Knowledge And Decisions

Insulation from feedback takes many forms, not the least of which is duplicity. Administrative agencies have turned the Civil Rights Act’s equal treatment provisions into preferential treatment practices. Laws prescribe severe criminal penalties vastly in excess of what is in fact carried out. A “results”-oriented Supreme Court creates constitutional “interpretations” that horrify even those who agree with the social policy announced. There is even duplicity imposed upon others, as when “affirmative action” requires employers to confess to being guilty of “under-utilization” of minorities and women, and to promise — in their “goals and timetables” — to achieve numbers or percentages which all parties may know to be impossible. Quite aside from the moral issues, doctrines which cannot be openly argued — quotas, judicial policy making, nonenforcement of criminal laws — cannot be subject to effective scrutiny.

Ironically, “results”-oriented legal policies have achieved largely intermediate institutional results, rather than their social goals. Appellate courts have successfully imposed their will on other institutions — school boards, trial courts, universities, employers — without achieving the social end results expected. For all the countless criminals freed on evidentiary technicalities, there is no evidence that the police practices the courts attacked have been eliminated or even reduced.³⁹⁰ For all the costly and controversial procedures imposed by “affirmative action” quotas, there is little or no evidence that such policies have advanced blacks beyond what was achieved under the previous “equal opportunity” policy.³⁹¹ For all the bitterness surrounding the busing controversy, there is no overall evidence of any social, educational, or psychological gains from these policies,³⁹² and even purely statistical “integration” has been offset to a great extent by “white flight” to the suburbs.³⁹³ In short, legal sacrifices of principles to get “results” have often been a oneway trade-off with no social gain, in terms of the avowed goals. That little or nothing has been achieved does not mean that there has been no cost. The purely financial costs of busing can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars for just one school system,³⁹⁴ not to mention the hundreds of millions of dollars nationally in school closings alone,³⁹⁵ and such social costs as increased racial antagonism,³⁹⁶ and a disruption of school children’s social life and reduced parental input into local schools.³⁹⁷ An “affirmative action” report can cost an employer hundreds of thousands of dollars, not to mention its costs in morale to officials,³⁹⁸ white male employees, and even minority and female employees feeling the backlash.

None of this is evidence of special ignorance or culpability in the individuals in appellate courts and administrative agencies who impose these policies. Rather, it is evidence of the inherent limitations of such institutions, and ultimately of human knowledge, as it exists in any one place. The elaborate, overlapping, knowledge-transmitting networks which constitute the various institutions of a complex society demonstrate both the wide diffusion of relevant knowledge and the high cost and high value of its transmission and coordination. For political institutions, especially for those insulated from effective feedback, to persistently override the decisions of other institutions and millions of individuals is virtually to insure results that are unproductive or counterproductive, even in terms of the preferences of the overriding institutions.