Problem Solving the Problem Solving Problem

Maybe we need to check our priors

This is a submission for The Boyd Institute ‘s essay contest “How can America improve its problem-solving capacity?”

Never has a society been more technically advanced, and yet everywhere the wheels are coming off. Necessary infrastructure is not being repaired, the government shuts down as a matter of course, businesses are ossifying around meaningless slogans and mantras as bureaucratic bloat swamps their ability to pivot to new realities. Public services are becoming more chaotic, safety is collapsing in every major city, and everyone is enmeshed in a game for social status as the world crumbles around them. We have the wealth to fix things, we have the human capital, so where are the movers and shakers that can solve them?

While decline seems ubiquitous in every crevice of society, visionaries are trying to reverse the trend. A good example is federal legislation introduced by Thoman Massie called the PRIME act. As of this writing, it is trying to get through committee and enter Congress for a vote. In essence, it would allow farmers to sell their meat within the state’s borders without federal inspection, thereby eliminating expensive middlemen.

Under the PRIME Act, a bipartisan bill Massie has reintroduced with Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, individual states could allow farmers to sell cuts of beef processed at locations that are not federally inspected.

“It would be a huge boon for Kentucky farmers because you wouldn’t have to sell your calves,” he said. “You could raise them on grass right here in Kentucky like I do.”

Massie and Pingree previously introduced the PRIME Act in 2023.

That year, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association put out a statement opposing it.

“NCBA is in favor of reducing regulatory burdens, but not at the expense of food safety,” said former NCBA President Todd Wilkinson. “While the PRIME Act is well-intentioned, allowing uninspected beef to enter the retail market is dangerous to consumers.”

Kentucky congressman reintroduces beef processing bill

Beef processing is one of the most onerous parts of agriculture, requiring them to be processed only in pricey USDA inspected slaughterhouses. This would seem prudent, as Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” is seared into every American’s consciousness, even if they have never read it. It’s assumed that without a strong government overseeing operations, such squalid and unsanitary conditions would happen again.

Unfortunately, this has created regulatory capture with the largest meat brands squeezing small farmers and crushing their competition.

Meatpacking is one of the most consolidated industries in our food system. Of the more than 70 meat brands marketing to consumers and retailers under the guise of individual names and logos, just four corporations—Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef—are behind these brands.

These four meatpacking giants control a staggering 80-85% of the beef industry. They routinely make headlines for their abusive behaviors, from getting sued by other corporate goliaths like McDonald’s for price-fixing to lawsuits over the use of child labor in their meatpacking plants.

But these companies’ sheer dominance over this industry, deceptively hidden behind their acquired brands, means that it’s challenging to opt out of buying their products at the grocery store.

This level of corporate control in the meatpacking sector has devastated the industry: Farmers have been driven off their land, prices have increased for consumers, and our food supply is vulnerable to disruptions.

Behind the Brands: The Meatpacking Monopoly and the Illusion of Choice | Farm Action

While the current reality of the policy is onerous and largely counterproductive, the intent was simple. They wanted to make food safer, and this required a regulatory apparatus. In solving this problem, they created a second-order effect, a de facto cartel that impoverished cattle farmers and made meat more expensive.

None of this is new, as regulations at both the federal and state level have been a thorn on the side of small farmers for ages. Joel Saladin, in his provocative and hilariously titled work “Everything I want to do is Illegal”, argues that such regulations stifle innovation and make it difficult for ruralites to support the local agricultural economy. In the name of safety, a farmer can’t sell meat to Sally down the road, or his grain directly to Bill across town. Because of the up-front costs of regulation, agriculture regulators naturally support mass farming that can eat the costs and viciously enforces protocol. Get on their bad side, and when the USDA comes barging in, you’d think a fentanyl lab was being raided.

Its blanket purpose of food safety puts people’s liberties on the back burner. Another example, regulations against raw milk also prohibits use choice, While raw milk has only a slightly more dangerous profile that pasteurized milk, along with benefits in terms of healthy bacteria, those who want to buy some have to go through convoluted hoops of “buying” part of a cow and getting its output, and even here it’s in a legally gray area.

The bureaucrats saw a problem, potentially unsafe food, and developed a solution everyone had to follow. The fact the solution is often expensive and useless without improving safety is overlooked, as well as the fact farmers selling to local residents leaves far less room for contamination and creates a healthy economic ecosystem.

While this example was in agriculture, it’s mindset percolates all elite institutions. Experts are delegated to find problems and develop solutions. Unfortunately, no matter how logical the solution, there are going to be unexpected secondary effects, and likely a loss of personal freedom. You see this in the corporation who wants a more efficient travel policy and nickel and dimes every expense an employee makes for the cheapest option. The cost savings is then spent micromanaging employees and increasing company overhead. In charities, as can be seen in Minneapolis, policies meant to support low-income household have become a bust-out of fraud and panhandling as perfectly capable members of society end up on the dole through navigating the byzantine structure of the modern welfare system. While the policy makers understood the risk of fraud and built safeguards, they never foresaw an entire ethnic enclave working together to defraud the system nor foresaw the state being unwilling to enforce its own laws. Hundreds of millions of dollars are squandered trying to fix ailing schools using the latest fads from the experts. High-speed rail projects go deep in the red with nothing to show for it.

