We could have a good solution for $10 and have government employees, or we could spend $100, my buddies pocket $99.99, and then blame it on working class people when it fails.
America has been massively successful at what it was intended to do- create huge amounts of wealth for the few on top. Almost every single “failure” people talk about was a conscious decision with specific intended consequences.
As a big proponent of POSIWID and good, sustainable systems engineering, it typically - as, I think, in this case - is representative of a system created very much not by conscious decisions. It's a perspective that is relevant when perverse incentives are failing to be correctly identified. Like if, in the classic Cobra Effect scenario, if government officials saw the rise in Cobra populations as a result of their culling initiative and decided to raise the bounty higher because it's an initiative to reduce cobra numbers, failing to respect the reality that it actually increases them.
This is not irrelevant to the discussion about the US' absurdly Laissez-faire economic and regulatory policies - they tend to reach their misnomer status in a similar way. It's not that anyone is making conscious and concerted efforts to maintain inequality - at least, not well - it's that stacks of decisions made by powerful people to benefit themselves in the short-term have the effect of increasing systemic instability, and the long-term negative consequences are too slow-moving for policy makers to notice, or sometimes even live through.
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u/Ragnarok314159 29d ago
We could have a good solution for $10 and have government employees, or we could spend $100, my buddies pocket $99.99, and then blame it on working class people when it fails.