Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [135]
11. See Geertz (1975).
12. See Wadler (2010) for the story about the “no lock people.”
13. For the Geertz quote, see Geertz (1975, p. 22). For a discussion of how people respond to their differences of opinions, and an intriguing theoretical explanation of their failure to converge on a consensus view, see Sethi and Yildiz (2009).
14. See Gelman, Lax, and Phillips. (2010) for survey results documenting Americans’ evolving attitudes toward same-sex marriage.
15. It should be noted that political professionals, like politicians, pundits, and party officials, do tend to hold consistently liberal or conservative positions. Thus, Congress, for example, is much more polarized along a liberal-conservative divide than the general population (Layman et al. 2006). See Baldassari and Gelman (2008) for a detailed discussion of how political beliefs of individuals do and don’t correlate with each other. See also Gelman et al. (2008) for a more general discussion of common misunderstanding about political beliefs and voting behavior.
16. Le Corbusier (1923, p. 61).
17. See Scott (1998).
18. For a detailed argument about the failures of planning in economic development, particularly with respect to Africa, see Easterly (2006). For an even more negative viewpoint of the effect of foreign aid in Africa, see Moyo (2009), who argues that it has actually hurt Africa, not helped. For a more hopeful alternative viewpoint see Sachs (2006).
19. See Jacobs (1961, p. 4)
20. See Venkatesh (2002).
21. See Ravitch (2010) for a discussion of how popular, commonsense policies such as increased testing and school choice actually undermined public education. See Cohn (2007) and Reid (2009) for analysis of the cost of health care and possible alternative models. See O’Toole (2007) for a detailed discussion on forestry management, urban planning, and other failures of government planning and regulation. See Howard (1997) for a discussion and numerous anecdotes of the unintended consequences of government regulations. See Easterly (2006) again for some interesting remarks on nation-building and political interference, and Tuchman (1985) for a scathing and detailed account of US involvement in Vietnam. See Gelb (2009) for an alternate view of American foreign policy.
22. See Barbera (2009) and Cassidy (2009) for discussion of the cost of financial crises. See Mintzberg (2000) and Raynor (2007) for overviews of strategic planning methods and failures. See Knee, Greenwald, and Seave (2009) for a discussion of the fallibility of media moguls; and McDonald and Robinson (2009), and Sorkin (2009) for inside accounts of investment banking leaders whose actions precipitated the recent financial crisis. See also recent news stories recounting the failed AOL–Time Warner merger (Arango 2010), and the rampant, ultimately doomed growth of Citigroup (Brooker 2010).
23. Clearly not all attempts at corporate or even government planning end badly. Looking back over the past few centuries, in fact, overall conditions of living have improved dramatically for a large fraction of the world’s populations—evidence that even the largest and most unwieldy political institutions do sometimes get things right. How are we to know, then, that common sense isn’t actually quite good at solving complex social problems, failing no more frequently than any other method we might use? Ultimately we cannot know the answer to this question, if only because no systematic attempt to collect data on relative rates of planning successes and failures has ever been attempted—at least, not to my knowledge. Even if such an attempt had been made, moreover, it would still not resolve the matter, because absent some other “uncommon sense” method against which to compare it, the success rate of commonsense-based planning would