Policy optics are concepts, analogies, methods and counternarratives used to recast issues currently defined as intractable. Recastings, if they work, remake (redescribe, recalibrate, reframe, revise, reorient) an issue more tractably. I seek to explain and describe how this is done in When Complex Is As Simple As It Gets (http://When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene)
But policy optics also function as prompts when they pose new but important questions and as probes when they reach for answers to So what?. This is an achievement even if both redefined questions and answers fall short of full-blown recasting. Below are 8 short examples of prompts and probes, in no order of priority, culled from the blog. Though some touch on topics in the Guide, all are new material and shortened from the original entries (where the references can be found).
- First: differentiate equality
- Apocalypse and tax havens
- There is no workaround for improvisation by central banks in the next fiinancial crisis
- “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
- Doing more in the climate emergency
- Doing less in predicting the future
- The scariest term ever produced by business schools: designing leadership
- But it is in my back-yard!
1. First: differentiate equality
Much of the debate over equality has been and remains at the macro-principle node. We all have equal rights; we all should have equal opportunities. Yet from the very beginning, exceptions have been in the form of specific contingency scenarios read off the macro, e.g., people are in principle equal but people are not born with the same and equal potentials. Contingency scenarios qualifying the reading of macro-principles litter debates over equality.
As the genetics we are born with are of course not everything, we also find vast differences in human-by-human particularities. Equal at the macro level, the most obvious fact at the micro-level is how unequal each person is in so many ways. Macro-principle, principle-based contingency scenarios and micro-experience are, however, not the only nodes around which equality debates organize.
The gap between macro-principle on paper and system behavior in practice is also everywhere evident. Systemwide pattern recognition, our fourth node, is populated by all manner of trends and statistics that show, e.g., just how unequal income, wealth and consumption distributions are within and across countries. Indeed, the difference between equality as professed and equality as realized is benchmarked by this gap between macro-principle and the recognition of systemwide patterns.
So what?
Put plainly, the macro-node in equality debates formalizes as principle what others cannot help but seek to informalize more through exceptions and contingency scenarios. The micro-node informalizes what others cannot help but seek to more formalize when they talk about systemwide patterns emerging across different cases. Equality, in this way, can’t help but be a messy project.
Nothing stops privileging one over another, or some over others, even though all four nodes are interconnected. There is, however, a world of difference between privileging one node from the get-go versus answering the question, “What do we do here and now with respect to this case of (in)equality”. The latter requires assessing all four nodes with their conflicts and examples.
2. Apocalypse and tax havens
I
Novels and scenarios about post-apocalypse are dystopian when it comes to the climate emergency: Nothing will be as it was before. But it’s that “nothing will be as it was” that bothers me.
An example, and one to which the reader can relate: tax havens. Once you have an inkling of what to look for, the numbers loom massive.
In one year alone (2016), multinational corporations (MNCs) were estimated to have shifted USD 1 trillion of profits to tax havens, with an estimated USD 200-300 billion in lost tax revenue worldwide. (The Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, Bermuda, Hong Kong and the Netherlands are among the most important tax havens.) Another study estimates multinational enterprises shift close to 40% of their profits to tax havens globally. As for regions, the main European banks are reckoned to have booked EUR 20 billion (close to 15% of their total profits) in tax havens. In Germany, by way of one country, MNCs there are said to have shifted corporate profits of some EUR 19 billion to tax havens, with an estimated tax revenue loss of roughly EUR 5.7 billion.
Now, post-apocalypse: The Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Hong Kong and the Netherlands? Under water. MNCs? They should be so lucky! Tax havens and forgone tax revenues? After the apocalypse, what taxes?
In other words, the bad of tax havens, pre-apocalypse, is made moot post-apocalypse.
So what?
Well, first off, why ever then are we spending time and resources on reducing the use of tax havens when all our energies—all our political will—should be directed to averting the climate-induced apocalypse? From this perspective, today’s tax havens are visibly part of opportunity costs of deadly climate inaction. Reducing tax havens is worse than meaningless unless the generated revenues are directed to mitigating the impacts of climate change—and even then the prospect of “too little too late” looms.
Or is it too little too late in quite another sense? For surely part of being in the apocalypse means we have to manage global climate change far better everywhere than we (can) manage tax havens here or there, and now. If so, we are on the losing end either way: managing (or not) tax havens won’t get us to the climate change mitigation needed. . .
Unless of course, we imagine that getting rid of these tax sinkholes for the rich and already-undeserving—the enemy of both populist and cosmopolitan citizenship—are among the few things that are truly urgent, like the climate emergency.
3. There is no workaround for improvisation by central banks in the next fiinancial crisis
I
Undertake a thought experiment. Assume we are actively in the lead-up to another financial meltdown and fund managers are making the same or similar points as in the last one. For example: We don’t know where the risks are. Ask now: What would be success or effectiveness for these managers under the current conditions?
One answer I highlight is that of a senior emergency manager who recently told us: “Success in every disaster is that you didn’t have to get improvisational immediately. You can rely on prior relationships and set up a framework for improvisation and creativity.”
More formally and back to our thought experiment, management success in this lead-up to the next financial meltdown is no longer one of preventing that meltdown from happening. It’s better to think that this lead-up is its own disaster and now ask: Where is effective emergency response going on presently or should be going on?
II
So what? While no detailed failure scenarios are possible here, the thought experiment can be extended in illustrative ways. Stay with the US setting. For example, assume all or several of 12 US Federal Reserve Districts and their respective Banks officially activate as Emergency Operations Center under the Incident Command System. Each Bank retains its mandates for price stability, maximum employment and interest rate regulation within its specific, widely varying regions. What then could/would/should each Bank-EOC do differently in the next two months?
