The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [103]
Make Multiyear Plans
The lack of clear goals, inherent complexity of issues, and mix of scientific confusion and disinformation would probably be enough to stop most coherent action in its tracks. Yet there are even greater obstacles at play in the executive branch. Even when it tries, the federal government suffers a chronic inability to develop and implement sophisticated plans.
The problem, as noted earlier, starts with the two-year national election cycle, by far the most frequent of any major economy. The president also makes an extraordinary number of political appointments at the top of each department. This has the ostensible advantage of bringing in fresh ideas with a change of political mandate. However, in practice, it leads to amateurism, a revolving door between senior officials and private business, and an incredibly time-consuming process to fill the administration’s top jobs. After one year in office, according to the Partnership for Public Service, the Obama administration had filled only around 60 percent of the top five hundred jobs.5 This has meant that throughout the administration, senior teams were not even in place as the 2010 elections approached.
All these problems of short-termism are compounded by an antiplanning mentality. More than two years into the Obama presidency, we’ve yet to see a coherent plan on almost any front. Health care reform was pushed through Congress without a plan. There is still no energy and climate plan. There is no plan to eliminate the budget deficit. Nobody in his right mind should advocate rigid central planning (in which the government tries to fix wages, prices, and outputs across the economy), but nobody should believe that complex challenges of science and technology, higher education, modernization of infrastructure, climate change mitigation, and the restoration of budget balance can be addressed without a careful, multiyear planning process within government.
The closest we now come to multiyear planning is the Office of Management and Budget, but OMB is focused largely on year-to-year budgets. Upgrading OMB or another agency to prepare multiyear plans for public-sector action will sound absolutely heretical to most Americans, but the truth is that most successful governments have such an agency or department, and make use of it especially to address the kinds of public investment challenges that America has been neglecting during the past thirty years.
One key—perhaps the key—to effective planning is to embrace complexity. The economy is a complex system, linking millions of public and private enterprises and billions of consumers around the world. With a complex system, there is rarely a single solution to a problem. “Magic bullets,” or single-minded solutions, are the favorite prescriptions of superficial analysts. Beware! Whether we are dealing with balancing the budget, improving education, reducing unemployment, or addressing immigration, the solutions are likely to be messy and complex, change over time, and involve multiple levels of government, from the international to the local. Plans are vital, but they must include several interlinked policies, be adaptive over time, and be open to a wide range of participants from business, government agencies, and civil-society institutions. The point is that the solutions won’t come through the easy nostrums of our day, whether tax cuts, stimulus spending, immigration crackdowns, or getting tough on teachers’ unions. The only thing in common with these kinds of “plans” is that they are based on oversimplicity in a complex economy and society.
Be Mindful of the Far Future
We cannot, of course, peer into the distant future, but we can still train ourselves and orient our political system to be mindful of the far future, a time horizon, for example, of at least two generations ahead.