Policy is for nerds
We've heard this before, and we'll hear it again. Where this goes south, however, is when we stop focusing on "Policy" and fixate ourselves on dissecting the "nerds". Who is a nerd? Does it bite? And so on, until the question loses relevance and we, the plebs, are confined into our little pits of never-ending doom. Congratulations?
The lingua franca of an evolving economy is policy. From the movement of a paisa down the market, to decisive choices that separate a bubble from a crash, policy shapes the world. To try and define it is a futile exercise in semantics. Au contraire, if we try and use logic and mathematical machinery to pin it down, we find ourselves in fairly predictable terrain.
Policy is a bundle of choices aimed towards a particular set of outcomes. It's always simpler to bunch things up when exactness is rare. Thus, the choices are as vague as the outcomes. In an algorithmic manner, one could imagine an initial dataset gathered from empiricism, and a subsequent "cleanup" to reflect the underlying topography of the problem at hand. The problem being governance. A country, a company, a club or a gang of football buddies at an Irish pub. Suit yourself. The only catch is - the data must orient itself to the eventual truth. So for instance, in Bihar elections, a certain party with an expected majority targets the blue collar workers as its primary vote bank and plans a manifesto promising a step-change in their lives. But a better life for a laborer might spell lower margins for the entrepreneur or the entrenched businessman who funds much of the party's election campaign. Now the party must fetch the monkey AND balance it on a thin wire. With each new variable in the equation, the wire starts thinning, until just at the precipice of a victory, it snaps.
The opposition waits with blood in its jaws, ready to snap its way into the new reality. But gravity is nonlinear in politics too. So you have a gigantic, complex web of parties looking for an optimum outcome for all. And on top of these games in motion, you have law as your ultimate reckoning. This constrained optimization problem is worsened by skewed data and inefficient gameplay by the primary stakeholders. The politician fails to identify their primary group, the citizens fail to identify their priorities. When the day ends, we have a broken political landscape that fixes little and leaves a lot for the next cycle that never comes. Potholes that never get fixed. Forests that vanish despite the law. Liberties that disappear under blanket bans and inexplicable rules.
If policy is indeed a bunch of decisions, and each decision is tied to its own outcome, the optimization problem should require a radical rethinking in terms of data and simplification of the map. What lies under the turbulent surfaces of most democracies is a fractured understanding of what matters and what doesn't. In other words, the nerds are always left out in the cold.
The world cannot be fixed. There is no silver bullet simply for the fact that there is no single point of truth. Thus, there is no single prescription to the political crises we find around us today. It was worse yesterday, and it only gets better. We must believe this because we have no logical option. The pit of doom favors only the jugglers and not the doers. The age and appetite for verbal jugglery is gone. The age of the nerd is upon us.
Time to bring them in.