At first glance this article may not seem to be focused on politics. Just wait....
Remember Betamax? That was Sony's offering in the consumer half-inch videotape casette field. The casettes themselves were smaller, and technicians generally agreed that the quality of the signal on the Betamax tape exceeded that of VHS. While half-inch videotape is rapidly becoming a yesterday technology, you can still buy blank and prerecorded tapes along with player/recorders. But I dare you to walk into any store and find anything in the Betamax format.
How about the Dvorak keyboard. Haven't heard of that? It's not surprising. Of all the advancements made to enhance data entry; the split keyboard I use, the split and slanted keyboard, various key click styles; a more sensible arranagement of the letters seems to have eluded us. It's all done on the so-called "qwerty" keyboard, named for the firxt six letters of the upper-left-hand row on the standard US data entry device.
The Dvorak keyboard was developed by examining the English language for the most commonly used letters. These were then placed under the strongest fingers, with the least used letters in the "reach" positions. Numerous studies have demonstrated the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard, but the "qwerty" rules the day!
Again and again in American society, when there has been a technology choice to make, our culture has chosen the second-best technology. Some would argue that FM stereo multiplexing, the standard for FM broadcasts, is one such technology. Even our choice in home and office computing, the "X86" platform, suffers certain disadvantages compared to its primary market competitor, the Macintosh.
Why might this be? Why would the culture that led the world into the technology age repeatedly choose second-best technologies when a choice presents itself? Our competitive, free-market economy is supposed to assure that only the best make it to the top. Why doesn't it happen? Why has our "god" failed us?
The answer speaks volumes about human nature, about modern politics, about the causes for the current craziness in the world. And it warns us that unless we infect the rest of the world with our culture we could end up being a second-rate nation.
There is a fundamental defect in human character that leads us to seek the reward without really offering up the requirements. It's what leads to cheating. But it manifests itself in many other ways. Fundamentally it's the idea that if you can fool the reward givers into thinking you're worthy of the reward you should then have it.
Here's how it plays out. Manufacturers A and B both make a type of widget X. They key characteristic of X as far as those who use it are concerned is that it reliably and safely performs its function. All other things being equal, our free-market system is supposed to cause the manufacturer whose widget performs most reliably to gain a larger share of the market. But all other things are NOT equal.
Due to other cultural pressures, X has become something of a status symbol. Manufacturer B's widgets have a history of poor performance. But the company has done market research and has found that customers feel more empowered if their widget is larger and more colorful. By making larger and more colorful inferior widgets, manufacturer B manages to surpass manufacturer A in the marketplace.
And here's where another human character defect has an impact. We are easily swayed by appearances. If it looks better, it must be better. Witness all the weak marriages formed when partners select someone who looks nice rather than someone who acts nice. Most companies today, even those who put forward genuine efforts to produce the most functional and lasting products possible, spend a lot of effort making their product look nice.
We still expect our competitive market to find us the best product because we expect that everybody does the "appearance" bit. But I have an idea that's not true; and the repeated adoption of second-rate technology confirms my belief. Apparently the person or entity with the superior product expects it to win out in the marketplace because of its superiority, possibly leading them to put less effort into the appearance and promotion areas.
Meanwhile the person or entity with the inferior product knows that they can't win on that basis and puts gargantuan effort into promotion and appearance. They might even test the edges of the laws against anti-competitive practices. In the end they win because appearance swayed the buying public more than performance.
Despite this weakness our culture still worships competition as the guarantor of quality and value. And now we've decided to apply competition to education in two ways. The first is the charter schools/school vouchers movement. Make schools compete for students, we say, and they'll have to do a good job. The other is merit pay for teachers. Make teacher pay dependent on student performance and we'll have better teachers.
But it won't work that way. Instead we will make our society dependent on our measurement system. And our measurement system has serious flaws.
In the industrial and commercial worlds everything hinges on measurement. "If you can't measure it you can't improve it," they say. And so we try to measure the educational progress of our children. Over the years our testing and evaluation tools have gotten more and more sophisticated, and we're spending larger and larger portions of our resources on these educational measurement systems. But they are not, nor will they ever be, perfect predictors of future performance.
There are the classic anecdotal tales of measurement system failures. One business student who got a "C" on a business plan because the professor said it wasn't feasible, implemented it and formed Federal Express. These stories don't prove anything, but they demonstrate the problems inherent in using these measures for making decisions that change lives.
Should the FedEx student's teacher have gotten less pay because his student scored poorly, or should he have gotten more pay because his student successfully provided an important service to society?
But the more important issue is what will happen as teachers and schools compete. How will my pay be determined? By my students' scores on such and such a test. How will I increase my pay? By ensuring that my students score well on that test. But what if the test doesn't measure an important cultural or social value? Will I waste precious classroom time developing that value which will have no impact on my pay?
Will schools competing for students (money comes with students) provide experiences with outcomes that can't be measured? For that matter, will promotion and appearance become important educational goals, starving critical educational enterprises for resources? Are we willing to offer our children as sacrifices on the altar of our god, competition?
Now for the real political bit. How long have candidates been winning on the basis of appearance and promotion rather than on substance? The purpose of money in politics is not to improve the candidates themselves, but to improve the public's perception of the candidates. When we see our system in that light we wonder that it has worked as well as it has. It's no mystery how we could end up with such an incompetent and conterproductive administration as the current government.
Do I have a fix? Well, I think voters COULD vote against money and make a big difference. But they haven't done so over the last one hundred years of money-polluted politics. It would take a serious crisis; probably one in which a major portion of the American population died, to wake voters up to the shame of their willing collusion with money power. And I think it's a pretty good bet that even the current inept administration will work hard and long to make sure such a crisis never takes place.