ESSAY // ON CERTAINTY
Success, Someday
Wrestling down the beast of our own certainty is a Herculean task. Our fate depends on it.
by John Muldowney
EXCERPT //
Politicians and commentators on both ends of the political spectrum try to sell their ideas as panaceas. They present the problems we face as straightforward issues with simple political solutions. Lawmakers rarely appeal to rigorous empirical evidence to support their proposals. On top of that, they advocate large-scale reforms with many components, few or none of which have been tested in isolation, let alone collectively. Many lawmakers are not even aware of what’s contained in the laws and bills they pass. For instance, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, which on the surface was a straightforward attempt to provide stimulus checks in the wake of Covid-19, was 5,593 pages in length. There may exist people who have read the entire bill, but I know there’s very little chance the lawmakers who drafted it, or the people they’re supposed to represent, have done so.
One of the reasons why officials rush these untested, convoluted policies into use is that we, the people, demand that they do so. We fall into the trap of believing every issue has a political solution. This incentivizes elected lawmakers to push bills through Congress, even if they don’t know what’s in them, or what effects they’ll have. If they want to get reelected, they have to look like they are “doing something,” which doesn’t leave them much time to meditate on the consequences of what they’re doing. Eventually, this leads to a morass of government policy so unruly and tangled that it’s impossible to identify which policies are the source of our problems.
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