Three Cheers for Solutionism?

https://aelkus.github.io/theory/2020/12/03/solu.html

by panic • 6 years ago

44 33 6 years ago

aelkus.github.io

robfig• 6 years ago

It seems to me that US politics took a turn for the worse in the past 20 years, and my response has been to disengage. Randomly, I picked up The Politics Industry by Michael Porter and Katherine Gehl, and I found it pretty convincing:

(a) The system of elections and legislation is responsible for the poor outcomes we see. It's not the specific personalities.

(b) That system's rules were written by the Republican and Democratic parties to entrench their power. It is NOT encoded in the constitution or otherwise set in stone. Both parties are winners with the status quo -- they do very well financially by drumming up tribalistic competition instead of cooperation and problem solving.

(c) The result of the current rules is that a politician's ONLY job is to appeal to primary voters, which is why they take an ideologic or hard line stance. "Reaching across the aisle" results in a primary challenger that costs them their job.

As an "average voter" that thinks the best route is probably somewhere in the middle (the world is complicated, and government is neither omnipotent nor impotent), me and everyone like me are not represented.

They present a surprisingly straightforward remedy:

(1) Adopt non-partisan primaries with Final Five ballots, which a couple states have already passed variants of (Final Four just passed in Alaska!)

(2) Ranked choice voting to remove the Spoiler reason ("don't throw your vote away") that keeps independents or third parties out.

I came away optimistic about the future. Highly recommended!

Here's their site if you'd like to learn more: https://gehlporter.com/

ThomPete• 6 years ago

this is why Trump was such a welcome change despite his style. he owed no one and thus were able to remove 8 rule for every one he implemented, challenge china, challenge coventional wisdom about middle east and get results that all the “experts” claimed to be impossible, change the global supply chain into something quite different than what the economists and experts said were oossible. Live him or hate him, Trump were a proper disrupter who saw things from a radical different view and i believe he will be much better judged by our dependents than most people today aknowledge

licebmi__at__• 6 years ago

I would like to agree, as bringing pro worker rethoric, pushing against delocalization, a change of EEUU foreign policy, and not really being entrenched on the career politician POV were actually the parts of Trump I did like when he was running on 2016. But unfortunately I think he failed to deliver, and ultimately the positive changes were few and outnumbered by the negative ones.

badconvincer• 6 years ago

All I saw was the drastic reduction of American hegemony by pulling out of bases and countries, losing the entire Asian pacific region to Chinese hegemony (partially due to the killing of TPP), losing Eastern European/middle eastern allies to Putin/Erdogan and denigrating moral standards that enabled authoritarians and dictators both at the government and lower levels. Picking a fight with China was probably the only good thing to come out of his presidency.

rootusrootus• 6 years ago

Trump were a proper disrupter who saw things from a radical different view

Of late that seems to be a decidedly non-democratic view (and by democratic I mean government, not party). I'm not sure that's the kind of disruption we needed in 2020.

handmodel• 6 years ago

I agree with a lot of this although I would get ride of "to entrench". I think assuming intentionality is both a big assumption and not really necessary to describe the issue.

This happens simply because the dynamics of a winner take all election. George Washington was against parties but it was inevitable they would form and did so quickly (not necessarily because of an evil condition but simply because it is good game theory)

The fact that the major parties are not fighting against rank choice voting leads me to believe that they don't have a preference for a two-party system necessarily. It just isn't a main motivator.

emodendroket5• 6 years ago

(c) The result of the current rules is that a politician's ONLY job is to appeal to primary voters, which is why they take an ideologic or hard line stance. "Reaching across the aisle" results in a primary challenger that costs them their job.

I'm not sure how that's the conclusion you're drawing from this round of Democratic primaries.

