Last Tuesday, Rachel Maddow reported from Aghanistan:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: If the police efforts, the policing effort, security efforts don't combine to create enough space for Afghan government to step up in a way that is working, I don't get the sense there's a plan B. Is there a plan B?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: We'll have more with the American general in charge of southern Afghanistan, Brigadier General Ben Hodges, in just a moment.
When she talked to General Hodges, he tacitly admitted it: No plan B.
But Afghanistan isn't the exception. It's the rule. The lack of a plan B isn't the problem--it's just one aspect of the larger problem of systematically bad thinking that repeatedly leads to bad results.
The very next day, Paul Krugman blogged about the Obama Administration's failure to foresee how bad things would get with unemployment, and their consequent undersizing of the stimulus. Here's a chart he reproduced showing what they thought would happen:
Krugman said, in part:
based on public reporting, like the Ryan Lizza article on Larry Summers - which reads rather differently now that we know how things are really working out, or more accurately not working out - it looks as if top advisers convinced themselves that even in the absence of stimulus the slump would be nasty, brutish, but not too long. That's the assumption embedded in the now infamous Romer-Bernstein chart, above. So all policy needed to do was meliorate the worst, while we waited for the economy to recover spontaneously. From the Lizza article:
Summers did not include Romer's $1.2-trillion projection. The memo argued that the stimulus should not be used to fill the entire output gap; rather, it was "an insurance package against catastrophic failure."
I don't know why Summers etc. believed this. Even before the severity of the financial crisis was fully apparent, the recent history of recessions suggested that the jobs picture would continue to worsen long after the recession was technically over. And by the winter of 2008-2009, it was obvious that this was the Big One...
In short, there was every reason to think that things could be worse than anticipated. But the problem wasn't simply that they got their estimate wrong. It's how they got it wrong, and even more seriously how they failed to think about what might happen if they turned out to be wrong. "Failure is not an option" they were thinking, just like BushCo, and so they didn't think about it, and thus they blindly plunged into it. No worst-case planning. No Plan B.
A little more detail from Liazza's article (including the passage Krugman quotes) makes this even clearer:
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Romer had run simulations of the effects of stimulus packages of varying sizes: six hundred billion dollars, eight hundred billion dollars, and $1.2 trillion. The best estimate for the output gap was some two trillion dollars over 2009 and 2010. Because of the multiplier effect, filling that gap didn't require two trillion dollars of government spending, but Romer's analysis, deeply informed by her work on the Depression, suggested that the package should probably be more than $1.2 trillion. The memo to Obama, however, detailed only two packages: a five-hundred-and-fifty-billion-dollar stimulus and an eight-hundred-and-ninety-billion-dollar stimulus. Summers did not include Romer's $1.2-trillion projection. The memo argued that the stimulus should not be used to fill the entire output gap; rather, it was "an insurance package against catastrophic failure." At the meeting, according to one participant, "there was no serious discussion to going above a trillion dollars."
Now compare this with Maddow, when she gets to ask the general about a "plan B":
MADDOW: I know this is a difficult question, but if over the next year, it doesn't-essentially doesn't work to establish better governance in Kandahar, if the police efforts, the policing efforts, security efforts, don't combine to create enough space for the Afghan government to step up in a way that's working, I don't get a sense there's a plan B. Is there a plan B? Is plan B just more time?
HODGES: There's no reason why this shouldn't be successful if the Afghans do their part. I mean, we have-I've never met an officer that didn't want more capability, so I would never turn away more engineers or military police. But we have enough to do what we have got to do in Kandahar, assuming that the Afghans step up and do their part.
MADDOW: If they don't?
HODGES: Well, then we will have-we will have given them the best chance they've ever have.
In short, there is no plan B.
And, of course, these are the relatively good stories. Look at Deepwater Horizon, and the broader situation with off-shore oil drilling. There wasn't even a plan A. Save the walruses, right?
This is evidence of groupthink gone wild. The original meaning of groupthink was confined to failures in relatively compact, cohesive decisionmaking groups. As Wikipedia explains:
Groupthink is a type of thought within a deeply cohesive in-group whose members try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. It is a second potential negative consequence of group cohesion.
