A lesson to policymakers

By Prof. Kirthi Tennakone
(Email: ktenna@yahoo.co.uk)

These days, our political parties hurriedly present their policies. They criticize each other, analyze, and debate to convince (confuse) citizens. Displaying superficiality and insincerity more often than profundity and honesty. What allows this waste of time and unwarranted cost of propaganda?

The primary objective of politics is the diversion of human and material resources, optimally for the benefit of all.

A policy is a plan of action proposed to achieve an objective. Planning, uniquely identifiable as effective, is possible only if a predictive theory exists to abide by and follow. In the social sciences, there are no such theories.

In the absence of a theory, virtually anybody can frame a policy to cater to his or her whims and fancies. Therefore, even the stupidest can criticise or endorse, to deceive the masses, and attempt to influence winning an election.

Some change colour, go to a platform, and what he or she utters there, tantamount to the statement: the policy I advocated yesterday was wrong, and from today I will be in the camp, which I opposed yesterday.

In the world of engineering, the situation is different. Predictive theories enable accurate planning. A 300-seater airplane of 3000 km transit capability and optimal fuel consumption can be designed based on powerful aerodynamic theory. No need to construct a number of models and alter the design if they crash when flown.

Engineers, unlike politicians, know how to draft a plan precisely and implement it.

Similarly, the world succeeded in containing the pandemic because of the availability of vast theoretical knowledge about viruses, immunity, and the way epidemics propagate. The know-how facilitated the planning and immediate implementation. The pandemic was effectively controlled.

Although we have good theoretical knowledge about viruses to plan and mitigate an epidemic, we do not understand our own behaviour sufficiently to formulate predictive theories and use them to plan strategies to cure societal ills!

In the absence of social theories, philosophers resorted to ideologies. An ideology is a set of beliefs, unprovable by logical reasoning or empirical methods. Solon’s (630 BCE) democracy and Marx’s (1867 CE) communism are both ideologies. Nonetheless, they were masterpiece intellectual efforts. The former was practiced for more than 2500 years in different lands with variations. Communism more or less collapsed after about a century and a half.

Communism advocates rigid governmental economic planning. Whereas democracy allows freedom of competition in production goods, services, and expression of ideas. For that reason, it lasted longer and continued.

Nature’s method of choosing the best option is evolutionary selection via competition. The greatest engineering marvel in the universe, known to humans, their own brain is not a product designed by a scientific theory. No scientific theory exists to construct a thing of that capability.

Even inanimate objects, planned on the basis of predictive theories, incorporate evolutionary corrections. During usage, the faults of an aircraft model are detected and corrections installed in subsequent generations of the model.

Extreme planning in the absence of a theory and suppression of the evolution of economic policy was the cause of the failure of communism in the Soviet Union. Western Europe evolved and advanced, but the Soviet bloc stagnated.

A principle that needs to be adopted in formulating social policies should be leaving room for accommodation of evolutionary corrections. And incorporate amendments, whenever a need arises during implementation. Thinking rationally and without being biased by self-interest

Socialism and capitalism are not strict ideologies; they originated from experience. Socialism is different from communism. The former potentially evolves in conjunction with democracy. In fact, Solon, considered the father of democracy, was socialistic in his policies. He formulated a policy of governance to mitigate rich-poor disparity. Implementation of the policy grew and stabilised the economy of Athens.

In the modern context, appropriate intermingling of socialism and capitalism in a democratic framework and permitting evolution would be the best dictum for a policy formulation.

A policy has to be broad but foresightful with details and implementation to be worked out at the subordinate specialist level.

Often, policies fail as a result of manipulation and corrupt practices during implementation – serious social malady so familiar to us. The remedy for the malady is transparency, openness and honesty, permitting expression of the opposite view.

Invisibility of openness, and transparency correlates with corruption and crime. There are so many financial frauds, murders, disappearances and harassments of journalists. They remain uninvestigated, misinterpreted or irrationally denied.

Provided the right policies are formulated and properly implemented, ensuring openness and transparency, we would not be short of resources to solve our problems. It is also prudent to recollect Benjamin Franklin’s quote: Honesty is the best policy.