Kludgeocracy: The American Way of Policy

An interesting critique and new term (I like this guy – you can't solve a problem until you can name it – remember that we have spent the last 11 years trying to name the wars that we have been fighting at the expense of trying to understand them)  :

You can’t solve a problem until you can name it. We have names for one axis of our politics — right vs. left, big versus small  government. But voters and politicians have no name for what should be an equally important set of questions that cuts straight through those ideological divisions, which is complexity versus simplicity. The name, for a lack of a better alternative, is  Kludgeocracy. 

The dictionary tells us that a kludge is “an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose…a clumsy but  temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem.” The term comes out of the world of computer programming,  where a kludge is an inelegant patch put in place to be backward compatible with the rest of a system. When you add up enough  kludges, you get a very complicated program, one that is hard to understand and subject to crashes. In other words, Windows.

But read the whole paper at the link below.

V/R

Dave 

Kludgeocracy: The American Way of Policy 

 http://newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/policydocs/Teles_Steven_Kludgeocracy_NAF_Dec2012.pdf

Steven M. Teles, Associate Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University 

December 2012

The last thirty years of American history have witnessed, at least rhetorically, a battle over the size of government.

Yet that is not what the history books will say the next thirty years of American politics were about. With the frontiers of the state roughly fixed, the issues that will dominate American politics going forward will concern the complexity of government, rather than its sheer size.

The next decade of American politics will see greater attention placed on the substantial amount of government action that redistributes resources upward to the wealthy and the organized, to the disadvantage of the poorer and less organized. Connected to this, greater attention will be placed on the rickety, complicated and self-defeating complexity of public policy across multiple, seemingly unrelated areas of government activity.

Conservatives over the last few years have increasingly claimed that America is, in Hayek’s terms, on the road to serfdom. This is ridiculous, for it ascribes vastly greater coherence to American government than we have ever achieved. If anything, we have arrived at a form of government with no ideological justification whatsoever.

You can’t solve a problem until you can name it. We have names for one axis of our politics — right vs. left, big versus small government. But voters and politicians have no name for what should be an equally important set of questions that cuts straight through those ideological divisions, which is complexity versus simplicity. The name, for a lack of a better alternative, is Kludgeocracy.

The dictionary tells us that a kludge is “an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose…a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem.” The term comes out of the world of computer programming, where a kludge is an inelegant patch put in place to be backward compatible with the rest of a system. When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program, one that is hard to understand and subject to crashes. In other words, Windows. 

Download the entire paper at this link:

 http://newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/policydocs/Teles_Steven_Kludgeocracy_NAF_Dec2012.pdf