Screeds
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Brick And Ivy
I remember when I learned that ivy, a weak, loosely organized plant that any six-year-old could pull apart with his hands, can disassemble a wall built of hard, unyielding brick. I learned it by watching an ivy-covered wall fall on a man and shatter his leg. It was the kind of lesson you don’t forget.
The sterile, seemingly inhospitable brick offers advantages to ivy. Ivy gravitates toward brick and similar surfaces. The structural strength of the brick provides a skeleton, by exploiting which the ivy can spread much farther than it otherwise would. In doing so, it slowly permeates the brick and causes it to crumble.
The world is filled with similar relationships, especially in politics, government and law.
We tend to think of our huge institutions as unitary objects, things with will and purpose of their own. The desires and intentions of the persons who work for them, or who invoke their services, are deemed to be far less important, even insignificant. There are exceptions to this worldview, of course. For instance, there is a tendency to think of the chief executive of an organization as controlling the organization, when five minutes’ thought would make it clear that no individual could control the activities of thousands of other people to any meaningful extent. But then, he’s likely to think of himself that way, too.
It’s a very static view of human life, equally as static as that of the man who, confronted with a mass of ivy and a brick wall for the first time in his life, concludes that the ivy is no threat to the brick.
Balthasar de Gracian said, "Time and I against any other two." The ivy has time on its side. Time, and the enduring incentives the brick offers to the spread of its destroyer.
Attention to incentives is the heart of the economic worldview. Incentives—conditions that lead men to believe that if they can do this, then they can acquire that—provide societies with their dynamics, the forces that drive change. A snapshot of society tells us only what it is at present. It tells us nothing about the dynamics that brought it to that point, or the dynamics that will propel it forward through time to other states of being.
Much that afflicts American political discourse arises from inattention to incentives. Many pundits, especially those on the left, talk as if the conditions they decry were causeless, produced by spontaneous creation. When they propose remedies, they seldom consider the incentives those remedies would create, seeds from which still worse problems would emerge.
If only the universe were so structured as to permit us to solve our problems without unintended consequences! But it isn’t that way. No-fault auto insurance, intended to streamline claim processing and prune back the burden on the courts, provoked an explosion in such claims and a mushrooming of insurance premiums. Alcohol prohibition, intended to improve the nation’s moral fiber by denying it one instrument of dissolution, sprouted huge empires of organized crime. The Social Security system, sold to Americans as an insurance-like supplement to private savings, blossomed into a massive welfare system with its own tax bureaucracy, the largest Ponzi scheme in the history of fraud.
Law and public institutions are fertile grounds for the germination of unintended consequences. They’re really nothing more than incentive structures themselves, whatever their putative purpose. You’d think that we had enough history to pay attention to such things, but if I read current trends correctly, we’re still stumbling along in the dark.
As a result of Black Tuesday, it’s become far more difficult to board an airliner than it’s ever been before. Now we’ve federalized the airport security screeners, which has made them largely immune to customer objections to their practices. Several people I know personally have reported the loss of valuable objects to security screeners: mostly jewelry that was taken from them on flimsy pretenses, and which was not returned.
Given civil-service union power, it’s highly unlikely that many screeners will ever have to face legal consequences for this kind of larceny. Word will spread that getting away with this sort of thing is straightforward. More of it will happen. Word will spread among would-be travelers, too. Well-to-do people will travel less by air, will counsel one another similarly, and the airlines will lose a large chunk of the lucrative first-class and business-class markets. The loss of revenues could well translate into increased fares for those of us who fly coach.
Do you think anyone bothered to think through that sequence when debating the federalization of airport security?
The Patriot Act has greatly lowered the legal hurdles required by the FBI to conduct telephonic and electronic surveillance on a suspect, or to continue it into the indefinite future. The FBI possesses enormous resources for such surveillance, such that if they decide to target you, your zone of privacy will shrink down to the contents of your skull. The possibilities for using these powers for financial or political profit guarantee that it will happen. Given the nature of the institution involved, we’d be lucky even to find out that it had occurred.
A few commentators have made note of the ominousness of that development, but have largely been ignored or shouted down. Add another to the list.
These are secondary, unintended consequences to the acts involved. They are incentive effects. They rely only on human cupidity and the opportunities for exercising it. In all probability, they who proposed the acts will be as disgusted and horrified by them as anyone else. That will not excuse them for planting their ivy next to the brick walls that protected our liberty and property, but we can expect them to exculpate themselves anyway. That, too, is an incentive effect, one that grows out of the nature of political power, which claims paternity only for successes and leaves failure and disaster to wail as orphans.
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