We need efficient feedback and we need the capacity to be exposed to consequences

This article, Teachers on the Defensive by Frank Bruni, prompted a train of thought regarding the importance of feedback.

While the history of man is one of slowly improving productivity and life success (an accelerating trend in the past fifty years), the means by which that occurs have long been the source of speculation. I believe there are many critical components whose interactions are complex - so complex that it is difficult to make accurate forecasts. One element of the puzzle, in fact the inverse of increasing productivity (which is a well established trend line), is our incapacity to explain why certain countries, cultures or regions first expand and then collapse - the rise and fall of empires if you will. There always thousands of proximate causes but none of them on their own are sufficiently reliable to be useful predictors of future collapse.

Take post World War II Japan for example. From 1945 to circa 1995 they were an accelerating juggernaut of productivity, putting fear into every trading partner. In books, movies and the popular culture, as well as among the chattering classes, there was grave concern. A concern that persisted right up to the point when their growth suddenly collapsed. They have been in a seemingly permanent state of stasis or contraction for some twenty years. And no one (well some individuals but not the consensus view) saw it coming.

In this article regarding the paradoxical position of teachers unions, there may be a hint of an answer. The paradox is that the teacher's unions have never been so successful in serving the interests of their members in terms of protection from termination, in terms of compensation, in terms of working conditions and yet at this very moment they face existential threats.

I wonder if the core issue is not perhaps the absence of effective feedback mechanisms.

“We bear a lot of responsibility for this,” Weingarten [president of the American Federation of Teachers] told me in a phone interview on Friday. “We were focused — as unions are — on fairness and not as much on quality.” And they’ve sometimes shown a spectacular blindness to public sensitivities in their apparent protection of certain embattled teachers in given instances.

In biology, nature is a cruel taskmaster of survival. Only those organisms that survive and reproduce are permitted a continued existence. How they survive is not preset, the survival mechanisms are miraculously manifold. Feedback on fitness for purpose is prompt, as represented by death or survival. Fairness does not enter into the equation, only quality.

In free markets, the freer the market, the more similar it is to a biological Darwinian process. Commercial success, absent regulation, is entirely contingent upon being able to respond quickly to changing exogenous circumstances. Again, there is no fairness in the equation. You either survive commercially or you do not and that survival depends on the quality of various, and often unpredictable, aspects of your business.

Both biology and commerce are distinguished by exceptionally clear feedback mechanisms married to a ruthless execution of consequences. There is no margin for error.

It is interesting that those regions that are most prosperous today are those that first took up the widespread dissemination of books, printing and reading - all being forms of cognitive feedback. Those countries which are the closest adherents to the principles of the Enlightenment (pluralism, tolerance, natural rights, freedom of press, religion, agency, rule of law, etc.), which principles greatly facilitate feedback and consequences, are also those that are the most prosperous today. Again, there is little focus on fairness in the consequences of Enlightenment, simply a statement of bedrock principles which will inherently have consequences, not all those consequences at any point in time being particularly desirable.

So the first thing I took from the article was the consideration that the problem is not so much with unions per se but the simple fact that based on government structure and past prosperity, that unions have been able to insulate themselves from both feedback and consequences. That would appear to be what we are struggling with now. As Weingarten indicates, the focus has been on fairness and not on effectiveness (or quality as she puts it). With no feedback mechanisms, the focus on fairness has undermined effectiveness and there is now a thirty or fifty year feedback deficit to be made up. It is not unlike plate tectonics. The longer there is no slippage (adjustment) the greater the magnitude will be the earthquake when it comes. Just one of those unavoidable facts of life. You can take a thousand small quakes or one massive one but it is inexorable that there shall be an adjustment. Just like biology, just like commerce.

Teacher effectiveness is an inherently complex thing. Can it be done in an administrative fashion with rules and measures and tests? Sure, to a degree, but is it optimal? Don't know. Is local control of and discretionary management of education likely to be unfair in some way? Sure, but ultimately that isn't the point. Does it work is the point. And we are uncertain about what has worked, what needs to work and what ought to work in the future. What we do know is that despite massive increases in resources devoted to education in the past fifty years, it is unclear that people are better educated or more productive or social outcomes more fair.

Statists seek to impose fixed solutions on complex issues which they hope will be secure over time. Libertarians trust in disaggregated unplanned actions. Both are rational responses to existing circumstances. The question is, over time and subject to repeated, unexpected exogenous shocks, which approach stands up better. I would argue that the pursuit of fairness, while understandable and to some degree noble, is a chimera.

Earthquakes are neither fair or unfair; they just are. Whether you accommodate plate slippage via ten thousand micro-quakes, always having small damages to clean up and pay for, or whether you take it altogether, once every long while with a single massive earthquake is the choice. When you close off feedback and close off the capacity to endure consequences, then you have, from a systems perspective, chosen to take a single massive earthquake.

We can choose, in human systems, when subject to constantly changing circumstances and unexpected exogenous shocks, to take on constant micro-quake adjustments or we can postpone adjustment for as long as possible and then take a body blow. What we can't do is choose not to adjust. It has nothing to do with fairness but with life - we always have to adjust one way or the other, much or as little as we like the consequences of having to adjust. We need efficient feedback and we need the capacity to be exposed to consequences.