The seen and unseen: Political version

Posted by Marc Hodak on May 10, 2009 under Politics, Scandal | Be the First to Comment

I have often noticed how business regulation is almost completely headline driven.  If a photo of rats in a restaurant makes it on the front page of the local paper, city council members will stand up before the cameras and announce hearings the very next day.  If a large business gets an offer from a foreign firm, and instead of portraying this as a vote of global confidence the press chooses to portray it as a foreign invasion, congressmen will step over each other to get to the microphones first to denounce it, even to the point of advocating law breaking.  I see this phenomenon all the time with regards to compensation and governance.  Serious issues get treated with populist sound bites.  The intended effects of poorly conceived legislation invariably get perverted into consequences no one intended.

Given this pattern on visible issues, it should come as no surprise that we see the opposite–political neglect–on issues that could actually benefit from the attention of government, like water management.

Out of sight, water infrastructure remained largely out of mind for U.S. policymakers in the federal economic stimulus effort. The $787 billion program allotted less than $10 billion for drinking and wastewater projects.

State and local officials will not turn the cash away but they say much more is needed to fix and add capacity to the nation’s water systems.

“It’s something that concerns me, because we pay so much attention to things we see and this is something we don’t see — until it’s too late,” Maryland State Treasurer Nancy Kopp told Reuters in a recent interview.

“In Maryland and other eastern states there have been repeated episodes in which pipes carrying clean water or sewage have collapsed,” Kopp said. “Over the next 20 or 30 years, water systems are likely to hit obsolescence.”

I think that one of the reasons that Swiss government is so much more efficient in many ways is that their politicians are more anonymous than ours.  They don’t have as much opportunity to jump in front of the spotlight because their society is not so politicized.  (American society is relatively unpoliticized, too, compared to most of the rest of world, thank goodness, so far.)

Perhaps we should amend our Constitution to compel our legislators to remain anonymous or random, kind of like jurors, unable to discuss any issue they are working on with the press.  I can’t help but think it would make the institution a little more serious.  It might make the legislature less responsive to the crisis du jour, but it would prevent them from legislating about things that really deserve more than a day of contemplation.  Removing the klieg lights might also encourage them to spend a little more time contemplating items that currently get less serious attention than they deserve.

Of course, nothing will get a politician to better allocate their time and attention better than value-based incentives.