Knowledge And Decisions

The concept of an “unmonitored monitor” with a broad mandate may seem dubious as a way of getting a job done. Articulated specifics (job descriptions, organizational rules, etc.) enforced by tiers of monitors are much more rationalistic. However, the ultimate question is not plausibility but results. Unmonitored monitors are among the most hard-working and dedicated people in the society. Mothers and businessmen are classic examples. In their very different ways, these two unmonitored monitors have become notorious for the intensity and duration of their efforts, and are often admonished to “take it easy” by those closest to them, even though the latter are often the beneficiaries of their efforts. Similar levels of dedication are much rarer among rank and file business employees or rank-and-file civil servants — though both of the latter groups are under layers of supervisors and controlled by numerous articulated rules. Admonitions to rank and file civil servants to “take it easy” would raise suspicions of sarcasm. Nor is it a matter of different groups of people performing differently because of disparate values or psychology. The very same individuals who perform in lackluster fashion as employees of business or government may, as parents, drive themselves to do all that they can for their children.

No one is a wholly unmonitored monitor. There are legal restrictions on business management and laws on child neglect and abuse. However, these laws seldom reach either the areas or the intensity of efforts achieved in parental or business activities. The businessman who works nights and weekends is usually going far beyond what is necessary to avoid being fired or to prevent the business from being sued or going bankrupt. Similarly, most parents could probably reduce their efforts and expenditures on their children by half without becoming legally liable for neglect or abuse. Indeed, some of the largest expenditures on children arise when putting them through college, at an age when there is no legal liability to do anything for them. In short, even where there are formalized rules, the articulated rationality of these rules does not begin to explain the efforts and sacrifices of unmonitored monitors. It is the high conductivity of both money and emotional ties which transmits knowledge of other’s needs with such dramatic effect.

High conductivity is an economizer of costly knowledge, in much the same way as the transmission of electricity through copper wire economizes on generating costs, even though it is physically possible to transmit electricity through less conductive material. The conductivity of the human nervous system also economizes on knowledge. A baby pulls his hand back from a hot object without having to know how heat destroys his tissues. The rare medical phenomenon of people whose nervous systems do not transmit pain also demonstrates how conductivity is an economizer of knowledge. Such people must have very frequent complete medical checkups, for they feel none of the painful symptoms which either alert the rest of us to trouble intellectually or else incapacitate us from continuing the harmful activity. As a substitute, they must seek vastly larger amounts of costly, explicit, articulated medical knowledge. Some such people have been rushed from a routine medical checkup to an emergency operation for such conditions as acute appendicitis, from which they had felt no pain. To the extent that social institutions are insulated from the pain of feedback, they may either neglect dangerous conditions or else require inordinate costs of knowledge to preserve themselves or the larger society. Sometimes the institutions deliberately seek to insulate or anesthetize themselves to painful feedback, but sometimes that happens as an unintended consequence of the way decision-making units are set up — for example, a special subway authority oblivious to the injuries and deaths its safety policies are causing among bus or automobile passengers.

Effective social decision making need not depend on the transmission of explicit feedback to decision makers, nor on the degree of their rationality and insight in reaction to it. Where individuals, institutions, or processes are competing for survival, the best adapted survive, whether their adaptation is due to brainpower or luck, and the social benefits are maximized either way. Individual merit is neither necessary nor sufficient for optimal social decision making.

Chapter 5 Political Trade-Offs