Knowledge And Decisions

In a constitutional democracy, a crisis cannot be made to last indefinitely because alternative versions of events cannot be suppressed. Real crises must be utilized to establish enduring institutions. The Great Depression of the 1930s was a landmark in this respect. The monetary system — the gold standard — was permanently changed. Labor-management relations were permanently changed by the Wagner Act, adding legal sanctions against employers to other union powers. The permissible limits of price competition were permanently reduced by the Robinson-Patman Act, “fair trade” laws, and a host of special restrictions and subsidies applying to sugar, the maritime industry, and others. All these political developments enhanced governmental power, either directly, as with regulatory laws, or indirectly by freeing government from previously existing restraints, as with the abandonment of the gold standard and relaxed standards of constitutionality for the hybrid executive-legislative-judicial agencies created by the New Deal. There was not only an extraordinary growth of governmental power but an unprecedented political swing. Roosevelt’s electoral victory in 1936 was the greatest ever achieved at that point: he carried all but two states. Moreover, it was part of a larger, historical pattern, which ultimately included an unheard of string of four successful presidential elections, along with one political party’s control of both houses of congress for more than a decade — also unprecedented in American history.

The demonstrable political value of crises was not lost upon subsequent governments or politicians. So many things have since been called a “crisis” that the word has virtually become a political synonym for “situation,” and indicates little more than something that someone wants to change.

In recent decades, there has been a trend toward superseding individual decision making based on behavioral assessments with decision making based on ascribed status. There have been laws proposed and enacted, administrative rulings, judicial decisions, and other political directives prohibiting various kinds of private decision makers from sorting and labeling on the basis of innate biological characteristics (race, sex), transient conditions (childhood, old age) or even volitional behavior (homosexuality, drug use, criminal record). In addition, there have been costs of various sorts and magnitudes imposed by government on those attempting to sort people by various performance characteristics (test scores, work evaluations). For example, letters of reference have been forced to become nonconfidential, and together with the increasing ease of initiating lawsuits, this means that they have become so bland and noncommital as to lose much of their value as transmissions of information on which to sort and label job applicants or seekers after various other kinds of benefits. The imposition of “due process” concepts on public school administrators has similarly reduced the ability of decision makers on the scene to sort out students preventing other children from learning, either by direct disruption of classes or by creating an atmosphere of random terrorism and/or systematic extortion.⁸⁰

Sometimes these governmental activities have been accompanied by admonitions to judge each person individually, rather than by sorting and labeling selected characteristics, but such advice is little more than gratuitous salt in the wound, given the cost differentials involved in these two methods. Sometimes the ascribed status is preferential, so that sorting and labeling that is biased in the prescribed direction is legal but any bias in a different direction is not.