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Antisocial EngineeringSeptember 12, 2005 "Social engineering": That's what people call it when government tries to achieve an objective that they don't approve of. Is there a catchy phrase for when government tries to achieve an objective that they do approve of? Can't think of it offhand. Often we don't come up with a name for something until we want to complain about it. What if we talked about "social engineering" and "antisocial engineering"? When public policy supports, say, the U.S. Constitution (including the Bill of Rights) and democratic values in general, we'd call it "social engineering." "Antisocial engineering," naturally, is the opposite: public policy that undermines the Constitution, exacerbates the gap between the rich and the rest of us, and generally has a negative impact on values conducive to community life. "Engineering" probably isn't the best word here: it sounds mechanical, distant, and impersonal. What we're talking about is incentives and disincentives, particularly incentives to do the socially responsible thing and disincentives to do the opposite. My favorite example of this is the bottle bill that my state, Massachusetts, passed in 1976, requiring that stores collect a 5-cent deposit on certain beverage containers and then refund that deposit when the customer returned the empty container. Well, when the bill was introduced, you would have thought the sky was falling: the beverage makers and bottlers screamed "Anti-business! Anti-competitive! Socialistic! Social engineering!" It passed as a ballot question, went into effect, and what do you know? Within a few months, bottles and cans nearly disappeared from the roadsides of the commonwealth. A nickel doesn't seem like a lot, but it's enough to make most people think twice about tossing their empties out the window, and to give other people a reason to go out with a bag or a little red wagon and collect the discards. Social engineering at its best. Social engineering can involve government policy. It usually involves public opinion. But in our society the most powerful engineering is done by "the market." The market shapes our days in a way that even the most obnoxious, in-your-face government can't. Why do you go to work in the morning? To earn money. Why do you want money? To pay for the necessities and the pleasures of life that you can't make, grow, or acquire by other means. The market is the mechanism that turns your labor into the stuff you want. It allocates resources, meaning that it combines the hours and dollars of hundreds, thousands, millions of individuals and channels them in certain directions; think of interconnected waterways, each with its pattern of dams, locks, and sluices. The market does a pretty good job of allocating resources, at least when compared to the alternatives mankind [sic] has come up with so far. What the market won't do is to automatically allocate resources in ways that encourage and sustain essential democratic values. Look at what it's doing to the electoral process, and by extension to government at almost every level. Don't blame the market: its job is allocating resources, not supporting the U.S. Constitution. A river's job is to flow downhill; don't blame it for not diverting itself to water parched fields or power a turbine. That's where the engineering comes in, social or otherwise. Be suspicious, very suspicious, of those who argue that engineering is by definition bad. Chances are good that the river of money is already keeping their fields well watered; why would they want to risk diverting it? Chances are also good that the blessings of the river didn't flow their way solely as a result of their hard work and entrepreneurial spirit. Tax breaks, price supports, pork-barrel politics -- aren't these a form of engineering too? Oh no, they'll tell you: That's supporting the economy, creating jobs, keeping America competitive. Right. Looks like antisocial, antidemocratic engineering to me.
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