http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/opinion/brooks-the-planning-fallacy.html?_r=1&hp

It is easy to imagine that at breakfast tables, lunch rooms , dinner tables and even at swank dinner parties in the suburbs of the capitol, the political homilies of Mr. David Brooks are the subject of many conversations, many disagreements,  many small debates, that provide some mealtime diversion to the participants. They can feel a sense of partaking in the intellectual life of the Republic, of defining by their activity the actuality of citizenship. In his latest column The Planning Fallacy, Mr. Brooks exercises his dissent on the notion and practice of policy making and policy planning: in essence he says that any attempt at policy planning is essentially doomed to failure giving as his example:

“When the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman was a young man, he led a committee to write a new part of the curriculum for Israeli high schools. The committee worked for a year, and Kahneman asked his colleagues how long they thought the rest of the project would take. Their estimates were around two years. Kahneman then asked the most experienced among them how long such work took other curriculum committees. The gentleman pointed out that roughly 40 percent of the committees never finished their work at all.But what about those that did finish? The gentleman reported that he had never seen a committee finish in less than seven years and never in more than 10.This was bad news. They might fail to finish a task that they thought would be done in three years. At best, the project might consume eight or nine years. Yet this information didn’t affect those on the team at all. They carried on, assuming that though others might fail or dally, surely they wouldn’t. As it turned out, their project took eight years to finish. By the time it was done, the Ministry of Education had lost interest, and the curriculum was never used.”

Mr. Brooks only refers to the works of well accredited experts, with impeccable intellectual pedigrees. Mr. Kahneman’s attempt to write a new curriculum was completed after eight years and never used. But what is germane is that this prolonged story of a single failed attempt to write a new curriculum is used as a long and tendentious introduction and rhetorical frame to the political stalemate between Republicans and Democrats, as presented by Mr. Brooks, hardly a disinterested observer or reporter. In essence both parties are mired in their respective narratives of economic recovery and neither can emancipate themselves from those narratives, that is, without the political wisdom of our Solomon like pundit. And his cynical conclusion is that policy can only aspire to fix small things, make small changes, that benefit some. But one could answer with the successes of the New Deal and The Great Society, although Mr. Brooks manages to describe one of these grand policy attempts as a failure.

Let me take a moment to quote some of Mr. Brooks’ irresistibly trenchant bons mots:

“The problem comes when these optimists don’t look at themselves objectively from the outside.”

“Most people overrate their own abilities and exaggerate their capacity to shape the future.”

“Optimistic people rise in this world.”

“The key to wisdom in these circumstances is to make the distinction between discrete good and systemic good.”

Political Cynic