Comments

"Once a system grows sufficiently complex, it doesn't matter how badly our best and brightest foul things up. Every crisis increases their authority, because they seem to be the only ones who understand the system well enough to fix it. But their fixes tend to make the system even more complex and centralized, and more vulnerable to the next national-security surprise, the next natural disaster, the next economic crisis."

The current economic crisis along with the oil leaking in the gulf have a lot to do with relaxing rules or decentralizing.

Also, only the best and the brightest can foul things up, because they will always be in charge - who else do we want to run our systems, the dumb and the incompetent?

Every year, one of the very best football teams in the USA loses the Superbowl.

Posted by zorro at May 18, 2010 1:29 PM

The school district in the city where I live, faced with a budget crisis, recently decided to save money by closing 3 small, high-performing, much-beloved elementary schools and consolidating them into one large school at the site of a former middle school. The numbers they based the decision on are bogus because they assume that the old school buildings can be rented out (probably not), and they don't include the costs of remodeling the new site to meet the needs of younger students. But most of the school board played the "elitist" card (Why should we put money into small schools in a "better" part of town and shortchange the rest of the district?), so the decision makes them look like the Good Guys to people who can't do the math (who, thanks to that same school system, number in the thousands). Thoughtful observers are disgusted.

Posted by Paula at May 26, 2010 5:17 PM