Knowledge And Decisions

The enormous value of articulation, abstraction, and formalized rationality in the intellectual process is as part of the authentication process. They are neither part of the creative act nor of the empirical evidence which determines its ultimate applicability. The essentially negative role of articulated rationality in filtering, modifying, and eliminating ideas on their way to becoming knowledge is teachable in schools because it is formally demonstrable. But the creative performance — the “preanalytic cognitive act”⁹³ as it has been called — is not. The most highly trained products of the leading universities are therefore better equipped to demolish ideas than to generate them. This is a systemic characteristic to be understood rather than an intentional choice to be criticized. It must be kept in mind, however, when considering such people as potential creators of “solutions” for social “problems.” Insofar as they are being creative, they are not doing what they were taught, but are instead professionals acting in an amateur capacity. The maxim that “experts” should be “on tap but not on top” expresses an appreciation of their valuable but largely negative role in filtering policy alternatives.

The very concept of “solving” social “problems” extends academic practices to a completely different process. The academic process is a process of pre-arrangement by persons already in possession of knowledge which they intend to articulate and convey unilaterally. Social processes are processes of systemic discovery of knowledge and of its multilateral communication in a variety of largely unarticulated forms. To “solve” an academic “problem” is to deal with pre-selected variables in a prescribed manner to reach a pre-arranged solution. To apply the academic paradigm to the real world is to arbitrarily preconceive social processes — the whole complex of economic, social, legal, etc., activities — as already comprehended or comprehensible to a given decision maker, when in fact these very processes themselves are often largely mechanisms for coping with pervasive uncertainty and economizing on scarce and fragmented knowledge. Resolutions of conflicting desires and beliefs may emerge from social processes, through the communication and coordination of scattered and fragmented knowledge, but that is wholly different from a solution being imposed from above as “best” by a given overriding standard in the light of a given fragment of knowledge.

What is a social “problem”? It is generally a situation which someone finds less preferable than another situation that is incrementally costlier to achieve. If the alternative situation is no costlier, it would already have been chosen, and there would be no tangible “problem” remaining. In both theory and practice, a social problem is likely to be one of the higher valued unfulfilled desires — one that is almost but not quite worth the cost of satisfying. Such situations are inherent in the incremental balancing of costs and benefits, which is itself inherent in the condition of scarcity and trade-off. A “solution” to such “problems” is a contradiction in terms. It is of course always possible to eliminate all unfulfilled desires of a given sort — that is, extend the consumption of some benefit to the point where its incremental value is zero — but in a system of inherent scarcity (i.e., unlimited human desires) that means denying some other benefit(s) even more. Much political discussion of problem-solving consists of elaborately demonstrating the truism that extending a given benefit would be beneficial in that particular regard — more airports, day-care centers, rental housing, etc. — without any concern with the incremental value of sacrificed alternatives. A variation on this theme is that some set of people “need” a particular benefit but cannot “afford” it — i.e., its incremental value to group A exceeds its incremental cost to group B. Whatever the plausibility or perhaps even merit of this argument with particular benefits and particular descriptions of people, it clearly loses validity as group A approaches a state of being identical with group B. Yet very similar political arguments for “solving” some “problems” are used when A and B are identical. For example, the American people cannot afford the medical care they need, and so should have national health insurance (paid for by the American people).