Week One's excerpt brings The Productive Pessimist approach to challenges as diverse as Gen-AI, civil unrest, and welfare reform:
Productive Pessimism in the Denial of Human Interest
From Generative AI, through welfare reform, to the cost of living, governments around the world are ignoring what their citizens need and want: That’s the problem that’s perceived; what’s the problem behind the problem, and what are three possible solutions?
Riots in France. Militaristic units being used against ordinary citizens in the USA.
Dismissal of the rights of disabled and unemployed people to be able to afford to remain engaged with society, and rising ableist rhetoric from government and media, in the UK.
Protests against AI data centres by local communities around the world.
At first glance, these may seem either to be completely unconnected problems, or problems that can be unified under “governments refusing to listen to their citizens.”
If they are unconnected problems, then it is a time-intensive, high-cost, high-resource-demand challenge to begin to address even one of them, and neither the resources nor the will to do so are typically present, even within the groups most affected by the consequences of leaving these types of problems unaddressed.
If they are unified under the problem of “governments refusing to listen to their citizens” we are left with a single problem which is unsolvable, because of the nature of governments, and the barriers they place between themselves and the demographics of their citizenry most impacted by the decisions made in government.
At The Productive Pessimist, we look for the single “problem behind the problems”, but we require that single problem to be one that can be addressed readily, by relatively ordinary people, in affordable ways.
So: What is the single, solvable problem behind the problems we’re seeing around the world?
. Reactionism
Reactionism sees governments being too lenient with how businesses are allowed to operate, and the costs they are allowed to charge, particularly for essentials - a completely free market is a reaction to falling tax revenues; the higher the profits of private enterprise, and the more organisations that are private enterprises, the greater the levels of corporation tax due to a country’s Exchequer, and the less they have to worry about other forms of declining tax incomes.
Reactionism sees governments rushing to adopt “novel technologies” simply because the owners of those technologies have threatened that anyone who doesn’t immediately adopt them will be “left behind”, and because other countries are adopting them, without establishing whether these technologies have any genuine utility, in whole or in part, for the individual country being governed, what the acknowledged and unforeseen costs of adopting the technology might be, and how much will need to be spent “managing acceptance”; as someone with a background in change management, the most complicated and costly aspect of any new process is often getting people to engage with it.
Reactionism sees harsh, punitive policies being brought to bear on what are social, rather than criminal, issues, and which need a systemic, social-led response, rather than a carceral one.
Reactionism can be a problem for individuals and organisations, as well as national and international governments. The solutions to reactionism are:
Zero cost: Slow down
Become the toddler you hate to hear ask “Whhhhyyyyyy?” - and ask why.
Set boundaries: “We will do X only if Y, and only for so long. If X has not succeeded in addressing Y in Z time period, we will try a different approach.”
Low cost: Establish use-case groups
For governments, these should be drawn from demographics experiencing the highest impacts of policy decisions, and with the fewest resources available to them. Which demographics those are will change depending on the policy considerations in question.
For companies and organisations, your use-case group should be drawn both from your front-line, lowest-paid staff, and - controversially, perhaps - people you rejected at interviews for roles within your company.
For individuals, a use-case group will usually be a peer group; try and establish a group with a range of people who are both different to you, and different from each other.
Mid cost: Set a period of time to live without the reactionism-driven response
Not acting doesn’t mean there isn’t a cost. However, while the costs of reacting are usually presented plainly, in the form of fees, etc, the costs of not acting are often obscured, and only become apparent when the process of inaction is underway.
Set a defined time - never less than two months, never more than two years - to live without making any changes. To just maintain the status quo. For governments, this may require legislation preventing encroachment by private owners of novel technologies, while organisations may need to draw up specific policies around inaction periods.
Note everything. Every frustration, and the time spent responding to it. How long every task took, and how much business or opportunity was lost to it. Absence rates. Engagement levels. Successful or unsuccessful hiring rounds. Feedback, both positive and negative. Ways your competitors shifted focus or approach, and how much business you’d gained simply by not having to shift.
Compare those costs to the stated costs of the reactionism decision, and to the hidden costs - the costs of change acceptance, the cost of dealing with obsolete items and processes, training costs, the costs of frustrations with the new process.
Whichever choice - change or continuation - has the lower cost: do that.
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