By Douglas Kruger
THE policies of a place represent its very soul. Yet it’s surprisingly easy for a policy to do more harm than good. Even the well-intentioned ones. Especially the well-intentioned ones.
A friend of mine once recounted a horrific taxi ride in a north African nation, in which the driver accidentally knocked down a pedestrian on a busy city street. While my friend sat in shock in the back seat, the driver shifted into reverse, then drove over the pedestrian a second time.
The driver explained a local policy. If you disabled someone, you became responsible for that person for the rest of their life. Better to simply finish them off.
This policy may have started from a place of concern for human welfare. But the real-world outcomes were the opposite of the intentions.
Jersey has seen a good deal of debate around several policies this year, most recently, the question of trainee minimum wage.
Is there a way of avoiding counterproductive results in debates of this nature?
Economic historian Dr Thomas Sowell provides some good ones.
Sowell studied policymaking, and its knock-on effects, over extensive periods of time. He found that the most common flaw is a simple fallacy of reasoning: we tend to judge policies by their stated intentions, not by their outcomes. If we were to judge policies by their real-world results, Sowell asserts, most would be scrapped, either because they haven’t worked, or because they encourage the precise opposite of what was intended.
Yet bad policies, he finds, are rarely ever scrapped.
This is because no policy is initially described in negative terms. They are described in glowingly positive terms, by proponents eager to sell them. The policies are given sympathetic names, and the public narrative focuses only on the good outcomes intended by them.
For instance, the Soviet Union was predicated on the achievement of “equality”. Yet death toll estimates, in the pursuit of this guiding ideal, vary between 40–60 million.
This begs the question: at what point do we admit that our kind intentions make for disastrous policies?
Sowell points out that most people never arrive at this realisation, because we do not commonly put a time limit on a policy and then test the outcome. Instead, we begin with good intent, then assume that this will be sufficient.
If governments ran honest trials and postmortems, Sowell argues, most modern policies would be considered outright failures, then duly scrapped. Instead, life moves on. The policy becomes embedded, for better or worse. A policy intended to reduce crime is never tested according to whether or not it actually reduced crime.
Before introducing a new policy, we should ask, “Where has this been tried before?”
Almost all of our policies in Jersey derive from the UK, and to a lesser extent the EU. Almost all are flagrant disasters in both places. Almost all are sold in the attractive packaging of kindness. There is no reason we should follow blindly, afforded as we are the benefit of time to see the results.
A healthy dose of scepticism can serve us well here. “Where has this been tried before? Did it work?” Then push a little harder: “What specifically went wrong the last time this was done?”
When that lens is applied, astonishing examples abound. In the US, black poverty rates were on a steep decline after the abolition of slavery, an altogether desirable trend. If the government had done nothing, disparities were on course to have disappeared organically. Yet this healthy decline came to a grinding halt when President Johnson’s administration enacted a policy to eliminate black inequality, declaring a “war on poverty”. You can measure the cessation of progress on a graph. Sowell, a black academic himself, has done so.
The problem here is one of language, as facts become clouded by emotion. A “war on poverty” sounds like an obvious good. Who would ever oppose or scrap such a policy? Yet its real-world outcomes were disastrous. Anyone who genuinely wanted to see a decline in black poverty would be appalled at the damage this policy did. A similar debate now rages around the US Department of Education. Prior to its founding, American education was arguably the best in the world. Since the founding of the Department of Education, standards of education have become worse by almost every measurable metric. Yet who in their right mind would abolish a “Department of Education”? The answer just might be: anyone who cares about outcomes.
So, a policy meant to reduce alcohol consumption should be tested in this manner: Did it reduce alcohol consumption? If this did not happen, the policy does not work. If alcohol consumption went up, then not only did it not work, it made the problem worse.
It would seem obvious, then, that the policy should be scrapped. What happens instead? A worsening of the problem is presented as proof that more of the policy is needed.
The problem is doubly compounded given that people don’t like to lose face. It would be better for all concerned to simply say, “That didn’t work. Let’s try something else.”
Another useful insight from Dr Sowell: policymakers tend to forget that people do not passively submit to policies directed against them. Instead, they react, and push back, often in unexpected ways.
The most commonly seen version of this is the targeting of the super-wealthy for extra taxation. The UK is doing it right now. In response, these people simply leave, shrinking the taxpaying base, leading to less revenue being collected, not more. What happens next? Policymakers push for more of the policy, creating a downward spiral.
It operates the same way at a small scale. “Our tourism industry is struggling. We need more revenue from that source. We will impose a special tax.” But people are not blocks of wood, passively accepting higher costs, so they go elsewhere. The number of tourists declines further. Policymakers are baffled, then decide the solution is to raise taxes further.
When you are in a hole, you should stop digging.
There is nothing new under the sun. Almost anything we dream up politically or economically has been tried somewhere before. We should always begin by seeking out specific ways that its application has failed. And do not ask the policymakers themselves. They are incentivised to save face. Find out from those directly affected by the policy.
If a policy does not work, do not implement it. We are not slaves to the bad ideas of other nations, nor are we eternally beholden to our own past missteps.
Above all, we must not fall for the propaganda of good intentions. Historically, they are all too often the key to Pandora’s box.
Douglas Kruger is an author and speaker based in Jersey. His books are all available via Amazon and Audible. Meet him at douglaskruger.com
