How can America improve its problem-solving capacity?

This is my contribution to the Boyd Essay Contest. Solving problems requires two things: a technical solution and a political solution. The first of these is more straightforward, though not easy by any stretch. I spent my career as a process development scientist in API1 manufacturing. Many of our process development projects were efforts to find technical solutions to production problems or to address needs. Despite the fact that the process development research was within normal established science, we encountered things we did not understand and needed to proceed in an iterative trial and error fashion to achieve success.

Such a trial-and-error program is often critical to finding a technical solution to complex problems. So, while technical solutions are not easily achieved, if one is possible, it can be considered as achievable as long as it can be properly “plant-trialed.” By analogy, to achieve good solutions to societal problems, the policy team needs to maintain the political support long enough to complete the necessary trial and error process. This requires that the sponsoring political party is able to acknowledge error without losing the ability to perform another trial.

That is, they need the ability to withstand the attack from the political opposition that will be launched upon the acknowledgement of error. The parties today have no ability to do this, so they do not acknowledge error and keep the bad solutions they began with, living with its flaws. An example is the ACA, whose structure (subsidized private insurance with an ineffective cost control mechanism) has resulted in political opposition preventing improvement. The need to withstand political attack is crucial to obtaining good solutions to problems. The solution to this problem is the political dominance that comes from having the dispensation. A dispensation is a multi-decade period lasting in which the range of acceptable political stances are set by the dominant party.

Another problem is technical knowledge is often intertwined with unscientific political beliefs that reduce the effectiveness of solutions. For example, based on evidence that most crimes are committed by a small percentage of young men, a crime-reduction program might start with a stop and frisk program designed to arrest and incarcerate young men who are carrying contraband on their persons. The idea here is those breaking the law in this small way are more likely to be a criminal than those who do not break the law at all. Such an effort will likely find and remove the criminals, but it will also harass a lot of innocent men. Worse still, it can make felons out of people for things wealthy men do without consequences. These things can anger the community being intensively policed, reducing cooperation with police. Another approach avoiding this outcome would be to develop community relationships enabling the targeting just the bad guys for harassment.

Suppose an optimal solution requires some of each? If these different strategies reflect different political beliefs, it is likely the team tasked with the job (coming from only one party) would focus on just their preferred strategy with suboptimal results. In this case an optimal solution is out of reach. But many people know that there was a time, sixty years ago, when the two parties did work together, making blended solutions possible. How did that happen?

It turns out that the American political system contains elements capable of addressing both of these political problems. The dispensation combined with elections does this. The dispensation allows a party to employ trial and error to work on long-term solutions, as long as they are getting good results. If they don’t their political popularity falls and they lose the next election. Even if the party loses the new party is not free to massively change things, because they don’t have the dispensation. But they can modify the existing policies by incorporating some of their ideas. If they succeed, the can win a second election, but not a third, so the dominant party is assured of coming back to power even if the opposition is very successful. This mechanism is what permitted the bipartisan cooperation in the postwar period. The Roosevelt dispensation was still strong, and Republicans needed to acknowledge its strength if they wished to play any role in national policy. This incented them to cooperate.

But dispensations eventually become unable to address the needs of the time. Usually, they are replaced with a new dispensation, typically by the opposition. This is what happened in 1980 and 1860 when Republicans replaced a Democratic dispensation, and in 1932 when Democrats replaced a Republican dispensation. Sometimes the party with the dispensation replaces their old dispensation with a new one, as McKinley-Roosevelt did in 1896. President Trump has tried to replace the Reagan dispensation with his MAGA program. He has so far been unsuccessful as shown by his failure to be reelected in 2020 and his chronic unpopularity.

As a result, we have been without any dispensation since at least 2016, and quite possibly since 2008, when Democrats chose not to establish their own dispensation in response to the disastrous failure of the Reagan dispensation. Today, neither party can even win a second term, much less the third necessary to demonstrate possession of a dispensation. So, it seems we will need a new dispensation in order to solve important problems facing the nation. That is, one cannot brush the politics under the rug. It won’t stay there. It has to be addressed front and center. In the meantime, efforts to pursue technical solutions to problems can be made at the state and local level.