Agreed. Politics is often not a question of picking the best option, but of picking the least awful option from among a list of very bad ideas. Will you have death by lethal injection, hanging, or being set on fire? I'd pick the first. Being an advocate of the "capitalistic welfare state" (as I am) is a similar sort of choice.
Why is this? I don't think it's just intellectual cop-out. I think the problem is that economics and all the other complex systems issues that hide behind politics are things that human beings are just not well-equipped to understand. We're bad at economics and social planning for the same reason we are bad at understanding the genome holistically. We just can't "grok" stuff like that.
I sometimes wonder if this isn't a neurological barrier. After all, how often in human evolution did we confront the need to understand parallel auto-adaptive systems with tangled webs of causality, multiple positive and negative feedback loops, and chaotic behavior? This may require neurological hardware that we just don't have, so we try to muddle through by applying linear reductionism. It doesn't work very well, but it's the only cognitive tool we have for decomposing a system that remotely works at all.
The free-ish market with a welfare state is a mess of hacks we've come up with through historical experimentation that seems to offer the benefits of certain classes of systems while mitigating their downsides. It's not pretty but it doesn't hurt as bad as being set on fire.
"I think the problem is that economics and all the other complex systems issues that hide behind politics are things that human beings are just not well-equipped to understand. We're bad at economics and social planning for the same reason we are bad at understanding the genome holistically. We just can't "grok" stuff like that."
I think we _can_ grok stuff like that, but not easily and not without study. I think that the main reason there are so many arguments about economics is that most people have not done that and because people know where various economic arguments lead and they've already made up their minds on those issues. Economics is just too fundamentally intertwined with public policy to be left to pure economists. Almost (and that's just a hedge) everybody who puts forth economic opinions online, for example, has some sort of political axe to grind.
Why is this? I don't think it's just intellectual cop-out. I think the problem is that economics and all the other complex systems issues that hide behind politics are things that human beings are just not well-equipped to understand. We're bad at economics and social planning for the same reason we are bad at understanding the genome holistically. We just can't "grok" stuff like that.
I sometimes wonder if this isn't a neurological barrier. After all, how often in human evolution did we confront the need to understand parallel auto-adaptive systems with tangled webs of causality, multiple positive and negative feedback loops, and chaotic behavior? This may require neurological hardware that we just don't have, so we try to muddle through by applying linear reductionism. It doesn't work very well, but it's the only cognitive tool we have for decomposing a system that remotely works at all.
The free-ish market with a welfare state is a mess of hacks we've come up with through historical experimentation that seems to offer the benefits of certain classes of systems while mitigating their downsides. It's not pretty but it doesn't hurt as bad as being set on fire.