This morning my expert public policy eye spots a right answer in the New York Times business news, real analysis and insight for all those of us who puzzle over public schools and party politics, religious wars, et cetera and just can't understand why we keep doing all the wrong things wronger, regressing rather than progressing.

"Overbooking, Bumped Fliers and No Plan B"
by Jeff Bailey

The whole story is about aggressive and insulated data analysts crunching endless numbers to create operational models that are statistically attractive to their own part of the "enterprise" but unfit for human consumption, thereby infuriating regular, responsible people just trying to participate in the system in good faith, in their own private, statistically insignificant roles.

Necessity being the mother of invention, savvy front line folks experiencing the fallout have to cope somehow. They create practical workarounds at their own lowly level that seem to compensate the consumer reasonably well and thus protect the system from its own longterm self-inflicted wounds. But that in turn makes the analysts redouble insistence on THEIR strategies, further infuriating users and further hurting the systems's credibility, requiring even more creative counterprogramming and loss of respect from the people caught up in it all. More and more regular people wise up to the system's escalating adversarial shortcomings, thus making it all even worse. Finally the system becomes neither workable nor fixable at any level . . Dörner's Logic of Failure.
"Stuck in a quagmire . . ."
"Scant credbility. . ."
"People view [it] as not on the up-and-up"

. . .what psychologist Dietrich Dörner shows, is that the problem lies not in the world, but in our own world-view . . .most of us are too simpleminded, especially when it comes to anticipating future trends or interactive processes. We don't think about the implications and consequences of what we want, or want to do, with results that come back to haunt us.

Nevertheless, and contrary to many current claims, Dörner also argues that there is no secret formula or mental trick . . . to overcome complacency or over-confidence. The world always has been very complex, but as the ambition and scale of our intentions has increased in modern times, the malevolent implications and consequences of our simple-mindedness becomes more and more frequent and compelling. . .
This is a book that public policymakers, politicians, planners, and the general public desperately need to read. We are squandering our environmental capital and undermining our social capital because we are trying to do things, or avoid doing things, that cannot be sustained for very much longer. . .

Remember that Kansas town that got wiped off the map by a giant tornado? Its mayor just quit, said he would not lead the rebuilding effort, wasn’t temperamentally suited to that kind of system work with competing ideas about what to do and how to do it. The town council said oh, don’t quit, we’ll just consider that you’re on sabbatical to get your own family squared away and then maybe you’ll come back and lead us. We’ll just wait.

HUH? But he is leading you, by example!
He’s doing a couple of smart, real, practical things. He has his priorities in order (family first) and he knows that not everyone is equally good at every task, “entitled” to it by system formula or not. And he knows that politics and government do not constitute leadership; it’s service.

None of which is to say that individuals against the big bad system are always right, or even a better alternative for the public than government. Individuals can be our best hope when they are critical-thinking individuals, and public policy can be progressive and productive. Both are possible and desirable. I'm not anti-government or anti-system or anti-institutional. I'm certainly not anti-peace or anti-mom!

But I am anti-Logic of Failure.

I know we have huge problems in the world, tornadic activity is tearing us apart all over the place. I am working toward finding solutions with the same fervor that drives most progressives. But the random, flailing, emotional-casuality, self-destructive, bathos-wallowing Logic of Cindy Sheehan is no less acceptable as The Right Answer than most of the rest of what passes for political discourse and analysis.