The quality of muddling
Ezra Klein, Karl Smith, and Ryan Avent today debate the merits and demerits of muddling though vs “grand bargains” and bold solutions. Here’s Smith, insightful as always:
The opportunity to muddle through is a gift. It allows one to make changes at the margin, to monitor their effects and to update accordingly. It allows us to avoid massive often useless sacrifice. It allows our knowledge, understanding and resources to race ahead opening up new ways to deal with our problems… We don’t always have that opportunity. Sometimes we are forced to deal with things in a big way. Indeed, this is much of what we mean by crisis. However, you don’t want to avoid an externally inflicted crisis by creating a self-inflicted one. If you have a chance to make your way with adjustments at the margin, take it.
I think this is right, and important. But even true words can lead us astray if we are not careful. To say that muddling through is a gift because it permits certain advantages can mutate into a case for incrementalism where there are clear disadvantages.
Further, which changes constitute “adjustment” and which would be disruptive are themselves contested. Consider Scott Sumner‘s view of the world. Sumner claims that the stance of monetary policy, when properly defined, turned sharply contractionary in 2008. However, what Sumner would have proposed in order to “stay the course” would have seemed bold and radical to status quo central bankers. Generally, what constitutes measured and incremental changes and what constitutes a sharp turn gets defined according the the conventions of dominant interests. Consider the TARP vs bank nationalization debate. The case against nationalization was often made on grounds of continuity and nondisruption, and that certainly reflects the perspectives of people inside the banking system and the Treasury department. And yet to me and many others like me, the no-accountability/no-more-Lehmans policy regime that was crystallized as TARP represents a wrenching and violent alteration of previously settled social arrangements.
Today’s conversation began with US fiscal policy. Klein tells us
The wish for a grand bargain that’ll take care of the deficit all at once is probably just that: a wish. The likelier outcome is a slew of deficit-reduction measures passed over the next decade or so. That’s even truer for health-care spending, which is both the biggest fiscal problem we face and the one that most requires a decades-long process of trial-and-error in which we test out new ways of delivering care, of paying for care, of separating useful treatments from useless ones and of modernizing the sector’s IT infrastructure.
Overall, this seems sensible. There is a problem, but we won’t hubristically predetermine a 30 year plan,. We’ll make small adjustments in real-time until the problem is solved. That sounds wise.
But is it true? Is that how US fiscal issues are likely to play out? I don’t think so. I’d bet on one of the following three scenarios:
- We will experience a boom and/or create technical efficiencies in health care delivery such that the US fiscal trajectory seems to stabilize on its own.
- The US fiscal situation will fail to durably stabilize at anywhere near the levels we now deem reasonable, but nothing catastrophic will happen. The MMT-ers will turn out to be right that any inflation or yield pressure associated with a growing stock of public debt will prove manageable in real time. It will feel like we are muddling through perpetually, but nothing bad will ever come of it.
- A crisis will force bold changes on the political system. This might take many forms — an inflation, a sharp spike in bond yields, a disruptive depreciation of the dollar, popular revolt against the distributional effects of fiscal largesse, etc.
At the moment, Klein’s scenario seems plausible. After all, despite elevated chronic unemployment — which in our society constitutes almost unthinkably severe human tragedy — we are making genuflections towards deficit reduction. Surely this means we are committed, and bit by bit we will adjust. Right?
No. For better or for worse, we are not adjusting. The small changes our political system proves capable of are promises of future chastity and cuts that disproportionately harm the disenfranchised. Historical experience suggests that even this degree of restraint depends upon an ephemeral configuration of political authority — a Democratic president, a Congress divided or Republican. There is little evidence that our government is capable of adjusting, incrementally but intelligently. It follows paths of least resistance and responds to crises. That might work out all right, or it might lead us to catastrophe.
So is it wise to muddle through? I think we all can agree that not all paths of least resistance end up in places one would wish to go. At the same time, Karl Smith is still wise. Sharp, bold changes are ipso facto crises, and there’s no sense creating pain willy-nilly to deal boldly with inexhaustible phantoms.
So what’s the right strategy? I’m not sure, but I’ll tell you what I used to think. I used to think that the right strategy was to muddle through in a context created by sophisticated financial markets. Human beings, as individuals and as policymakers, have limited information and are prone to flawed choices. Markets aggregate the information and foresight of millions, weighted by confidence expensively signaled via degrees of financial risk assumed. Such markets would always be current, would produces prices reflective of the best available information at any point in time, and would be forward looking. Markets would ensure that, on the path of least resistance, peoples’ incentives would be to make smart adjustments in real-time. Muddling through under these circumstances would leave us where Smith suggests: With “knowledge, understanding and resources…opening up new ways to deal with our problems…[we’d make our] way with adjustments at the margin.”
I think that this view, once my view, is now completely discredited. Financial markets, as they exist in the world we live in, have proven liable to catastrophic and foreseeable mistakes. The instruments we trade hide information and prevent adjustments as frequently as they reveal and promote them. Plausible mechanisms of self-correction have been weakened rather than strengthened during the crisis, so we can expect even poorer performance looking forward. Our financial institutions are best understood as means by which certain groups within our society protect and perpetuate themselves, and as mechanisms by which covert prerequisites of stability are maintained. Of course markets were never going to be perfect — no human institution is. But existing market institutions have fallen in my estimation from “good enough, the best we’ve got” to “incompetent and hopelessly corrupt”.
Absent some context that shapes incentives and links muddling through with intelligent adjustment, accepting muddling as a default position is unsatisfactory. It becomes a means of drifting towards hazards unknown and an excuse for attending to the interests of the powerful. The alternative of bold, flawed, improvisations is also unattractive. The choice between moldy bread and rancid stew is best made on a case-by-case basis, with a lot of unscientific sniffing.
The only way out is to recreate some context in which we’ve reason to expect our muddling will be smartly shaped. Our existing political and financial systems strike me as a poor place to start, but here we are. In the end, I’d like to agree with Karl Smith about the virtues of muddling through. But it all hangs on the quality of the muddling.
- 10-May-2011, 3:55 a.m. EDT: Fixed some typos and awkward sentence constructions. No substantive change.