Geometries of Geopolitics
In all my years of schooling, only one math class ever captured my imagination: ninth grade Honors Geometry. Most of that came down to an exceptional teacher, Mr. Curtis James, who eloquently laid out the course of study not just as lines and angles but the graceful unfolding of irrefutable logic.
From just a handful of simple postulates, such as that parallel lines will never, ever intersect, the enterprising mathematician could derive a vast array of universal conclusions. Partway through the year we read the most entertaining book I was ever assigned in a math class, the classic Victorian satire Flatland, a whimsical portrait of what life might be like in two dimensions and the struggle of the narrator “A. Square” to consider existence in three dimensions, one dimension, and even no dimensions. We humans could be smug about our mastery of the third dimension, but how much were we obliviously missing of the fourth?
And then, shortly before final exams, Mr. James dropped an intellectual bomb: what if almost all of what we’d studied was elegant, consistent, and shockingly wrong? The entire year up to that moment had been classical Euclidean geometry, that straightforward conception of planes and spaces that comes most intuitively to human beings, but what if it just so happened that space itself was curved, kind of like the inside or outside of a sphere, or something even more bogglingly beyond human perception? In such a strange unfathomable universe most bets were off: parallel lines might eventually intersect after all.
Euclidean geometry was fine for laying a building’s foundation or even launching into orbit, but scientists were discovering that if you looked far enough out to the cosmos, or deep enough into quantum space, the standard rules started breaking down. And perhaps that had certain implications for broader society, we were invited to consider—maybe stark differences in philosophy and politics could be explained by different groups of smart people with good intentions and impeccable logic, but all built on subtly different baseline assumptions diverging into cascading disagreements.
It was a lesson I never forgot, and that frequently came to mind a few years later studying public policy at Brown. The basic introductory classes mentioned chronic institutional problems like corruption and regulatory capture and the principal-agent problem, but the further one advanced in completing course requirements the less such concerns remained part of the conversation. Policy academics tended to lean left and fancy themselves social science engineers and technicians, as if they were turning dials and operating consoles at mission control. The grime and friction of institutions as they really are was typically too much of a buzzkill to want to think very much about.
Among the few exceptions was a relentless root canal of organizational psychology taught by a tough as nails professor named Brooke Harrington, one of the harder-hitting academics I’ve ever met. Instead of airily positing that agencies and bureaucracies are meritocratic brain trusts of selfless public servants, she kicked over that rock to reveal the creepy-crawlies underneath: that institutions have many dimensions of dysfunction, that the rational self-interests of leadership and layers of employees often conflict with institutions’ avowed aims, that personnel often plateau above their level of competence, and a whole pungent semester’s worth of inconvenient truths. If we policy people really wanted to achieve the kind of good government we promised, we’d have to face these unwelcome issues head on.
And yet today all too many progressives and policy professionals seem all too susceptible to a certain literal-mindedness—or perhaps excessively eager suspension of disbelief—when it comes to ostensibly technocratic institutions and expertise. If a famous university happens to offer a degree in something, then that credential is presumptively meaningful and not just a piece of paper from a fancy diploma mill. If Democratic Party-endorsed legislation is called the Inflation Reduction Act, then it must be what policy geniuses have masterminded to solve the inflation problem. If an industry labels itself “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,” then it must consist of devoted professionals striving to bring people together—even if exacerbating divisions would likely be better for their bottom lines. And if an international institution claims to be a fierce advocate for peace and justice, then it’s on the side of the angels.
It's as if the progressive policy discourse has gotten stuck on only a Euclidean lens while the actual fragmenting institutions and society the governing class expects to finetune like clockwork are infinitely stranger and more confounding than that single logical framework can encompass. To some extent there’s a conceptual category for corruption and dysfunction—especially when it comes to those dastardly Republicans—but it’s frequently minimized as a footnote to be dealt with later in the name of supposedly ‘not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.’
But public policy represents the ultimate interdisciplinary quandary, rich with irony and paradox and unintended consequences: anywhere you squeeze that balloon, the air rushes elsewhere. A highly simplified technocratic framework might work fine as a schematic in the classroom or intermittently in the real world, but it’s simply not tenable for capturing the full social, political and institutional landscape as it is or might realistically be reformed to be. There’s no need to throw out the Euclidean POV altogether, it remains useful in the right contexts, but it does need to be deployed alongside a host of other perspectives to have any hope of discerning reality. Otherwise, the policy discourse tends toward quibbling over angels on the head of a pin.
To those of us devoted to the potential of nuanced policy to help achieve a better society, supposed wonks are often too epistemically sealed to experience the very mixed results of their governance. Good intentions and idealized abstractions are not enough, and neither is dismissing critics pointing out the vast gulf between rhetoric and reality. Any sort of real progressive renaissance will involve learning to listen and empathize again, and getting back to trying to see through multiple lenses at the same time.
It's important to remember that the bureaucracies and defects present in business are comparable to those in government - some specifics differ both because you get different kinds of people showing up and the institutions have different goals. It's humans everywhere though, in the academic, government, other nonprofit, and private sectors.
A technocratic approach is still warranted - ideally one savvy to the limits and defects of human organisations, but these things can also be studied academically (and are - most of the things covered in "Theory of the Firm" generalise to other sectors).
This is a good essay. It reminded me of my approach to problems arising in our D&D game 40+ years ago. People would suggest all sorts of rules to get players to not do certain things. I though rules just led to clever ways to work around them. I built karma into my world. If you used a loophole to gain a benefit at the expense of some NPC, then a time would come that an NPC would do the same thing to you. So people did not try to color outside of the lines, even though doing so was not against the rules.
This is the approach I would take to public policy. Change a few simple things and see what evolves out of that. If you select the proper changes who should get a society from which changes to need to address social problems would be less extensive and required smaller easier to manage bureaucracies to manage.
For example is rather than setting economic policy so that we have a large class of workers who cannot afford healthcare, housing or collect education and so use government programs to get these things, why not employ a set of policies that makes this class smaller, reducing the need for large programs and the bureaucracies they require to operate?