While these issues are difficult, they aren’t insurmountable. So how do we increase the problem-solving capabilities of this nation? After all, the theory goes that with the proper experts such second order effects can be mitigated. With the proper people in charge, we can cut through the red tape and build things. If we listened to the experts and gave them agency, society would run like a well-oiled machine, right? Color me skeptical.

The Republican party, while claiming to be pro-family, have inadvertently created some of the most anti-family conditions to ever exist with its previous free-market policies that failed to reign in vice, foreign adventures that separated families, and impoverishment of the rural heartland. The Democratic party has proved useless in elevating the poorest in society by dooming them to crime-ridden neighborhoods. Even if we assumed the experts are altruistic, far-sighted, and in line with American values, it’s a sad reality that well-intentioned policies can have disastrous consequences elsewhere.

Jacques Ellul in his seminal work, “The Technological Society” detailed how the proliferation of technique wiped away organic methods of being in the name of efficiency and optimization. Technique is not just machines, microchips, and automation, but also rules that regulate human society. Modern banking practices are a form of technique, as is the corporate business model. The University System credentialing model is a technique. Modern therapy is a form of technique. Our court system is a technique. As society became more complex, more aspects of human life become proceduralized, removing organic bonds with relationships and processes that are more scalable to broader society. Because technique is artificial by nature, replacing the organic and spontaneous with the artificial, there are always aftershocks.

The world that is being created by the accumulation of technical means is an artificial world and hence radically different from the natural world.
It destroys, eliminates, or subordinates the natural world, and does not allow this world to restore itself or even to enter into a symbiotic relation with it. The two worlds obey different imperatives, different directives, and different laws which have nothing in common. Just as hydroelectric installations take waterfalls and lead them into conduits, so the technical milieu absorbs the natural. We are rapidly approaching the time when there will be no longer any natural environment at all. When we succeed in producing artificial aurorae boreales, night will disappear and perpetual day will reign over the planet.
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

The core thought process is always the same. Experts find a problem, and work to solve the problem in a universalized, quantifiable way. They find the optimal technique to solve the issue, then proliferate it throughout general society. In the economic realm, this is often seen in mass production with increasing efficiencies built in that allow more products to be built faster and cheaper. When the technique is accepted, everyone else needs to catch up or else be buried under their more efficient competitors. Even if there are secondary damages to social cohesion or the environment, the corporation’s main aim, to build things cheap, is unhindered.

And there are always secondary effects. Every attempt to subdue nature has consequences that can’t be easily quantified. This isn’t to say technique is never the proper course of action, but that caution in implementing a policy based on tangible metrics could mask the corrosion of intangible connections that let human societies flourish.

Perhaps this technocratic mindset “finding solutions to problems” is the wrong approach to the problems of modernity. Maybe the drive for getting the best metrics, the best stats, by their very nature take away from the invisible joys that make life worth living, the bonds that allow people to work together in harmony. It is also losing its utility. When we’re at the stage of trying to address “The problem of the lack of problem-solving capacity”, the plot was lost somewhere.

The plot is especially lost when so many “innovations” are paperclip maximizing on steroids. When you look at things from a problem/solution framework, it’s impossible to ignore. Social Media is designed to be as addictive as possible instead of edifying. Professional sports caters to gambling as opposed to local spirit. Search engines are broken to force people to spend more time searching and click on ads. Middlemen exist to extract as much value from every transaction as possible. Appliances have earlier obsolescence and are impossible to repair. College is now a soulless, largely interchangeable credentialing apparatus. All of these changes were to solve “problems”, and they solved them to the detriment of us all. They simply were not the problems we wanted solved. Profits were raised, growth expanded to new areas, consumers suffered through more ads, and items were rebought over and over. They found out that people have many vices, and it’s good business to give them what they want. It’s also good business to give them no choice. They solved the problem of increasing margins, but at the detriment of society as a whole. In short, all this solving has led to increased enshittfication.

What do you mean when you talk about “problem solving”? How about asking if there is a problem at all? While technique has created mass wealth, a safe society, and plenty of material goods, we need to ask if we are reaching diminishing returns, and one can argue it’s been worse for awhile. What’s lost in this contest is that problem solving has not deteriorated, but the concept of what is and is not a problem as well as what our priorities are.

Whether you like it or not, giving violent inner-city thugs a slap on the wrist while throwing the book mostly law-abiding citizens is an effective way to “solve” the lopsided prison population. Banning and censoring contrary scientific theories solves the problem of building consensus. Criminalizing speech is effective at making sure regime approved bodies are not challenged. In the Soviet Union, starving millions of Ukrainians to death under the early Stalin regime solved a lot of resource problems. Liquidating the kulaks solved stability problems. One understands instinctually this is immoral, but how do you form the value system to seek solutions that benefit everyone? How can this be done with conflicting moral models, some of which are perfectly happy with stomping on a significant portion of the population.

