Sufficiently advanced incompetence
Via Making Light, I ran across this vaguely attributed quote:
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
As Roz Kaveny explains:
"I love it simply because it nails both the folly and the irrelevance of conspiracy theory. It is not necessary to claim that the President of e.g. the USA is setting out to kill a maximum number of African Americans out of deliberate spite. It is sufficient to point out that if you take a job involving life and death, and go on doing it when you are clearly incompetent, then you are morally responsible anyway. There is a duty not to be crap at what you do."
This fits in very nicely with Barack Obama’s take on the federal response (via MsMusings):
"I think there were a set of assumptions made by federal officials that people would hop in their SUVs, and top off with a $100 tank of gas and Poland Spring water."
"We as a society and this administration in particular have not been willing to make sacrifices or shape an agenda to help low-income people."
In the last couple of days, my office has been very peripherally involved with responding to Katrina, and all I have to say is that it doesn’t give me a whole lot of reason for hope.
On a related note, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Susan Wood, and her resignation from the FDA over the emergency contraception decision, saying that it "is contrary to my core commitment to improving and advancing women’s health."
Shortly after I started working at HHS (over 9 years ago!), my new boss, Wendell Primus, resigned his position in protest of Clinton’s decision to sign the welfare reform bill. Several months later, he was followed by his boss, Peter Edelman, and the ACF Assistant Secretary, Mary Jo Bane. But all three of them were political appointees, obligated to represent the President’s position.
At what point, if any, is a career civil servant morally responsible for being part of an organization that is crap at what it is supposed to be doing?
September 8th, 2005 at 2:37 am
I think if one works for an organization that is so abysmally run that one’s best efforts will fail, then one either has to quit or try to change it. If not for moral reasons then for morale reasons.
I was a post-Soviet Studies major and we asked questions like this all the time.
September 8th, 2005 at 7:42 am
Well, I do remember thinking that I wish there was a way that they could try the FEMA head for involuntary manslaughter, since, intentionally or not, he’s probably responsible for many, many s.
September 8th, 2005 at 8:39 am
If FEMA/the feds are morally responsible for the SUV/Poland Spring water assumption, then, IMHO, the New Orleans mayor and the LA Governor are 100x more responsible. Pre-disaster, I think you need to attribute lack of foresight and responsibility to the local and state officials. If you’re the mayor of New Orleans, if you know that your city is always in mortal danger of flooding, then you should have done the analysis and realized that you needed a plan beyond yelling “everybody out!” to make a large-scale evacuation work. Like, for example, knowing that there are nursing homes in your city and figuring out how to evacuate them effectively. Post-disaster, sure, the feds have also performed abysmally. But as much as I like Obama, I think he’s wrong to attribute the pre-disaster assumptions to the feds – the locals are at fault for that one.
September 8th, 2005 at 8:52 am
I think there is plenty of incompetence to go around in this situation. I’m very interested in the concept of that first quotation, which I think is apt.
September 8th, 2005 at 9:56 am
A friend of mine pointed out that the obverse works well for this situation, too: Any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence.
From what I can tell, the original quote was from Arthur C. Clarke, and read “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” If Mr. Sideshow came up with the change, hats off to him.
September 8th, 2005 at 11:53 am
That’s a tough one – about a career civil servant being obligated for the decisions of an incompetent organization. Not to be too grim or make an inappropriate comparison, but the first thing that leapt to mind was the Milgram experiment. At what point is a line employee expected to question the big orders/decisions coming down from the top? Especially if the policy wonk in question 😉 is not necessarily involved in making or carrying out any of the really troublesome decisions.
It’s a murky, murky area, in my view. I mean, you wouldn’t say that the guy mopping the floor at night is to be held responsible for his employer’s views and decisions, but what about the receptionists? Or the copyeditors? How about the project leaders? Or the scientists? If they continually push back against internal policies but they never win, are their consciences any cleaner than if they had never tried?
I have to say that being a DC-ite and riding the Metro for 6 years with masses of people with federal ID tags dangling, I would hardly expect most of them to feel responsible for what their agencies are doing.
September 8th, 2005 at 8:22 pm
I ultimately saw Susan Wood’s resignation not as a protest but as a recognition that she just couldn’t do her job anymore. I think there are alot of people who work for the federal government who are doing good work. I don’t feel any need to tar them with Bush’s brush.
But, on the other hand, I’ve felt for some years now that I’m very glad to be out of DC. I was at NIH during the Clinton administration; I was a scientist and I thought it was heaven. I had no responsibility for policy, and the research I did was pretty far removed from any real world consequences. So, theoretically, I thought it wouldn’t matter who was president, or even who was NIH director (though of course, Varmus was a dream director for a scientist). But now, when I hear reports of NIH, I realize it is not a happy place. Scientists feel like the politics of people at the very top is filtering down to them (from program directors who were calling to warn people from using words like “gay men” in their grant abstracts, to the stem cell controversy, to a general feeling that criticizing the government is unacceptable). So, I’m glad I’m out (even though I would have loved to stay).
My husband worked for another government agency, and he too (and he left because of me, and really worried about leaving the “center of the world” that was DC) is happy to be out. And that’s true for the two of us, who worked for among the least political agencies in the federal bureacracy.
I think you have to quit when you’re compilcit in decisions you disagree with, but as long as you can do your work I don’t think you have to leave because the administration is bad, or because they’ve started a war in iraq. I think to argue that you have to quit federal employment because the people in charge of the federal government are bad, is equivalent to arguing that you have leave America because you disagree with President. Of course we don’t; And to leave is to suggest we’ve given over the institutions, of government, or of this country to the bad guys.
bj
September 8th, 2005 at 9:31 pm
I personally would find it very hard to work at HHS if Congress is successful at cutting $10 billion from the Medicaid budget next year, but that’s just me. I think there is an argument to be made that we always need good people on the inside, trying to do good, even in a bad administration. But I can’t really fault anyone for saying to themself, the mission of this organization is no longer the mission that I signed up for.