Unwinding Success

 Attempts at social engineering or “nudging” as Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler have generally ended up in a smoking heap.  Busing and other forms of forced integration failed and often were counterproductive.  Government’s push for a low fat, high carbohydrate diet in the early and mid 80’s, combined with sugar subsidies and the growth in fast food chains like McDonald’s led to an obesity epidemic, reaching a current astonishing 42% rate, with 70% of Americans classified as overweight.  The obesity rates, in turn, led to the high COVID19 morbidity rates during the pandemic.  The steering of our diets by government has ended in massive failure.

Social engineering has consequences and those consequences have been almost uniformly deleterious.

But I will admit that two movements—and only two,  aided and abetted by government have been enormously successful.

In the early to mid-80’s, Ronald Reagan’s Surgeon General C. Everett Koop waged a war on cigarette smoking.  There was a time when we could actually vest some trust in our public health administrators.  At the time 42% of the American population smoked cigarettes.  Cigarette smoking was ubiquitous.  The haze was permitted nearly everywhere—in restaurants, in the workplace and even in the back of airplanes.  I have distinct memories of flying to Las Vegas on my way to a hiking trip in Zion National Park in the back of the plane in a haze of smoke of drunk middle aged folks on their way to the casinos.  The curtailment of this public health hazard took time, however.  The government mandated warnings on cigarette packages in 1966, and cigarette advertising was banned in 1970. But the government didn’t get around to banning smoking from air travel on flights less than 2 hours long until 1988 and on longer flights in 1990.  Since then, smoking has been severely restricted in areas in which smoking was formerly permitted—restaurants and most public places were off limits.

Koop’s initiative was enormously successful. Today, only about 15% of the adult population smokes cigarettes, down from 42% in 1965 (51% among males).   Did this engineering eliminate smoking entirely? No.  But government taxed it, restricted it, regulated it, and brought a social stigma upon smokers, relegating smokers to the dark corners of our society, with its concomitant benefits to public health.  Smoking has been almost entirely driven out of society. 

The second social engineering project was headed by iconic Martin Luther King.  It took a long time, but as with cigarette smoking, racism was driven to near extinction in American society.  Legal structures were changed in the mid 1960’s with the enactment of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and the elimination of redlining.  Social changes took a bit longer to seep through society.  Loving v Virginia wasn’t decided until 1967 the same year  Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was released.  Star Trek’s interracial kiss between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhuru was still a big deal in 1968.  Blacks went mainstream  in the media the late 60’s and early 70’s with Diahann Carroll starring in the groundbreaking sitcom Julia and, later, with The Jeffersons and Good Times. 

Almost all of the people of my generation and younger had MLK’s words drummed into us like catechism.   Judging a person by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin was dogma, an 11^th Commandment.   It was correct.  It was just.  And it ranked in importance with the other 10.   And, in large measure, IT WORKED.  Our citizenry probably observed this 11^th Commandment with more regularity than the other 10 over the past 50 years.  As with smoking, racism was probably not entirely stamped out, but it was definitely put on the run.

With so few successes to crow about, it is astonishing to me that these accomplishments are now being rolled back by the progressives.   Racism and segregation are definitely on the rebound under the guise of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion movement.  Two generations of work in which people were explicitly instructed and indeed mandated by law not to take into consideration skin color are being systematically repealed and reversed.  At work and, indeed, codified by law, we are now being told that we must look at race as a primary consideration.   School admissions, job opportunities, promotions, contract bidding are all now tilted in favor of “persons of color”   in a sort of pathological reverse apartheid.  Universities now have separate dorms for black students, something that would have been unthinkable a decade or two ago.   And it is being codified into law and spoken openly about by our politicians.  The Biden Administration provided aid to black farmers.  Oakland’s guaranteed income program was initially limited to BIPOC people.  Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley is sponsoring a bill to make public transportation free to people of color, because “Black and LatinX commuters are disproportionately criminalized by fair evasion policies.” 

The list goes on and on.  But 50 years of progress in knitting together a social fabric are being torn apart again.

Similarly, the anti-smoking policies that were so successful in driving smoking to the margin are being resurrected, this time with cannabis (and the concomitant toleration of other drug use).   The Left allied with the libertarians to legalize pot and provide free needles to drug abusers, along with places for them to indulge in their addictions.   The result is a nice growth chart of marijuana use as tobacco is now being swapped out for marijuana as the smoking product of choice.  And unlike tobacco, which has limited effect on cognition and behavior, the growth in marijuana use will impact productivity and motivation, along with other side effects.   And we are seeing the effects of removing the social stigma from other drug use- crime, homelessness, and the littering of our city streets with used needles.  Oh, and by the way, the libertarian argument that legalizing pot and taxing it would take the black market out of it turned out to be a false hope as greedy government implemented tax rates on the product high enough to ensure that the black market survived.  Smoking is back and on the rise, but it’s not tobacco. And just as with tobacco, the government has as terrible incentive to push the habit.  It wants to hook you and your children because it is hooked on the tax revenues.

Most of the time, these social experiments fail.   I identified two that were actually quite successful.

Sadly, it appears that we can't leave success alone.