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Scientific Sense Podcast

Sunday, August 26, 2018

Policy inefficiencies

It has been shown that good intentions are not sufficient to make good policy decisions. Humans have generally been incompetent in making optimum policy in the presence of uncertainty and interconnectivity. A recent article (1) gives a powerful example of this phenomenon. The article demonstrates the futility of subsidies and massive investments into improving irrigation efficiencies on the premise that freshwater is a valuable resource. The blue planet has abundant water - but the species that apparently dominates it has not figured out how to harvest it. More importantly, it also shows how policymakers and politicians, in general, do not have the capabilities to optimize the system.

As the tumbling blue planet skirts disaster in an active shooting gallery in space, we have a system that allows incompetence to rise to the top. Knowledge and meritocracy do not matter, money and the ability to tweet garbage, do. As the "free market capitalists," raise tariffs and the socialists stand ready to dole out subsidies without thinking, it is clear that we are entering a regime of governance that will not be attractive for the rising millennials. A generation seems to have wasted time and space, adorned with ego and irrational ideas such as religion and prestige. Such is the disastrous state of affairs for the 8 billion that even scientists, who claim to think rationally and religious leaders, who claim to perpetuate good, have become numb.

If humans are observed from above by an entity that understands the non-linear effects of arbitrary actions on a complex and virtually unpredictable system, she will be sad. As the space agency makes plans to perpetuate the human species to Mars and beyond, there is a more important question it has to answer, first. Why? Will the universe lose knowledge and compassion if humans were to vanish as the Earth gets scorched under the expanding Sun? Will the universe lose information if humans were to vanish in a catastrophic impact from outer space. Will the universe care about a species that shows no positive slope in conceptual knowledge?

Likely not.


(1) The paradox of irrigation efficiency.  http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6404/748
  • R. Q. Grafton1,2,
  • J. Williams1,
  • C. J. Perry3,
  • F. Molle4,
  • C. Ringler5,
  • P. Steduto6,
  • B. Udall7,
  • S. A. Wheeler8,
  • Y. Wang9,
  • D. Garrick10,
  • R. G. Allen11
  • See all authors and affiliations

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