CGamesPlay• 6 years ago

He obviously isn't drawing that conclusion from "this round of democratic primaries". In a comment addressing 20 years of history, your attempt to revoke it involves looking at what one half of the parties did in the most recent few months.

eli_gottlieb2• 6 years ago

On the one hand, the Democratic Presidential primary had overwhelming support for the most moderate candidate available. On the other hand, Democratic Congressional primaries have started to get a little silly in terms of how vicious the internecine fights can get between people who fundamentally disagree on very little, my favorite example being Ritchie Torres vs Samelys López in the Bronx.

zhoujianfu• 6 years ago

You may be interested in represent.us, they were the group behind the Alaska initiative!

mch82• 6 years ago

my response has been to disengage

What if disengagement (demoralization) is what the people who oppose your politics want you to do?

Wikipedia, “Demoralization (warfare)”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoralization_(warfare)

eyelidlessness• 6 years ago

my home state of California – where GOP opposition has been virtually eradicated – single-party dominance has failed to resolve basic governance issues.

I’m sorry but what? Sure, CA is blue on a national map in national elections but it’s a very reddish purple for any smaller statewide analysis. As is my state (WA), and all other “safe” blue states. And while I can’t claim to be intimately familiar with local CA politics, when I do follow the local goings on they’re very similar to here: at every layer of government where the GOP is electorally disadvantaged, they still find ways to have outsized influence. And in these blue states, they often achieve that by undermining the platforms of their D rivals and sewing doubt in the platform’s merit. Essentially trolling as politics. But it’s surprisingly effective.

CA’s ballot initiative system is often called out, because you can pass a new measure and defund it in the same go. Well, WA doesn’t have quite the same system but we have it staggered by ballot cycle, and yeah. It’s chaotic. Every time we decide we want to do something as a state, someone comes along and says “boy it would be great if the tax system (we quietly keep in place to make it painful for you) didn’t make you feel pain for this thing, do you wanna vote for a few more dollars in your pocket?” And of course people want a few more dollars in their pocket.

It’s a mistake to think anywhere is safe from this. We can’t pay for anything anywhere. Because some people would rather hold it hostage for their advantage.

purple-again• 6 years ago

I think we are doomed to this forever by human nature.

As a thought experiment ask yourself what you think would happen in the following scenario:

We enshrine the two party system into law but allow all Americans to chose their party freely each year. You no longer pay taxes or receive services from the government but from your party instead.

Do you think this would lead to harmony where the half of the country that wants high taxes and many services would join the D party and the half that wants low taxes and few services would join the R party, all living side by side in harmony?

Or do you think this would lead to total chaos where the people with money to take (IE money to spend on services for themselves) all join the R party and the people without money to take all join the D party looking for services they can’t provide to themselves.

I would say it’s pretty obvious what would happen but then again my world view is a bit cynical and of course not the only one. I would say it’s exactly what has happened to our system without needing the thought experiment to make the incentives obvious.

PaulDavisThe1st• 6 years ago

Billionaires are overwhelming pro-Democratic party politics, and most of them are even in favor of genuine "big government". They understand which side their bread is buttered on.

[ EDIT: turns out I was wrong. Billionaires are not overwhelmingly pro-Democratic party. They are, however, roughly split between Democrats and Republicans, which does more or less the same work in disproving the claim implicit in the parent's rhetorical thought experiment. ]

Your thesis doesn't hold.

roenxi2• 6 years ago

I’m sorry but what? Sure, CA is blue on a national map in national elections but it’s a very reddish purple for any smaller statewide analysis.

So I'll cheerfully admit a near total ignorance about Californian politics, but I see a 29:11 and 61:18 Democrat majority in what looks like the state parliament [0]. The wiki link also mentions "The Democratic Party currently holds veto-proof supermajorities in both houses of the California State Legislature.". I didn't actually think it was possible to see such majorities in an large, healthy, wealthy democracy, but obviously I've reassessed that now.

Intransigent minorities can do a lot, but it seems like it would be a real challenge to push back past against that sort of majority. California is going to be a pretty fair representation of what would happen if the Democrats gained a 60% across board majority in US federal politics.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Legislature

dragonwriter4• 6 years ago

I didn't actually think it was possible to see such majorities in an large, healthy, wealthy democracy, but obviously I've reassessed that now.

