In 1995, Gerald Schneider and Patricia A. Weitsman edited a volume entitled, Towards a New Europe: Stops and Starts in Regional Integration. There's a model in that volume that seems particularly germane in the present day showing that the European Union (EU) was started based on the short-term benefits of integration, while the long-term costs get pushed off and forgotten. Well, those costs are now coming due, and the fact that they're long-term doesn't make them any less real.
I was also thinking about my time at SEU and how I expressed and pursued my conservativeness. I didn't memorize and repeat speeches by William F. Buckley, Ronald Reagan, or Margaret Thatcher. I know who Edmund Burke is, but I haven't read him extensively. I read Leo Strauss in school, but that was later. No, my conservativism was rooted in engineering -- that is, doing what works and what has been shown to work. It seems to me that a policy that impacts hundreds of millions of people should be crafted with the same care that an engineering company makes its products, say Apple's iPhone for instance. However for politics this is not the case as was made vividly clear by Ben Rhodes' explanation of how he helped Obama pass his Iran policies. Very little care was given to the costs and consequences of these policies, but much care was given to the arguments, talking points, and passage strategies. This is a problem.
At the core of this issue is system complexity, which manifests itself as policy resistance. That is, policies often do not achieve their intended benefits and the consequences can be very different from those originally envisioned. The unintended consequences of these complex social systems being influenced are at the heart of conservatism, which involves the interaction between senior decision makers, their analysis teams, and an external system. This interaction is so fundamental, but it's not well understood or entrenched in the policy community.
Hayek wrote memorably about such matters in the Road to Serfdom after World War II in 1945. Without going into that particular argument, there are two consequences that I do want to highlight. First, there is the response to Hayek by Herman Finer, Road to Reaction, which was also published in 1945 and is remarkable for its over-the-top affect and almost complete lack of argument. It's amazing because Finer, a political scientist and Fabian socialist who taught at Harvard, basically calls Hayek every name in the book for opposing socialism and it centralized planning to which Finer might have aspired. Perhaps more amazing is that nobody really seems to have had a problem with Finer's argument, or lack thereof, because his colleagues all agreed with him. Second is Hayek's essay "Complexity" that was published in 1967, which is amazing for its prescience and lucidity. He works through many of the policy details and implications that were later used by Herbert Simon and Elinor Ostrom (note that all three of them won the Nobel in Economics in 1974, 1978, and 2009 respectively.
In rereading Simon's 1983 Reason in Human Affairs, he notes that being math and empiricism to these topics is always controversial, which strikes me as odd because it should be fundamental, but it's not, which means it's a topic worthy of further consideration. Perhaps most controversial to successful and intelligent academics is that their cognition or rationality is bounded in relation to the systems their trying to impact and whose behavior they claim to be able to predict. The model that compared and constrasted the short-term integration benefits that helped form the EU and the long-term costs that now threaten it provide just one example of the limited capability of policy makers to impact complex social systems in a beneficial and long-term manner.
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