March 26, 2000

WORLD'S COMPLEXITIES DERAIL SOCIAL ENGINEERS

Editorial writers frequently have occasion to point out the unintended consequences of well-meant legislation or grandiose social engineering.

Reality, it appears, is not only stranger than we imagine but more complicated than we can imagine.

In the 1999 presidential address to the American Sociological Association, Princeton sociologist Alejandro Portes offers an illuminating taxonomy of the multiple paths by which good intentions lead to perdition or other unanticipated destinations.

Portes begins with the surprising success of rather expensive private schools in the generally impoverished Dominican Republic. The United States has many Dominican immigrants, many of them raised according to the philosophy "spare the rod, spoil the child."

Their children here, however, soon learn that it's an empty threat, which the children counter by threatening to call 911 and denouncing their parents for child abuse. Rather than risk losing their children to the streets, many parents adopt the painful but effective solution of sending them back to the Dominican Republic to live with relatives. And attend private school.

"The compassionate framers of child protective legislation in the United States," Portes writes, "could not possibly have expected that it would end up building a private school sector in another country."

In a totally logical world, where everybody had the same priorities and acted rationally all the time, one could move in a straight line from announced goals, through the means designed to accomplish them, to the intended result.

Reality is messier.

Portes lists five ways that straight line twists into corkscrews.

The "hidden abode": the real goal is different from the apparent or announced one. The term comes from Karl Marx, who used it to describe the "real" purposes of capitalism.

The latent function: people intend one thing, but their actions have consequences of which they are unaware. The Dominican school example falls here.

The mid-course shift: People start out with one goal but circumstances force them into adopting a new one along the way. The unexpected outcome: The methods adopted for one goal bring about contrary results.

The lucky turn of events: The goal is real, and it is accomplished, but by way of accidental events that formed no part of the plans. In such a fortunate case as the last, Portes notes, history is often rewritten after the fact to claim credit for good planning where no credit is due.

Politicians do that a lot, I've noticed. For instance, deficit reduction formed no part of the Clinton administration's original financial policy; his early budgets assumed $300 billion deficits as far as planners could project. But soaring tax revenues and a Republican Congress slightly less spendthrift than the Democrats have erased the deficit. People are pleased, on the whole, and so Al Gore is running for president on the premise that he and Bill meant it all along.

Portes studies immigration policy, which is a rich field of examples. The 1986 Immigration Act, to take just one, was intended to control and reduce immigration but in fact increased it substantially.

"First, amnestied illegals promptly used their new status to strengthen their networks with family and friends back home and bring in their kin as soon as they could."

And second, "employers complied with the letter of the law but not with its spirit."

They filled out forms saying they had seen proof of legal residence, but seldom checked for authenticity. "An instant industry sprang up in Los Angeles to provide illegal workers with the requisite papers."

Awareness of all the ways things go awry, Portes says, "does not lead to paralysis ... but to more cautious forms of intervention." Change should be implemented in carefully measured steps, checking at each step what is actually happening, as distinguished from what was intended to happen. And second, "one must know the actors involved and their actual goals in order to anticipate their reactions to external intervention."

And, I would add, approach the job of redesigning other people's lives with due humility. (660 words)