Passive Pressure

I have coined a few “rules of life” in my six-plus decades on this spinning oblate spheroid. While I have not deluded myself into thinking that these rules are original or unique creations, I am occasionally surprised when I find that one of them already has a name attached to it.

My most recent surprise came when I found out that Peter’s Third Rule of Life, “Everything takes longer,” was coined by and named after Douglas Hofstadter, a cognitive scientist who wrote the book Gödel, Escher, Bach in 1979. Hofstader’s Law informs us that “Everything takes longer than you expect - even when you account for Hofstader’s Law.”

The notion is not original to Hofstader, either. It’s a version of an old Yiddish proverb, “we plan, God laughs,” found in Proverbs 16, colloquialized by Woody Allen as, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.” Similar observations can be found in other cultures and traditions.

The rule/law/proverb/notion/aphorism is not meant to suggest futility of action, but rather the opposite. That’s why Peter’s Fourth Rule of Life is, “Someone has to push.”

There is art and psychology in pushing. As another adage notes, honey is better than vinegar at catching flies.

Art and psychology have their limits, however. Your ability to push depends on what leverage you have. An employer has to weigh the costs (time, dollars, learning curve, etc) of finding replacements when pushing employees to be more productive. A homeowner has similar calculus to perform when pushing a contractor to complete a job more speedily or to better workmanship. Likewise, an employee or a contractor has to judge the risk of loss of employment when pushing back against demands.

In fact, anyone who doesn’t work alone and for himself, independent of reliance on third parties for anything, depends on leverage. If I have to dig a ditch, and I already have a shovel, then the only opposition to my pushing is myself. The ditch is entirely under my control. Sure, it will still probably take longer than planned, but I have near-complete control of the process. It’s when others are necessary that the ability to push and the available leverage become more germane.

When we have less leverage, we can’t push as hard, and things will take longer.

I experienced a maddening instance of low leverage last year, during a home renovation project.

My home is on an elevated plot, about 3-4 feet above street/sidewalk level. My front lawn had a sloped section that, over time, deteriorated into a lumpy mess. I decided to replace it with a stone retaining wall, and contracted out the work. I did everything by the book, with permits, civil engineer, licensed stone mason, et cetera. Inevitably, things took a while to get going, but that was expected and everyone/everything moved along at a reasonable pace.

Until, that is, I encountered the harsh reality of “conditions in the field.” Because the wall’s foundation had to be below the frost line, we found during excavation that my gas and water mains were “in the way.” Long story short, that cost me four months.

Why did it take so long?

Because there’s very little leverage one can apply to a government-protected monopoly. The gas utility, to its credit, was friendly and decently responsive. Still took forever, for numerous reasons including all sorts of protocols. Some of which were irrelevant to what I needed done.

The real nightmare was the water company. Not only did it take time and effort to find out who the correct point of contact was, that person was incredibly unresponsive. I started with emails. I was patient after each one, but no response. Then, phone calls. Multiple answering machine messages were ignored. Finally, I caught the man at his desk, and he was a combination of blithe and prickly, so I immediately realized I had to tread carefully. He said “oh, yeah, I saw that email, I’ll send a crew this week.” That was after 2 months of chasing. No one showed. It took another six weeks of not-too-frequent-lest-I-piss-him-off calls before it got done... and the crew that was promised in the morning didn’t show until late afternoon. Which meant my plumber (the utility is only responsible up to the curbside shutoff) had to wait around all day, with me paying his rate.

Those four months cost me the season. We had to halt work once the cold came around, and resume in the spring. So, I had a partial wall and a big ugly ditch fronting my house for eight extra months.

Everything takes longer, even with me pushing.

If I had options, if I didn’t have to rely on the good will of, I’ll say it again, government-protected monopolies, I’d have had the pressure of market forces helping me. A business that treats customers shoddily will lose them if they have other options. About the only leverage I had was the government supervisory groups created to field complaints, and involving those comes with its own peril. It’s a good idea to try to avoid pissing off the people you need things from.

This illustrates a very important distinction between planned and market economies. In a free-market, competitive setting, improved efficiency does not rely on the good will of service providers, or threat of active intervention by government. The poorer providers will be selected out, in a fashion that parallels the mechanisms of evolution. Where market forces are dampened or eliminated by the protection of monopolies, that passive pressure is muted or eliminated.

Passive pressure is relentless. Active measures to supervise interactions that are insulated from passive pressure take days off, rely on the mood, work ethic, and good will of the watchdogs, and are themselves low-leverage situations where you and I can only push gently.

This is why market economies work better, why they produce better results, and why they have historically outpaced, by miles, all other forms. The difference is rooted in human nature, which makes it inherent, fundamental, and unalterable.

This is what young, idealistic socialists do not understand about their big-government fantasies. They assume that all it takes is putting the right sort of people in charge. Even if they could find a horde of (hat tip to Milton Friedman) “angels” to run society for us, those angels can never be as relentless as market forces. And, of course, we all know that there are very few such angels out there. Certainly not enough to make socialism work as well as free economies.