Complexity and Contradiction

For some time, another form of assortment has been on my mind: cognitive. The much-maligned Bell Curve is a fascinating read, not for all of the psychometric data that makes people dismiss it as “racist screed,” but for the conclusion it comes to: western society is just becoming too damn hard to figure out. The basic thesis of the book is if you broke out intelligence (i.e. raw cognitive power – information processing) from a myriad of data about society, what would you learn? It turns out that it has some pretty intense correlations. After a long discussion of longitudinal surveys, wartime induction examinations, facets of testing, the “g” factor, and statistical regression analyses; what it boils down to is for income, crime, and a multitude of other issues, the strongest correlating factor is intelligence. This is beyond and in lieu of the standard answers of family structure, socio-economic background, or ethnicity. Which makes a certain amount of sense; it’s not that SAT scores follow wealth, but that wealth (and its helpmate education) follows intelligence. Their data fits nicely even into the observations about the relative ineffectiveness of parenting Steven Levitt makes in Freakonomics. (A good, short, read.)

All of this means that being able to process reams and reams of information is a valuable and necessary skill, which I think we mostly have realized intuitively. The compelling, important question the Bell Curve guys lead up to is: What happens to you if you can’t? For untold decades, the institutional answer to everything seems to have been complication. Mr. Sinclair writes an expose of packing in Bridgeport? Create an overseer board. Worried about corruption in politics? Institute disclosure laws. Want to help out families with kids? Bend the tax code around them. No one trusts your newspaper? Run everything by four editors first. Corporation using too many paper clips? Make everyone file a requisition in triplicate. Publicly traded companies playing a shell game? Sarbanes-Oxley. This amount of complication has a price.

We have not exhausted all the reasons that cognitive ability is becoming more
valuable in the labor market, but these will serve to illustrate a theme: The
more complex a society becomes, the more valuable are the people who are
especially good at dealing with complexity. Barring a change in direction,
the future is likely to see the rules for doing business become yet more
complex, to see regulation extend still further, and to raise still higher the
stakes for having a high IQ. [The Bell Curve, p.99]

The price is almost nobody can any longer figure out what the hell is going on. To pick on the perennial example: when engineers feel like they can’t fill out their tax forms without help, you may have a problem. The more and more complex things become, the more the information-processing skill becomes paramount, and the more the less-than-brilliant become mired in an arbitrary Kafkaesque world with which they have no hope of dealing. This increases feelings of alienation and helplessness, straining the shared good will that makes civil society work and essentially making the vaunted “democracy” that people celebrate endlessly into a meaningless spectacle. In the words of an historian I’ve been reading:

At the same time, it {is} also held that . . . all children {must be} not simply
literate but educated up to and through college – rules, rules, definitions,
classifications, and exceptions = indignation – and litigation. The
welfare state cannot avoid becoming the judiciary state. [Barzan, From
Dawn to Decadence. p.777]

The danger is of creating an untenable system. How often have we already heard “this is what the regulations say, but this is how we actually operate?” Laws that are contradictory and inscrutable devolve into arbitrary power. Commerce that is incomprehensible grows Andy Fastow. As countless third-world examples illustrate, if the formal way of working is cumbersome to the point of impossible the only ones profiting are the black marketeers. (Oil-for-food was probably a great example.) The lynchpin of society is voluntary agreement between people for mutual gain, including the famous “informed consent.” If no one understands to what they’re agreeing, resentment, conflict, and “gaming the system” are sure to follow. For years I’ve been the only guy in the meeting who has actually read the forty-page construction contract. The prophet here is W. Edwards Deming, who famously observed that no one can do a good job in a system that won’t allow them to.

Maybe this isn’t a new problem. I remain concerned that if the rules of the game continue to leave behind those who haven’t been intensively trained and have a natural aptitude for complexity, then the consequences may be dire.