The underrated power of not doing things

To avoid kludges and boondoggles, politicians need to be willing to settle for less

Something that I think is a little underrated in political circles is the fact that you always have the option of not taking action on an issue, of deciding not to tackle a problem.

The American system, after all, has a lot of veto points, so tackling problems is hard. And if you insist on tackling a hard problem in a system with lots of veto points, you’ll often find that the only way to get a solution through is an ugly kludge. If the problem at hand is a top priority, then an ugly kludge might be worth it. And if it’s your top priority, you can wield the political knife relatively viciously and cut down on kludges.

The problem arises when you arrive at an issue that you care about, but isn’t one of your top priorities.

In this case, you want to do something. Or you want to tell a particular group of supporters that you’re going to do something. Or you want to be broadly seen as having taken a position in favor of doing something.

But really, it’s not your top priority. Here, the veto points become daunting, and to assemble a coalition, you’re going to accept kludges. But since you don’t care that much about the goal, the kludge-to-benefit ratio starts to look unfavorable pretty fast. Most likely, the whole project collapses in a manner that generates ill will and devolves into finger-pointing.

And in these situations, I think politicians should more seriously consider just doing less.

As an example, let’s consider Texas high-speed rail. I think this is a pretty good idea. If I were the dictator of Texas, I would do it. But Texas is fine without it. And precisely because Texas is fine without it, it’s unlikely that a Texas political coalition would steamroll enough people to get it done in a cost-effective way. But also because Texas is fine without it, doing it in a high-cost way doesn’t make sense. Ideally, Texas would do it and do it right! But the second best option is to do nothing.

The next section of this article features some tedious technical discussion of a project that almost certainly won’t get built, but (and we’ll come back to this later) I think the principle here is generalizable beyond Texas and rail projects: The tedious details matter and you need to think about them before you psychologically or politically commit yourself to taking things on.