THE POLITICAL MAUSOLEUM
Built to the wrong scale, unable to deal adequately with transnational problems, unable to deal with interrelated problems, unable to keep up with the accelerative drive, unable to cope with the high levels of diversity, the overloaded, obsolete political technology of the industrial age is breaking up under our very eyes.
THE DECISIONAL IMPLOSION
Too many decisions, too fast, about too many strange and unfamiliar problems—not some imagined “lack of leadership”—explain the gross incompetence of political and governmental decisions today. Our institutions are reeling from a decisional implosion.
Working with out-of-date political technology, our capacity for effective governmental decision-making is deteriorating rapidly. “When all the decisions had to be made in the White House,*’ wroteShawcross in Harper’s magazine, discussing the Nixon-Kissinger Cambodian policy, “there was little time for considering fully any one of them.” In fact, the White House is so squeezed for decisions—on everything from air pollution, hospital costs, and nuclear power to the elimination of hazardous toys (!)—-that one presidential adviser confided to me, “We are all suffering from future shock here!”
Nor are the executive agencies much better off. Each department is crushed under the mounting decision load. Each is compelled to enforce countless regulations and to generate vast numbers of decisions daily, under tremendous accelerative pressures.
Thus, a recent investigation of the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts found that its council spent all of four and i half minutes considering each class of grant applications. “The number of applications . . . have far outstripped the ability of the NBA to make quality decisions,” the report declared.
Few good studies of this decisional logjam exist. One of the best is Trevor Armbrister’s analysis of the 1968 Pueblo incident involving the capture of a U.S. spy ship by the North Koreans and a dangerous showdown between the two countries. According to Armbrister, the Pentagon official who performed the “risk evaluation” on the Pueblo mission, and approved it, had only a few hours to appraise the risks of 76 different proposed military missions. The official subsequently refused to estimate how much time he had actually spent considering the Pueblo.
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