While technique is effective at fixing things, it’s totally incapable of considering what man’s telos is. After all, the point of mass production is not the mass production itself, but to enable human flourishing. What is forgotten in this technocratic way of thinking is the sort of society that edifies the people living in it. While the food problem can be solved by putting soylent into everyone’s veins and the problem of safety can be solved by putting everyone in a concrete box, humans are not soulless robots. They have spiritual wants that our society is less capable of offering.

The focus on problems and solutions is bad framing. There will always be problems, and technocratic solutions create their own set of problems. What needs to be asked is what our aim is. How can we foster the spiritual, material, and cultural cultivation of our nation? The purpose of anyone making policy decisions should be the building a virtuous society.

One could argue talking about virtue is just empty moralizing, and there is no way to build a reasonable consensus. It’s true what is virtuous is not a universal constant. Alastair Macintyre in his work “After Virtue”, argued what was virtuous depended on the type of civilization you were in. A martial society’s idea of virtue would be far different than a farming society, yet both of them could have a citizenry that could be directed towards gratifying ends. According to MacIntyre:

The virtues therefore are to be understood as those dispositions which will not only sustain practices and enable us to achieve the goods internal to practices, but which will also sustain us in the relevant kind of quest for the good, by enabling us to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations and distractions which we encounter, and which will furnish us with increasing self-knowledge and increasing knowledge of the good.

What Macintyre means by “goods in practice” needs to be expanded upon. According to Macintyre, a practice is":

any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended

In other words, a practice is a social activity with clear standards of excellence to adhere to that benefit the wider community. What those standards of excellence are varies, but what does not vary is its spiritual edification in the practitioner as well as the benefit to general society. It’s the discipline of a professional that establishes rigor and takes pride in their work in a way that elevates those around him. It’s the drive to perfect a craft or skill for its own sake as opposed to having a specified output.

The virtue of a judge would be its adherence to the meaning and spirit of the law, to bring public order and to give fair representation to everyone entering the court regardless of station and immutable qualities. The virtue of the software developer would be to write clean, readable, and dependable code that elevates the user experience as opposed to bombarding him with ads and distractions. The virtue of the farmer would be to be ecologically conscious steward of the land that supports the local community. The virtue of the bureaucrat is to create reasonable processes that allow work to be done as opposed to building a personal fiefdom.

There’s a symbiosis between all of these practices, and when one falters everyone suffers. All of them know their place in the social order, and the responsibilities entrusted to them. How they do their duties depends on cultural context, but all of them follow the principle of honest connections with other human beings. There is an understanding of what excellence in practice entails. It isn’t just a set of skills, but a respect for the traditions and history of their professions as well as the culture they live in. It would make no sense for an architect in the Midwest to design building like medieval Japan. He is necessarily constrained by their cultural norms and traditions. The way virtue is shown in a mercantilist empire like the United States will be far different than a theocracy like Iran, but both can manifest an excellence in varied forms. While this is a hindrance to some, it allows them to fit practices into the complex ecosystem and unspoken rules of his culture, and societies can’t function when they are totally disregarded. Human beings are not blank slates, and societies cannot simply have their past wiped away. What works for one area might not work for another, neither will be optimum in an abstract sense, and that’s okay.

The question of “how can I be more virtuous?”, is not a problem to be solved, but a mantra to base one’s life around. It brings every part of one’s life into greater focus, regardless of how many people are under you. It sets precedent on oneself, as it is impossible to cultivate virtue in others while being a cad. When your focus is to give the opportunity for everyone to be the best in their particular culture, it opens up avenues beyond mere metrics and enables more agency to trust one’s senses before spreadsheets. One’s virtue in a particular practice necessarily manifests virtue elsewhere.

Still, virtue is not something that can be quantified, and any attempt to tends to fall due to the same paperclip maximizing that plagues modernity. You know it when you see a passionate work of art, a man who takes his duties as a soldier seriously, a mother keeping her calm amidst the chaos of domestic life, or the cashier smiling as she takes her small station with a kind heart. There is an aura around them, a sense of greatness that extends beyond them as an individual to a higher mode of being.

Virtue is human, while technocracy is soulless and mechanical. Instead of thinking like machines, taking in inputs and deciding how to optimally reach a certain set output, we should think more like human beings living in a certain time in a distinct culture with unique neighbors. Instead of focusing on abstract problem solving, a lot more can be done working to cultivate the best in everything that we do, and through our efforts inspire those around us to do the same. Instead of abstractions, actions at the personal and policy level needs to be grounded in a sense of particular place, emphasizing the organic before the technical, though both have their place. Technique, problem solving, and the like can only be spiritually fulfilling within these contexts. Maybe we need to focus less on solving things, and more on demanding personal excellence.