Our Crisis of Institutional Competence
Why things don't work anymore.
Almost everywhere you look, we are in a crisis of institutional competence.
The Secret Service, whose failures in securing Trump's Butler, PA speech are legendary and frankly hard to believe at this point, is one example. (Nor is the Butler event the Secret Service's first embarrassment.)
The Navy, whose ships keep colliding and catching fire.
Major software vendor Crowdstrike, whose botched update shut down major computer systems around the world.
The United States government, which built entire floating harbors to support the D-Day invasion in Europe, but couldn't build a workable floating pier in Gaza.
And of course, Boeing, whose Starliner spacecraft is stuck, apparently indefinitely, at the International Space Station. (Its crew's six-day mission, now extended perhaps into 2025, is giving off real Gilligan's Islandenergy.) At present, Starliner is clogging up a necessary docking point at the ISS, and they can't even send Starliner back to Earth on its own because it lacks the necessary software to operate unmanned – even though an earlier build of Starliner did just that.
Then there are all the problems with Boeing's airliners, literally too numerous to list here.
Roads and bridges take forever to be built or repaired, new airports are nearly unknown, and the Covid response was extraordinary for its combination of arrogant self-assurance and evident ineptitude.
These are not the only examples, of course, and readers can no doubt provide more (feel free to do so in the comments) but the question is, Why? Why are our institutions suffering from such widespread incompetence? Americans used to be known for "know how," for a "can-do spirit," for "Yankee ingenuity" and the like. Now? Not so much.
Americans in the old days were hardly perfect, of course. Once the Transcontinental Railroad was finished and the golden spike driven in Promontory, Utah, large parts of it had to be reconstructed for poor grading, defective track, etc. Transport planes full of American paratroopers were shot down during the invasion of Sicily by American ships, whose gunners somehow confused them for German bombers. But those were failures along the way to big successes, which is not so much the case today.
But if our ancestors mostly did better, it's probably because they operated closer to the bone. One characteristic of most of our recent failures is that nobody gets fired. (Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle did resign, eventually, but nobody fired her, and I think heads should have rolled on down the line). Even the FBI agent who accidentally shot a man while dancing in a bar was allowed to carry a gun again. He also avoided jail time with a sweet plea deal.
I believe that incentives matter. Just compare the performance of SpaceX to that of Boeing here. SpaceX's rockets work. The Crew Dragon capsule has been flying for quite a while, even as this debacle with Starliner was that vehicle's first crewed flight. SpaceX has been operating in a "bet the company" mode since its first Falcon flight, and while Elon Musk is quite tolerant of rocket explosions as a part of iterative learning, I don't think he's tolerant of people who are acting stupidly or lazily or not learning. And consequently, as soon as Starliner developed problems people started speculating about a SpaceX rescue mission.
A famous essay by Nico Colchester divided approaches into "Crunchy" and "Soggy." When things are crunchy, you know how you're doing:
Crunchy systems are those in which small changes have big effects leaving those affected by them in no doubt whether they are up or down, rich or broke, winning or losing, dead or alive. The going was crunchy for Captain Scott as he plodded southwards across the sastrugi. He was either on top of the snow-crust and smiling, or floundering thigh-deep. The farther south he marched the crunchier his predicament became. Sogginess is comfortable uncertainty. The modern Scott is unsure how deeply he is in it. He can radio for an airlift, or drop in on an American early-warning station for a hot toddy. The richer a society becomes, the soggier its systems get.
Systems are soggy when nobody's life is obviously affected by failure. Any system involving civil service employees or contractors on cost-plus contracts is likely to be soggy. As long as Elon Musk is at the helm, SpaceX will be crunchy, though given time it's likely to tend toward sogginess, as most institutions do.
Colchester concludes: "A crunchy policy is not necessarily right, only more certain than a soggy one to deliver the results that it deserves."
Stay crunchy, my friends.
Here's one example. Just one. My father (1916-2002) had three years of college, in chemistry. The day after Pearl Harbor he and his brother were down at the recruiting station. They turned Dad down because as a chemist he was "too valuable at home". He would have none of it, and eventually browbeat his way into the Navy, becoming an officer.
He taught himself radio and radar, and at Iwo Jima radioed the lead unit assaulting Suribachi to "grab the biggest damned piece of sheet metal you can find, and carry it right up front." He then deployed the radar fire-control system to walk his destroyer's 5-inch shells up the mountain, only yards ahead of the Marines. Figured it on the go. There were thousand like him.
After the war, he became a self-taught engineer, eventually getting his P.Eng. licence in both electrical and mechanical engineering. He specialised in metals -- alloys, corrosion, plating, and so on. Back in 1963 he got a panicked phone call from a competing company. They had a process tank full of phosgene [one of the most poisonous things there is] at 3000 psi for which the corrosion monitors no longer were reporting.
He caught the overnight train to Cleveland, and by Xray determined that 2 inches of nickel steel had corroded to 5/8 inch. It was days away from a pressure-failure explosion, directly upwind of Cleveland.
When he got home, he pulled me out of school and we spent days at the nearby Yale library. I was doing the preliminary skimming, and handing him the potentially useful journals and texts. Within 30 days he had invented a totally new alloy which would not corrode under those conditions.
He refused to patent it, and instead telegrammed every chemical company using high-pressure phosgene in the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe ... warning them of the problem and giving them the needed new-alloy specs.
America was then full of men and women like him, and I, too, wonder why such people are so depressingly scarce in these current times. Dad certainly didn't have more formal eduction or credentials than folks today, but his generation always found ways to get shit done.
This will get me branded as an extremist ofc, but i've been in the workforce since the early 80s and these observations are built on copious experience. Workplaces where men are the majority tend to be crunchy. Workplaces where women are the majority don't. Workplaces with a critical mass of out-of-the closet deviants (5% or so) are the soggiest of all.