isen.blog

Jared Diamond's op-ed for the New York Times over the weekend reminded me of another, more detailed piece that appeared on the Edge website in March 2003.

In that essay, Diamond outlines four simple reasons why societies make disastrous decisions:

• failure to anticipate a problem.
  
• failure to perceive it once it has arisen.
  
• failure to attempt to solve it after it has been perceived.
  
• failure to succeed in attempts to solve it.

He further dissects this list.

Reasons for failure to anticipate the problem include:

• [there may be] no prior experience of such problems
  
• prior experience has been forgotten.
  
• reasoning by false analogy.

Reasons for failing to perceive a problem that has actually arrived include:

• the origins of some problems are literally imperceptible.
  
• the problem may take the form of a slow trend concealed by wide up-and-down fluctuations.
  
• distant managers who are not on the scene never become aware of the problem.

Reasons for failure to try to solve a problem that has been perceived are divided into "rational and "irrational" reasons, where "rational" and "irrational" are used in the economic sense. "Rational" reasons include:

• clashes of interest between people with different inherent interests.
  
• when the consumer has no long-term stake in preserving the resource.
  
• when the interests of the decision-making elite in power conflict with the interests of the rest of society.

"irrational" reasons include:

• attachment to a bad status quo because it is [embodies] deeply held value that we admire.
  
• clashes between short-term motives and long-term motives.
  
• psychological denial.

Reasons for failure to succeed in solving a problem that one does try to solve

• the problem may just be too difficult
  
• efforts are too little, begun too late

Diamond concludes his March 2003 essay by saying:

All this may sound pessimistic, as if failure is the rule in human decision-making. In fact, of course that is not the case, in the environmental area as in business, academia, and other groups. Many human societies have anticipated, perceived, tried to solve, or succeeded in solving their environmental problems. For example, the Inca Empire, New Guinea Highlanders, 18th-century Japan, 19th-century Germany, and the paramount chiefdom of Tonga all recognized the risks that they faced from deforestation, and all adopted successful reforestation or forest management policies.

Thus, my reason for discussing failures of human decision-making is not my desire to depress you. Instead, I hope that, by recognizing the sign posts of failed decision making, we may become more consciously aware of how others have failed, and of what we need to do in order to get it right.

There are lessons for telecom policy here, I am certain.