Government and the Fine Art of Chasing Rainbows
Should governments be in the business of solving unsolvable problems?
A common theme running through much of my research into government policy outcomes has been how often and how tenaciously the real world simply ignores government decision makers. Some problems simply refuse to go away, and all the cash in the world won’t make a whiff of a difference.
Browsing through The Audit’s own deep archives, the most spectacular failure that comes to mind is Global Affairs Canada’s three billion (with a B) dollar investment in curing malaria, tuberculosis, and AIDS. By GAC’s own stated expectations, it was clear that they’d wasted our money.
That’s the nice thing about being a cynic: if the government spends a gazillion dollars to eradicate a disease and then the disease actually disappears, I can always claim that correlation does not equal causation: for all we know it was slimy space aliens and not our government’s program that made the difference here. But when the disease continues to rage unabated, we can legitimately be 100% certain that the program failed.
To be fair, most of us are probably happy that the government at least tries to help address suffering where possible. The problem is that some suffering just can’t be successfully addressed.
Perhaps doubling funding for public education won’t actually improve educational outcomes (however you prefer to measure them). Perhaps forcing landlords to take on tenants at sub-market rent levels won’t actually solve the housing crisis (see Sweden).
And perhaps - just perhaps - there’s actually no way to balance the legitimate healthcare needs of all Canadians regardless of their ability to pay, against the systemic constraints of a healthcare industry in crisis.
Canadians are a generous people, but that doesn’t justify willful waste. As they log into their first Zoom each morning, policy makers should ask themselves whether what they’re currently planning makes sense. Any sense. I mean, whether there’s a snowball’s chance in Haiti that anything good will come from a project.
Ah, Haiti. They’ve had more than their share of troubles. And recent news describes a country that’s desperate not for good governance, but for the most basic social order. Sadly, that’s been the story for decades, right? Whatever the solution to their profound troubles, no one in the international aid community has yet identified it.
So then why do we keep executing hopeless programs?
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