Which is by way of answer: When it comes to immediate response to this disaster called the lead-up to the next financial meltdown, there is and can be no workaround for improvisation.
4. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
More than a year ago a joint statement was issued by the Center for AI Safety. It was the one sentence quoted above. Famously, it was signed by more than 350 AI experts and public figures.
Now, of course, we cannot dismiss the actual and potential harms of artificial intelligence.
But–and here’s the answer to the “So what” question, these 350 people must be among the last people on Earth you’d turn to for pandemic and nuclear war scenarios of sufficient granularity against which to appraise their AI crisis scenarios.
5. Doing more in the climate emergency
I
I attended an informative conference on sea-level rise, storm surges and flooding in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, now and projected into the near decades. I was told:
- that Bay Area would need some 477 million cubic yards of sediment–the vast majority of which can’t be sourced locally–to restore area wetlands and mudflats;
- It would require an estimated US$110 billion dollars locally to adapt to higher sea levels by 2050, this being based on existing plans in place or used as placeholders for entities that have yet to plan; and
- To expect much more sea level rise locally because of the newly accelerated melting of the ice cap melting in Antarctica and Greenland.
Millions of cubic yards equivalent to over 420 Salesforce Tower high-rises? Some $110 billion which has no possibility whatsoever of being funded, locally let alone regionally? How are these and the other unprecedented high requirements to be met?
II
But there is a major problem with these estimates of losses (economic, physical, lives, and more) incurred if we don’t take action now, right now. It’s been my experience that none of these estimated losses take into account the other losses prevented from occurring by infrastructure operators and emergency managers who avoid systemwide and regional system failures from happening that would have happened had they not intervened beforehand, sometimes at the last moment.
So what?
Why are these uncalculated billions and billions of saved dollars important when it comes to responding to sea level rise, increased storm surges, more inland flooding, rising groundwater levels and other sequelae?
Because it from this pool of real-time talent and skills and practices that society will be drawing for operationally redesigning the inevitable shortfalls in new technologies, macro-plans and regulations for climate restoration and recovery.
6. Doing less in predicting the future
So what if we’re lousy in predicting the future? We are so used to the idea that predicting the future is more or less about accuracy that we forget how murky and unclear the present is. To paraphrase Turgot, the French Enlightenment philosopher and statesman, we have enough trouble predicting the present, let alone the future. Because the present is not one-way only by way of interpretation, why expect anything less for the future?
Again: So what?
This means that the microeconomic concepts of opportunity costs, tradeoffs and priorities, along with price as a coordinating mechanism make sense–if they make sense–only now or in the very short term, when the resource to be allocated and alternatives forgone are their clearest. Without opportunity costs, notions of stable trade-offs and prices go out the window.
7. The scariest term ever produced by business schools: designing leadership
Take even a cursory glance at the track record of advisers to their leaders:
- Plato and Dionysius II;
- Aristotle and Alexander the Great;
- Seneca and Nero;
- Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf;
- Petrarch and Emperor Charles IV;
- Montaigne and Henri IV;
- Descartes and Sweden’s Queen Christina;
- Leibnitz and the Dukes of Hanover;
- Voltaire and Frederick the Great;
- Diderot and Catherine the Great; and
- In case you want to add to the list, Adam Smith and the Duke of Buccleuch or Goethe and Prince Carl August, and so on through the centuries. . .
- Or if you really want to cringe, just consider André Gide recommending against publishing Marcel Proust, Edward Garnett against publishing James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot against publishing George Orwell. . . .
I mean, get real: If these guys didn’t advise effectively, who the hell are we to think we can do better for the leaders of the day? (And, puhleeese, don’t throw up Kissinger and Nixon as the working template!)
So what?
Two things. It’s hard to imagine two words scarier in the English language than “designing leadership.” Second, we should take to heart the extensions of, “It was beyond our mental capabilities to predict Bob Dylan winning the Nobel in 2016.”
8. But it is in my back-yard!
I
They believe that climate change is actually happening but don’t want those wind-farms off their coastline. Those driving electric cars are opposed by those demanding no more cars, period. Those who demand more renewable energy here are among those opposing construction of new transmission lines from renewables there.
The commonplace is to insist tradeoffs are involved. But tradeoffs aren’t the only, or even priority, starting point.
II
How so? Start with an observation in an online New York Times,
While China is the world’s biggest adopter of clean energy, it also remains the world’s biggest user of fossil fuels, particularly coal. “We have to hold these two things, which can seem contradictory, in our heads at the same time,” [another Times correspondent] said. “China is pulling the world in two directions.”
This may not be a contradiction so much as a transition.
German Lopez in The New York Time’s online Morning, August 14 2023
That is: What if those NIMBYisms are not contradictions so much as part of transitions underway? What if the oppositions aren’t stalemates but are already leading to something different?
III
One such complex transition underway is the transfer of renewable energy between and across different electricity grids in the US.
As has been reported, there is a pressing need for new transmission lines. But that new construction would add to a base that already involves inter-regional electricity transmission, including for clean energy. True, how much of that transitioning is going on is hard to document. True, the regional grids are fragmented and true, more renewable energy interconnections are needed.
IV
So what?
Take a case where city residents objecting to wind-farms off the coastline are served by a grid not inter-regionally connected to clean energy sources. One interconnectivity solution to this Nimbyism would be to hike up the electricity rates of city residents: not just because they are forgoing clean energy but also because their rates for the interconnected water, cellphone and transportation subsidize their choice.
Transitioning to clean energy in my back-yard is already in the front-yard of inter-regional energy infrastructures.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 
2 thoughts on “Probing new optics to better address eight major issues of policy and management”