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, the largest public housing project ever built. And sure enough, as the sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh describes in American Project, what started out as a high-minded and carefully thought-out plan to help inner-city, largely African American families rise up into the middle class became a debacle of dilapidated buildings, overcrowded apartments and playgrounds, concentrated poverty, and eventually gang violence.20
The large scale and disruptive nature of economic and urban development plans make them especially prone to failure, but many of the same criticisms have been leveled at government plans to improve public education, reform healthcare services, manage public resources, design local regulations, or decide foreign policy.21 Nor are governments alone in suffering from extreme planning failures. Corporations are rarely as large as governments, so their failures tend not to attract the same kind of scrutiny—although the near collapse of the financial system in 2008–2009 comes close. There are also so many more corporations than governments that it’s always possible to find success stories, thereby perpetuating the view that the private sector is better at planning than the government sector. But as a number of management scholars have shown in recent years, corporate plans—whether strategic bets, mergers and acquisitions, or marketing campaigns—also fail frequently, and for much the same reasons that government plans do.22 In all these cases, that is, a small number of people sitting in conference rooms are using their own commonsense intuition to predict, manage, or manipulate the behavior of thousands or millions of distant and diverse people whose motivations and circumstances are very different from their own.23
The irony of all this is that even as we observe the mistakes of politicians, planners, and others, our reaction is not to criticize common sense, but instead to demand more of it. At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in early 2009, for example, in the darkest depths of global financial crisis, one indignant audience member announced to the audience,