Social Capabilities in Decline
Mankind has not been to the moon for a long time, and Bruce Charlton has made the argument that this is because we no longer have the ability. We can say until we're blue in the face, goes the argument, that we haven't sent men to the moon lately because we don't want to, because we feel we have better uses for the money or other projects to which the talent must be devoted, but the simplest explanation is that we don't because we, as a society, can't.
Because the task of getting to the moon was one imposed by politicians, and was not within our technical capability at the time, only the most talented engineers and project leaders were assigned to the task. The leaders had the ability to make crucial decisions without (much) bureaucratic interference. Now, however, government agencies such as NASA recruit personnel on the basis of qualities other than mere smarts and decisiveness, such as diversity, minority membership, obedience to the bureaucracy, and organization-man conformity, and recruiting on this basis means that the agencies don't necessarily have top talent.
Can we use the same argument about other social tasks, such as border control? We haven't controlled our borders for decades now, and the question is whether we can. It takes little technical expertise to do so, so not having top talent in that field shouldn't matter. But, as a society we now give priority to other values, such as cheap labor, diversity, or filling the ranks of voters for socialism. It could be argued that a simple policy change would do the trick, but despite endless polls that show that a large majority of Americans are against illegal immigration, nothing is ever done. So maybe as a society we don't control the borders because we're unable.
Another example might be the prosecution of a war. The U.S. had (has) specific war aims in Iraq and Afghanistan that it has not been able to fulfill. We have not succeeded, for example, in pacifying either country. A good way of looking at the problem is to say that we have not because we can not. Other priorities than war-winning have intruded onto war plans, and these include not looking like a bully to world opinion, an unwillingness to sacrifice American lives (not that that's a bad thing), an unwillingness to be seen killing the "enemy".
So it seems that there are a number of things we can no longer do. California can't build a bullet train because of bureaucratic bungling and environmental concerns. We could probably no longer build an interstate highway system. Oil refineries and nuclear power plants are virtually incapable of being built.
Posted by Dennis Mangan at 12:39 PM
http://mangans.blogspot.com/2012/06/social-capabilities-in-decline.html