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posted by on Sunday January 01 2017, @03:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the prescient-author-or-eternal-situation dept.

A computer scientist who saw congressional decision-making up close in 1980 found it insufficient to the task of solving big problems.

"I've heard many times that although democracy is an imperfect system, we somehow always muddle through. The message I want to give you, after long and hard reflection, is that I'm very much afraid it is no longer possible to muddle through. The issues we deal with do not lend themselves to that kind of treatment. Therefore, I conclude that our democracy must grow up. I'm not going to give you a magic recipe on how that will happen—I wish I had one—but I offer some thoughts that I hope will stimulate your thinking.

What's principally lacking on the federal scene, it seems to me, is the existence of respected, nonpartisan, interdisciplinary teams that could at least tell us what is possible and something about the pluses and minuses of different solutions. Take energy, for instance. What I would love to see established, with the National Academies or any other mechanism to confer respectability, is a team that will ... say, 'Okay, there are lots of suggestions around, and most of them won't work. But here are six different plans, any one of which is possible. We'll tell you what each one costs, what's good about it, what's bad about it, how dangerous it is, and what its uncertainties are.' At least each option would be a well-integrated, clearly thought-out plan. I do not trust democracy to try to put together such a plan by having each committee of Congress choose one piece of it. Suppose Congress designed an airplane, with each committee designing one component and an eleventh-hour conference committee deciding how the pieces should be put together. Would you fly on that airplane? I am telling you we are flying on an energy plan, an inflation plan, and so on that are being put together in exactly that way.

Unfortunately the original 1980 article that this was excerpted from is paywalled.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @04:45PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @04:45PM (#448169)

    If he doesn't understand the fundamental fact we dont have that here in the US, and never did, why should i bother reading his opinions?

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday January 01 2017, @05:37PM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Sunday January 01 2017, @05:37PM (#448184) Homepage Journal

    You're being both pedantic and inaccurate. A republic is a form of democracy; it just isn't a direct democracy.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Sunday January 01 2017, @05:53PM

      by jmorris (4844) on Sunday January 01 2017, @05:53PM (#448187)

      The Founding Fathers would disagree with that opinion. Most of them considered Democracy an evil to be guarded against. They believed this because they studied the results recorded in history from every single previous attempt. Then founded a Democratic Party while some of the same people were still alive. Go figure.

      Point being Democracy can't work, never has worked and is one of the fastest ways to being ruin on a people. The Republic we have allowed to fail into a Democracy was intended to prevent what we see today. When we rebuild we will have to learn from the failure of Constitution 1.0.

      • (Score: 3, Touché) by GungnirSniper on Sunday January 01 2017, @06:24PM

        by GungnirSniper (1671) on Sunday January 01 2017, @06:24PM (#448196) Journal

        The Democratic-Republican party.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @09:33PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @09:33PM (#448246)

        You can democratically elect representatives. When they talked about democracy, what they were usually referring to was direct democracy. Of course, we also have the electoral college, indicating that they were on guard against some other forms of democracy as well, but still not completely.

        The Republic we have allowed to fail into a Democracy was intended to prevent what we see today.

        I really don't think a Republic (what we have now, actually) is some magical cure-all to begin with. The government has been oppressing people since the country was founded; in some ways we've gotten a lot better (no more slavery, no more Jim Crow, women can vote, etc.) and in other ways we may have gotten worse (such as with automated mass surveillance, but that wasn't possible in the past). The founders didn't put enough limitations on the government, and the checks and balances they created were not enough. Just going back into the past would solve nothing.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @06:57PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @06:57PM (#448608)

          There is no cure all.

          The founders didn't put enough limitations on the government, and the checks and balances they created were not enough.

          Ultimately that's the voters job. Remember those amendments that lots of you treasure are _amendments_. They didn't all happen at the same time. Go figure how stuff got changed.

          The government has been oppressing people since the country was founded; in some ways we've gotten a lot better (no more slavery, no more Jim Crow, women can vote, etc.) and in other ways we may have gotten worse (such as with automated mass surveillance, but that wasn't possible in the past).

          If you all keep voting for lesser evil it should be no surprise you still get evil.

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @11:15PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @11:15PM (#448282)

        What are you even trying to say? Have you even read Constitution 1.0? How is that not a democracy?

        I don't understand this. Yes, you hate the Democrat Party. Did it ever occur to you that the word democracy had some other denotation than referring to the policies of the Democrat Party, or are you just too fucking stupid to even comprehend that?