By David K. Shipler
The first in an occasional series
Perhaps
the word “again” should be put in quotes or parentheses or followed by a
question mark, because while the United States has done a lot of things very
well through its history, incompetence has also plagued governmental behavior in
areas ranging from foreign affairs to poverty. A frequent hallmark of failure
has been the unwillingness to apply what we know to what we do. Expertise does
not get translated into policy.
The
most obvious recent example is the Covid-19 pandemic, where the Trump administration’s
floundering cost lives and worsened economic hardship. But the gap between
knowledge and practice inhibits problem-solving in many fields. If you add up
all of society’s accumulated understanding about the causes of poverty, for
example, or about the sources of conflict in one or another region of the
world, and then compare that knowledge with the actions being taken, it looks
as if knowledge gets filtered out through a fine sieve before it gets to the
policy level.
The Vietnam War was such a case. The
US government saw North Vietnam as a Chinese and Soviet proxy in the vanguard
of communism, and therefore a threat to American security. But historians knew
that Vietnam had resisted China for centuries. And so could any American
soldier or diplomat in Saigon who bothered to notice how many streets were
named for Vietnamese heroes in the long campaigns against Chinese occupation. It
should have been no mystery to American policymakers that the war, for Hanoi,
was the continuation of a long anti-colonialist struggle, not one fought to spread
global communism.
The dilution of expertise in making
policy can be seen in the Middle East, Russia, China, and other parts of the
world. The same is true at home. Much is known about how to treat prisoners to
reduce recidivism rates, how to prevent police from extracting false
confessions, how to provide good defense attorneys for indigent defendants, how
to curtail global warming, how to clean up air and water, how to make
workplaces safer, how to reduce suicides (gun control), how to treat mental
illness, and on and on.
Accumulated knowledge about poverty is not put to good use. We know how to alleviate housing problems in America; it’s a matter of money. We know how to eliminate malnutrition—also a matter of money. We know how to raise workers’ skills and make work pay enough to sustain a family. We know how to provide decent medical care. We know how to improve education. True, some of our abilities diminish along the more difficult part of the spectrum—we are confounded by child abuse, drug abuse, gang violence, racism, white supremacy, and harmful parenting. But we know how to ease many other hardships.
