How - Dov Seidman [45]
Though an election including only qualified voters would be a much better election, it would be extremely difficult to administer. It is relatively simple to administer an election if the rule says that you need to be 18 to vote. You verify everyone’s age and citizenship when they register; then they show up with their registration and vote, and the entire election throughout the country takes but one day. Determining a qualification like maturity and civic-mindedness, on the other hand, would be far more complex and time-consuming, not to mention subjective. In a rules-based society, we often choose efficiency over value, but, while rules-based governance systems may often serve well the values of fairness and representation, their seeming efficiency hides a deep and important flaw: We often rely on rules when they are not, in fact, the most efficient or effective solution to getting the result that we desire. Understanding that flaw is vital to thriving in a world of HOW.
Another problem with rules lies in the fact that they are not created in a very efficient, or systematic, way. Elected bodies, vulnerable to the demands of the political process, write them; those who wield or seek to wield power over others, either militarily or professionally, write them; owners or boards of companies, or a manager chosen by professional meritocracy write them. William F. Buckley once joked that he would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Boston telephone directory than the Harvard faculty, and those Harvard folk are pretty smart people.4 Despite the best of intentions, people create rules variously and often in reaction to behaviors deemed unacceptable to the larger goals of the group. That is why we often find ourselves revising the rules when new conditions reveal their loopholes. Again, let me share a couple of examples.
In 1991, the U.S. Congress issued federal sentencing guidelines to incent good corporate behavior.5 At that time, the Congress laid out a number of steps and programs corporations could adopt to mitigate their potential liability should they be found guilty of criminal violations. It was a rules-based solution proposed by a rules-based organization: the U.S. government. In response, companies spent enormously on compliance programs (proxies for good behavior, really) and grew large and costly bureaucracies of compliance in an attempt to inoculate themselves against future penalties. This carrot-and-stick approach, however, did not lick the problem. Companies added more enforcement, more penalties for getting it wrong, and more incentivizing rewards for getting it right, and yet they did not see substantially more compliance. Despite this huge investment in more compliance programs, since 1991 there have actually been more companies that have run afoul of the law. In 2003, the ad hoc advisory committee to the Federal Sentencing Commission concluded, after studying these compliance programs, that they failed to achieve “effective compliance.”
In the wake of a seeming abundance of corporate scandals at the turn of the twenty-first century, the U.S. Congress hastily wrote a new set of rules to govern corporate conduct, the Sarbanes-Oxley bill (commonly called SOX ), and revised the sentencing guidelines to react to those transgressions. Corporations again immediately allocated billions to figure out how to comply with the new regulations, just as they did a dozen years before.6
Consider this smaller example of the same phenomenon: A manager puts up a sign in your company lunchroom that says, “Please Clean the Microwave after You Use It”; then another, “Do Not Put Your Feet on the Tables”; then a third, “Don’t Eat Other People’s Food.” All these rules, and the myriad more little lunchroom dos and don’ts that your manager madly prints out and posts, attempt to codify