The object of politics is simple, pass laws and build institutions for the “Greater Good” by objective debate, and negotiations. The rub of course is that the greater good is a trade-off between the interests of all the parties involved and our most common way of dealing with trade-offs is conflict and and often violence. It is often said that the best government is a benevolent dictatorship. We could imagine an intelligent alien from outer space who had no personal interest on earth, defining a rational, objective greater good, which would be the best we could hope for even though everyone would not be equally happy.
Politics today, far from being an objective debate about the greater good, has become a struggle for power and a battle of partisan ideologies. If we had conscientious politicians with a genuine interest in greater good, they would need to learn from the success of engineering in many aspects:
- they should be experts in some field of social design. The 767 airliner was not built by grassroots citizens and social problems are much more complex than an airliner.
- they should have an unambiguous language for the concepts they would need to deal with. Concepts like fairness, equal rights, justice, facts, etc. The words for these concepts are extremely vague and general and politicians take advantage of this to mislead and coerce. In engineering, they also have generic terms like say a valve, but a blueprint never just says a valve, it always spells out the details of that valve so it can be used without error. If we use the term fairness, a blueprint language would force us to specify all the nuances and details of the meaning of that word in this context.
- Engineers reuse the best features of past projects and make incremental improvements. The 767 airliner did not start with a blank sheet, it built upon the 747 and the 737 etc. Every country in the world has a healthcare delivery system, you would think we could reuse the best components of all of these and over time add improvement. Instead we design according to ideologies, not feedback from practice.
- The 747 was not democratically designed for good reason. Its need, however was democratically established by consumers “voting” to buy trips on it. Social structures should also be designed by experts based on past performance knowledge, not democratically. The democracy would apply to establishing need and feedback on performance.
Blueprintspeak 