What I learned from a pencil
Yesterday officially kicked off the 2020 Presidential Campaign. If the Iowa Caucuses are any indication, the Democrats effort to choose a nominee to unseat President Trump is going to be a raucous affair that will go down to the wire. I expect to see accusations of a rigged system by multiple candidates who end up falling short. And who can blame them? In 2016, the Democratic National Committee, seemed to put their finger on the scale to tip Iowa in favor of Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Bernie cried foul and the party changed to a more complex system designed to provide more transparency into the system. The caucus format is already complex and obtuse, but it was decided to inject more complexity with a “cool new app” that controlled reporting. Instead, the system failed, and no results were provided at the end of the evening. Now the candidates have moved on to New Hampshire, and the American public has become ever more suspicious of our election system. What’s that they say about “the best laid plans?
The 2020 Iowa Democratic Caucus is a metaphor for the perils of centralized control. The caucuses are already an interconnected network of geographically distributed precincts that is kind of like ranked-choice voting where the supporters of low-ranking candidates are eliminated who then transfer their votes to their next choice. Votes are repeated until some pre-determined level of victory is achieved. Each forum also has its own peculiar rules on breaking ties that range from coin flips to drawing straws. The caucus format isn’t my preferred way to choose a candidate, but it has worked for Iowans for decades so why mess with it?
This reminds me of the simple but exquisite explanation of the miracle of the “invisible hand” by following the production of an ordinary pencil. In I, Pencil, Economist Leonard Read shows that none of us knows enough to plan the creative actions and decisions of others. Read traces the life of a pencil from growth of trees, to mining of graphite, to production of rubber erasers and all the manufacturing and human resources applied along the way. No human alive is smart enough to make a pencil by themselves. And yet we have Presidential candidates promising that if they are given the reigns of government, they can correctly pick winners and losers in the marketplace, set prices or rents where they should be, decide what kind of education our children should have, and what kind of healthcare you should have. They should stop for a second and learn some humility from a lowly pencil.
In my book, Locally Grown: The Art of Sustainable Government, I talk about the advantages of distributed over centralized systems to achieve a common goal. It reflects the self-evident truths that “two heads are better than one” when dealing with diverse problems and “one-size fits all” is no way to govern sustainably. In her Nobel Prize-winning work for “governing the commons”, economist Elinor Ostrom echoes Leonard Read by showing how community-based solutions are more effective than top-down centralized control for managing precious common resources like clean air, ocean fish stocks and forests. Without the knowledge of the superiority of distributed over centralized mainframe computing, the internet and most of the digital capabilities we take for granted would not be possible. In similar fashion, the more we vote for outsourcing our freedoms to a centralized federal government, the faster we build the house of cards that will collapse under it’s own weight. So, when the 2020 campaign roadshow comes to your state, ask the contenders what their plan is for reducing the $1 trillion federal deficit and $23 trillion federal debt outstanding. If they tell you just raising taxes on corporations and wealthy households will solve the problem, they are lying to you. Most will dodge the question because being fiscally prudent isn’t what gets you elected these days. Just answer them, holding your pencil in the air: “I’ll vote for everything you promise if you show me you’re smart enough to make this.”