Three Cheers for Solutionism?

> my home state of California – where GOP opposition has been virtually eradicated – single-party dominance has failed to resolve basic governance issues.

I’m sorry but what? Sure, CA is blue on a national map in national elections but it’s a very reddish purple for any smaller statewide analysis. As is my state (WA), and all other “safe” blue states. And while I can’t claim to be intimately familiar with local CA politics, when I do follow the local goings on they’re very similar to here: at every layer of government where the GOP is electorally disadvantaged, they still find ways to have outsized influence. And in these blue states, they often achieve that by undermining the platforms of their D rivals and sewing doubt in the platform’s merit. Essentially trolling as politics. But it’s surprisingly effective.

CA’s ballot initiative system is often called out, because you can pass a new measure and defund it in the same go. Well, WA doesn’t have quite the same system but we have it staggered by ballot cycle, and yeah. It’s chaotic. Every time we decide we want to do something as a state, someone comes along and says “boy it would be great if the tax system (we quietly keep in place to make it painful for you) didn’t make you feel pain for this thing, do you wanna vote for a few more dollars in your pocket?” And of course people want a few more dollars in their pocket.

It’s a mistake to think anywhere is safe from this. We can’t pay for anything anywhere. Because some people would rather hold it hostage for their advantage.

It seems to me that US politics took a turn for the worse in the past 20 years, and my response has been to disengage. Randomly, I picked up The Politics Industry by Michael Porter and Katherine Gehl, and I found it pretty convincing:

(a) The system of elections and legislation is responsible for the poor outcomes we see. It's not the specific personalities.

(b) That system's rules were written by the Republican and Democratic parties to entrench their power. It is NOT encoded in the constitution or otherwise set in stone. Both parties are winners with the status quo -- they do very well financially by drumming up tribalistic competition instead of cooperation and problem solving.

(c) The result of the current rules is that a politician's ONLY job is to appeal to primary voters, which is why they take an ideologic or hard line stance. "Reaching across the aisle" results in a primary challenger that costs them their job.

As an "average voter" that thinks the best route is probably somewhere in the middle (the world is complicated, and government is neither omnipotent nor impotent), me and everyone like me are not represented.

They present a surprisingly straightforward remedy:

(1) Adopt non-partisan primaries with Final Five ballots, which a couple states have already passed variants of (Final Four just passed in Alaska!)

(2) Ranked choice voting to remove the Spoiler reason ("don't throw your vote away") that keeps independents or third parties out.

I came away optimistic about the future. Highly recommended!

Here's their site if you'd like to learn more: https://gehlporter.com/

I think the removal of agency and oversight from the public that is often coupled with "solutionism" - not lack of faith in technology - is a primary reason solutionism has met public resistance. People are willing to sacrifice efficiency for accountability & involvement, and they do not want to hand off priority-setting to technocrats. I am personally hesitant to embrace a model where "governments have also found success in working together with the private sector to manage information flows during the pandemic", as the author describes Taiwan, especially when coupled with oversight by a bureaucratic cryptid like Marshall at the ONA. The current US versions of a misinformation "Fact Check Center" and "Meme Engineering Team" [0] have not inspired confidence. The list of top Marshall protégés may hint at tradeoffs associated with broader deployment of the ONA approach [1].

[0]https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/lesson... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marshall_(foreign_polic...

This article and the article to which the author is responding seems to miss the point entirely.

There's nothing wrong with "solutionism" if people are making actual solutions to problems that they understand well.

The derogatory term of solutionism was coined because of a trend where people built cool but gimmicky superficial "solutions" for perceived "problems" that in no way addressed the root cause of the problems. They were salves for symptoms by people who drastically underestimated the scope of the problem. They also seemed to have no idea how to engineer lasting solutions (because those are expensive and boring).

Vaccines are an actual solution, though. They, in part with huge amounts of boring, un-sexy political action, can end the pandemic.

So no, vaccines aren't solutionism, because they actually solve the problem, in a big, expensive and boring way

My god these people need to read some Marx. You cannot effectively disentangle these things, they are mutually-dependent and both a product of the same socioeconomic system. The conditions that created Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and pharma companies are indivisible. There is no competition between methods and mindsets, only systemic failures and broken incentives that result in a conflict between them.

The issue with modeling SV as oriented towards creating "solutions" is that the incentives of VCs are at odds with that of actually solving problems: they're looking for short-term profits, social sustainability be damned.

So Uber, which is a proposed solution to crumbling American public transit infra, splurges a lot of money to accelerate the crumbling of said infra, and in the process manages to make life worse for drivers (terrible pay), for the planet (via increased emissions), and eventually for riders (when prices will be too high and public alternatives gone).

But this doesn't matter to VCs, who want short(ish) term profits.

This issue generalizes into a critique of solutionism as a whole: technological "solutions" are not grounded in humanity: they don't actually take into account those affected, i.e. the everyday people who will directly interact with your "solution", and the millions more who will be indirectly impacted. You can try to suggest that your solution is politics-free, but in the act of interacting with, and affecting, society, it becomes political.

I suggest "The Politics of Artifacts" for more on this.