Don't interfere with something you don't understand

From If You Don’t Understand It, Don’t Mess with It by Michael Munger.

In our rapidly developing and integrating world, the speed with which our systems (economic, political, social, technological, etc.) become more complex far outpaces our quotidian understanding. Indeed, complexity increases at a log rate whereas comprehension is slowly additive.

We have hit most of the low hanging fruit for problem solving. The overwhelming increase in longevity is the result of 1) clean water, 2) basic levels of nutrition, 3) basic first aid, and 4) improved cleanliness. All those billion dollar hospitals? They do improve morbidity and improve mortality rates but for individuals and at the margins. The big improvements come from a handful of fundamentals.

I recently read or heard someone ask a question along the lines of "What major public policy in the past thirty or forty years has been an unequivocal success in achieving its stated goals without breaking the bank or generating substantial negative unitended consequences?" His point was, though not in these words, that most social problems are multivariate in origin and sensitive to a range of supply and demand pressures which make it hard to actually predict what the outcomes are going to be.

Since I heard the question, I have only come up with a small handful of such policies, most of them extremely basic.

Seatbelts (and later airbags and roll-bars).

Child seats for cars.

Violence Against Women Act.

Just about all other policies have been failures to achieve their desired goals, cost far more than expected, generated unanticipated negative consequences, or all three.

This touches on the issue of gun control as well. It is extremely rare that any of the commonly proposed gun control laws commonly mooted about have any evidentiary basis for their efficacy and are usually irrelevant to the particulars of the outrages which lead to the calls for gun control.

It comes back to the issue that in a dynamic, heterogenous society subject to increasingly complex processes, it is difficult to identify public policies in which we can be confident. The more we try to coerce policies in to place which then do not work, the more we undermine the case for expertise in policy and undermine trust in government - two undesirable outcomes.

Munger points out that most Classical Liberals (often incorrectly called conservatives today) are comfortable with emergent order which we see in both science (particularly evolution) and in governance. They believe in policy experimentation in the laboratory of the states or counties. They see little inconsistency.

As Munger summarizes:

Overall, the argument for emergent order in the environment has an implication: if you don’t understand it, don’t mess with it. The argument goes like this:

There exists a variety of complex structures we observe, but do not understand.

When we investigate the historical origin and function of the structure, it is clear that it comes from somewhere, and has crucial value in the survival of individuals and the evolved system.

One cannot simply look at the structure, or any part of it, and draw any conclusions about whether it is useful or where it came from.

Even though the system is not designed, it is highly complex and interdependent; each element has an important function.

Indeed.

He goes on then to identify one of the less discussed paradoxes.

What I find surprising is that the very people in Western society who are most likely to take the “prudential preservation” position on natural structures such as species and ecosystems are exactly the same folks who are most willing to throw away the cultural traditions and moral systems from the past. If a political group encounters a rule or custom they find inconvenient, their solution is to tear the whole thing down and start over.

We see this remarkable overconfidence come a cropper over and over in history when intellectuals are given free rein to implement their schemes. The French Revolution, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and Roosevelt’s “New Deal” are each unique historical events, but they shared the feature that those in charge thought that they could achieve fast and dramatic improvements by destroying many of the existing rules and norms.

[snip]

I hope the reader sees the problem. It is precisely those who (plausibly) preach prudence in manipulating the natural world who are most cavalier about smashing and rebuilding social institutions. One might think that the argument “But we don’t understand the function of, or connections among, these rules well enough to replace them!” would carry some weight, since (1) social institutions are also highly complex and interdependent, and (2) this argument is already understood and used by such analysts in understanding the environment.

He ends, appropriately, by citing Chesterton's famous dictum's in Chesterton's Fence:

And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious.

Basically, don't interfere with something you don't understand.

We can trace modern prosperity and success to some unclear combination of technology, religion, culture, historical circumstance that occurred in Europe circa 1500 which led to the Age of Enlightenment, Human Universalism, Classical Liberalism, etc. which in turn created all the systems of productivity which have brought us to this unique and never duplicated point in history where longevity is equalizing across the globe, absolute poverty is disappearing, peace is the norm not the exception and where natural disasters are mitigated.

The prize has been great and we do not remotely understand the details of the combination of systems (technology, religion, culture, historical circumstance), their interplay with one another and their antecedent multi-variables are. We have some ideas and hypotheses and we are beginning to close in on some rudimentary understandings, but we don't really understand.

And it is in this environment in which so many otherwise apparently sane people so often advocate for policies which have always failed (socialism and communism) or are gleefully ignorant of any complexity and therefore feel free to propose reforming whole sectors, dramatically reconstructing institutions, overturning long sustained social norms, etc.

It is narcissism on steroids.