Irving Janis studied a number of American Foreign policy 'disasters' such as failure to anticipate the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (1944); the Bay of Pigs fiasco (1961) when the US adminstration sought to overthrow Cuban Government of Fidel Castro; and the prosecution of the Vietnam War (1964-67) by President Lyndon Johnson. Studying these events that it was the cohesive nature of these important committees which made these decisions and which prevented contradictory views being expressed. As defined by Janis, "A mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action". [1].
Individual creativity, uniqueness, and independent thinking are lost in the pursuit of group cohesiveness, as are the advantages of reasonable balance in choice and thought that might normally be obtained by making decisions as a group. During groupthink, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking.
But this goes far beyond that. What we have here is not just isolated examples of groupthink in different decision-making groups. We have an all-pervasive system, with a pre-selection process that worked overtime to screen out anyone who might not go along without questioning.
Indeed, Obama's extreme focus on trying to gain bipartisan consensus ensured that any sort of thinking that was too critical, too disruptive of the possibility (however illusory) of bipartisan cooperation would necessarily be attenuated. It was a virtual requirement for groupthink, and thus for defective decision-making. In particular, Wikipedia notes:
Groupthink... results in defective decision making. That is, consensus-driven decisions are the result of the following practices of groupthinking[5]
- Incomplete survey of alternatives
- Incomplete survey of objectives
- Failure to examine risks of preferred choice
- Failure to reevaluate previously rejected alternatives
- Poor information search
- Selection bias in collecting information
- Failure to work out contingency plans.
Although we don't have detailed information, all seven factors would seem to have been involved in the both the stimulus and the Afghanistan War decisions. For example, it was obvious at the time the stimulus package was put together that there was "Failure to work out contingency plans". Krugman himself argued that a too-small stimulus would leave the impression that it had failed, and would make passage of a second stimulus politically impossible. There was no credible counter-argument to his point. They simply didn't consider the possibility.
The more we know, the more other failures come clear. The passage quoted from Liazza's article clearly indicates that there was "Incomplete survey of alternatives" and "Failure to reevaluate previously rejected alternatives," while other failures--such as "Failure to examine risks of preferred choice" can be easily inferred.
The failure of the decision-making process can be further illuminated by looking at recommended counter-measures:
According to Irving Janis, decision making groups are not necessarily destined to groupthink. He devised seven ways of preventing groupthink (209-15):
- Leaders should assign each member the role of "critical evaluator". This allows each member to freely air objections and doubts.
- Higher-ups should not express an opinion when assigning a task to a group.
- The organization should set up several independent groups, working on the same problem.
- All effective alternatives should be examined.
- Each member should discuss the group's ideas with trusted people outside of the group.
- The group should invite outside experts into meetings. Group members should be allowed to discuss with and question the outside experts.
- At least one group member should be assigned the role of Devil's advocate. This should be a different person for each meeting.
While the decisionmaking process wasn't entirely cut off from outside input (points 5 and 6), the dominant framework of seeking bipartisan concensus effective served to diminish any possible impact of advice to act in a more robustly progressive manner--even though such a policy pathway was clearly indicated from past experience.
The escalation of the Afghanistan War, however, made the stimulus decision-making process look like the work of freewheeling creative geniuses by comparison. The idea that a military response to terrorism actually helps the terrorists to advance their goals was clearly never seriously considered, for example, and the alternative of taking a non-military approach to defeating al Qaeda clearly was never considered--even though it's the standard approach of virtually all of our allies, except, of course, Israel, which has had such tremendous success--not!
Groupthink has become so commonplace in Versailles as to be virtually invisible. The knee-jerk rejection of certain people and certain sorts of ideas is rationalized by group labelling. Certain alternatives are never considered, even when that leaves nothing on the table except a choice between different sorts of proven failures from the past. This is "naturalized" to a certain extent by starting off at higher levels of abstraction by labelling some actors and some ideas as simply beyond the fringe, and with this mindset in place, it's easy to pre-select the sorts of people and the kinds of ideas that figure in any sort of deliberation. But when one actually looks at specific decision-making processes, the failure modes of groupthink clearly stand out for what they are.
And with groupthink dominating every aspect of our national political decisionmaking, is it any wonder that things just keep getting worse and worse and worse?
p.s. Please note, these examples are both major issues and extremely clear-cut. It's not a matter of left vs. right. It's a matter of real-world empirical reality vs. Versailles bi-partisan political fantasy. Clearly, one could also add global warming as another similar example, in which case the reality is even more unambiguous, and the results of continued failure are even more dire. |