It's probably not, at least , California’s electoral democracy isn't healthy; California's major parties (and this particularly impacts the Republicans) aren't completely free to align themselves as they would independently for competitive purposes because they are affiliated with national parties that have the kind of financial relationships with them and their campaigns that would be illegal for foreign parties if California was independent.

California is going to be a pretty fair representation of what would happen if the Democrats gained a 60% across board majority in US federal politics.

It's really not, because California and the Federal government aren't structured similarly. The feds do t have as much detail of government tied up in the Constitution that the legislature can't amend on its own. The feds don't have citizens reserving the powers of recall, referendum, and initiative. The feds don't have a higher Constitutional bar for tax increases than passing a budget.

And the kind of electoral lopsidedness that occurs in CA wouldn't be nearly as stable on a federal level; those no outside party to kowtow to that constrains major parties fromm competitive realignment.

dragonwriter4• 6 years ago

Sure, CA is blue on a national map in national elections but it’s a very reddish purple for any smaller statewide analysis.

No, it's not.

It's true that it has very large Republican land areas, but like the country at large these areas are mostly the sparsely populated ones.

Since the national Republican Party began radicalizing during the Clinton Administration, the California Republican Party has been increasingly uncompetitive.

bitwize• 6 years ago

Democratic governor, Democratic legislature. They have a hammerlock on state politics.

Ar-Curunir• 6 years ago

The issue with modeling SV as oriented towards creating "solutions" is that the incentives of VCs are at odds with that of actually solving problems: they're looking for short-term profits, social sustainability be damned.

So Uber, which is a proposed solution to crumbling American public transit infra, splurges a lot of money to accelerate the crumbling of said infra, and in the process manages to make life worse for drivers (terrible pay), for the planet (via increased emissions), and eventually for riders (when prices will be too high and public alternatives gone).

But this doesn't matter to VCs, who want short(ish) term profits.

This issue generalizes into a critique of solutionism as a whole: technological "solutions" are not grounded in humanity: they don't actually take into account those affected, i.e. the everyday people who will directly interact with your "solution", and the millions more who will be indirectly impacted. You can try to suggest that your solution is politics-free, but in the act of interacting with, and affecting, society, it becomes political.

I suggest "The Politics of Artifacts" for more on this.

eigenrick• 6 years ago

This article and the article to which the author is responding seems to miss the point entirely.

There's nothing wrong with "solutionism" if people are making actual solutions to problems that they understand well.

The derogatory term of solutionism was coined because of a trend where people built cool but gimmicky superficial "solutions" for perceived "problems" that in no way addressed the root cause of the problems. They were salves for symptoms by people who drastically underestimated the scope of the problem. They also seemed to have no idea how to engineer lasting solutions (because those are expensive and boring).

Vaccines are an actual solution, though. They, in part with huge amounts of boring, un-sexy political action, can end the pandemic.

So no, vaccines aren't solutionism, because they actually solve the problem, in a big, expensive and boring way

marchenko• 6 years ago

I think the removal of agency and oversight from the public that is often coupled with "solutionism" - not lack of faith in technology - is a primary reason solutionism has met public resistance. People are willing to sacrifice efficiency for accountability & involvement, and they do not want to hand off priority-setting to technocrats. I am personally hesitant to embrace a model where "governments have also found success in working together with the private sector to manage information flows during the pandemic", as the author describes Taiwan, especially when coupled with oversight by a bureaucratic cryptid like Marshall at the ONA. The current US versions of a misinformation "Fact Check Center" and "Meme Engineering Team" [0] have not inspired confidence. The list of top Marshall protégés may hint at tradeoffs associated with broader deployment of the ONA approach [1].

[0]https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/lesson... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marshall_(foreign_polic...

zesterer• 6 years ago

My god these people need to read some Marx. You cannot effectively disentangle these things, they are mutually-dependent and both a product of the same socioeconomic system. The conditions that created Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and pharma companies are indivisible. There is no competition between methods and mindsets, only systemic failures and broken incentives that result in a conflict between them.

Three Cheers for Solutionism?

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