Predictability covereth a multitude of sins

I have been busy! Between writing research proposals and travel, I have had no time to post fun stuff. I’ve been sitting on this draft for a few months though, so I’m excited to start publishing again.

I had two conversations in the fall in which I found myself using driving as an analogy for other coordination problems that have moral overtones. The gist of the argument is that your job as a driver is to be predictable. Your job is not to be nice. Your job is not to be fair. Your job is not to follow the law. (At least not directly; give me a moment.) Your job is not to avoid accidents. Your job is not to get to where you want to go. Your job is to make sure that all of the other people precariously steering around thousands of pounds of metal know where your thousands of pound of metal are going to be. Surprises kill people, because there are literally too many moving parts on a busy street for a single driver to hold in mind. The only way millions of Americans are able to usually drive unrestrained death traps around and get where they’re trying to go 99.9% of the time is because all of those unrestrained death traps are basically doing what we expect them to.

Several years ago, I was waiting at a red light when I saw a car coming at me in my rearview mirror too quickly to stop. If my job as a driver was to avoid accidents, maybe I should have veered over to another lane to avoid being hit. That was not my job. I put the car in neutral, held the brake, and sat up straight so my head would be supported by the headrest when I got hit. It is a societal victory that the person in that car rear-ended me instead of trying to cleverly veer into an oncoming lane even though there was a red light and probably nobody would be there. Or trying to veer in the other direction and hop an empty sidewalk. Those are not predictable actions. Nobody expects to see a car coming at them driving the wrong way in traffic, and you have a sacred duty as a driver to ensure that that is always the case, no matter what clever reason you have to drive on the wrong side of the road. It is better to predictably get your car totaled than it is to unpredictably try to avoid getting your car totaled. I look back on that time my car got totaled with pride, because five people walked away from that accident uninjured, and there are so many worse ways for a car to enter an intersection at speed because the brakes went out.

I brought all of this up to my friend who made a comment that he doesn’t understand why people loudly talk about precedent in government. He correctly said that there is no justice or virtue in respecting precedent. I said that that wasn’t the point. With the possible exception of legislation, the government’s job is to be predictable. The government’s job is not to be fair. The government’s job is not to do the most possible good. The government’s job is not to right historical wrongs. The government’s job is to do its utmost to make sure that people who are governed know what representatives of the state will and will not do. There are too many moving parts in a government for one person to keep them all straight in their head unless they can rely on every person in government to follow whatever rules are there, and precedent is a self-reinforcing predictability measure. It is almost tautologically predictable to say “we’re going to do the same thing this time as we did all of the previous times,” and if people know that you’re going to act according to precedent, then they can plan accordingly.

The goal of predictability in these cases is to be able to do more of something, even if the something is not exactly what people want. Sometimes it’s better to do a lot of a process which creates a little good each time than it is to do a process which creates a lot of good that can only operate up to a small scale. It is worth any individual driver not taking the optimally fast route to where they are going to have every driver be able to get where they are going relatively quickly at the same time. We tolerate many inefficiencies in government because we need government to be legible and work at all for everyone more than we need it to be efficient for any individual person.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t try to avoid accidents when driving. This isn’t to say that the reason you should drive is to be predictable. The reason why you are driving is to get where you’re going, but if you’re predictable, then more people can fit on the road without everyone having to ramp up their caution so much that nobody ever gets anywhere or without everyone constantly running into each other so much that nobody ever gets anywhere. In the same way, we don’t make governments for the purpose of increasing predictability. We make governments to provide services. We make governments to disincentivize crime and exploitation. The way that we make the government effective for those purposes is by establishing what a government is going to do and then making sure that the government actually does it. When you design a government, you design it so that the things it does result in justice, flourishing, and so on, but when a bureaucrat or judge is deciding what to do on a day-to-day basis, their job is to be predictable.