In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government

11. Searching for Solutions That Work: Changing the Metaphor

[ 201 ] 11Searching for Solutions That Work: Changing the Metaphor Since large-scale social programs began, the metaphor for the process by which the government attempts to solve social problems has been engineering. The words that are used for the policy-formation process—design, evaluation, inputs, outcomes, cost-benefit—and the very notion that a discrete “program” may deal with a discrete “problem” all bespeak an engineering perspective. The logical expectations that drive the solutions lend themselves to the same kinds of schematics that engineers use for wiring diagrams, structural blueprints , and PERT charts. The metaphor has not been lost on the critics of such programs—that’s where the label “social engineering” came from. In arguing on behalf of the pursuit-of-happiness criterion for thinking about social policy, I am in effect arguing on behalf of a metaphor that describes social problems in terms more like the healer’s than the engineer’s. The parallel is not precise—surgery is not the kind of healing I have in mind—but it captures the notion of social policy as something to be applied to an organic system, not as a process of hammering a selection of raw material into the desired shape. The view of society as an organic whole was nearly a universal image until the eighteenth century and has continued to be used with great effect by conservatives from Edmund Burke to Robert Nisbet.1 Having acknowledged this, however, I must separate the discussion that follows from that tradition. Once again, I am adapting a majestic concept for some nuts-and-bolts uses. I am suggesting that if policy planners— diagnosticians?—are to be successful, they must think in terms of solutions that permit a naturally robust organism to return to health. Does the nation suffer from schools that don’t teach? The task is not to figure [ 202 ] toward the best of all possible worlds out better teaching techniques; we’ve known how to teach children for millennia. The task is to figure out what is keeping us from doing what we already know how to do. Does the nation suffer from too many children being born into fatherless families? The task is not to devise a public relations campaign to discourage single teenage girls from having babies, but to neutralize whatever is impeding the age-old impulse of human beings to form families. Does the nation suffer for lack of lowincome housing? The task is to understand why an economic system that pours out a profusion of cheap-but-decent shoes, food, clothes, and every other basic of life is prevented from pouring out a profusion of cheap-but-decent apartments for rent. And so on through the list of problems that customarily preoccupy planners of social policy. In proposing a metaphor of healing, I am proposing as well two quite specific and important characteristics of solutions that work. The first is that such solutions are quite fragile, in this sense: They do not comprise modules that can be connected or disconnected or grouped in combinations. They don’t work because of gimmicks; they don’t work by twiddling one bit of a mechanism without affecting anything else. Instead, they work because they tap natural and deeply embedded responses. Such solutions tend to be of a piece, and they tend to be simple. The second characteristic (which seems at first to be paradoxical) is that the solutions if implemented as a unitary piece will themselves be robust. In sharp contrast to social engineering solutions (which tend to be disrupted by almost anything), solutions that tap dynamics which “will naturally occur if you let them” will tend to work even in the tough situations and to spin off positive unintended outcomes—they are serendipitous . In this chapter I take up each of these characteristics in turn, once again using the education problem for illustrative purposes. A Delicate Balance The core of the healing metaphor is the concept of interconnectedness —of causes, of effects, and of causes with effects. A great virtue of the pursuit-of-happiness criterion in assessing social policy is that it forces these interconnections to the surface. searching for solutions that work [ 203 ] Part of the interconnectedness was implicit in the discussion of the enabling conditions. It is not easy to augment material rewards without affecting self-respect, not easy to induce people to enjoy intrinsic rewards unless they already...