OpenSource National Impact Assessment Needed - To Evolve Democracy

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Various civic defense groups have been warning of the uncalculable consequences of vast policy experiments like NAFTA and the so-called Trans Pacific Partnership. You might wonder who is initiating this partnership, on who's behalf, and for whom, exactly? However, don't expect any adequate answers, except later on, from historians.

Example: TPP Will Undermine US Democracy

Will it? Will we know only in hindsight what happened to us? You don't even have to wade into the exact details of this or other, ongoing national initiatives, before arriving at a stark, fundamental question. Can we run national policy by the seat of a few, randomly oscillating, lobby pants? Isn't that rather like steering the Titannic while blind? As is, national policy is like a bar fight breaking out every 2 years, with the surviving drunks winning their opportunity to try to steer the Titannic. The underlying policy "paradigm" seems to be the naive assumption that the US Middle Class, unlike the Grand Banks, cannot eventually be depleted - or at least our assumption is that such an event is so far off that we needn't even think critically about it.

Yet if that event were not so far off, what would constitute the beginning of critical thinking in an electorate, about it's own outcomes?

How about an OpenSource, very public, 1-page "flow diagram" for every Bill that makes it through Congress, and for every ACT and/or Treaty signed by the Administration? To forestall and monitor the unintended consequences of large system-changes, such a simple step makes a lot of sense. It's an old idea, what makes it taboo to apply it to all our risky and uncertain process steps?

For 40+ years now, large engineering projects have required an Environmental Impact Statement. Why on earth shouldn't all outcome, goal and policy decisions require an OpenSource National Impact Assessment available daily to every citizen? (Note, not for ALL strategy, and certainly no meddling in tactics; just for major policy decisions.) The key part would be OpenSourced assessment, to get adequately diverse feedback, plus timely, distributed distribution of 1-page net assessments. Group agility can achieve miraculous outcomes, but only through disciplined practice of focused feedback-exchange & and message-passing. Maneuver Context Management, the basis for all Maneuver Warfare depends on prior preparation and practice. That's what agile Democracy means. Active participation and practiced tuning of feedback messaging is all that protects us from the ineptness of Central Planning by a declining proportion of isolated nitwits.

Practice at a National Impact Assessment would at least attempt to graphically show causality for policy decisions (on 1 page), including:
who requested it;
who initiated it;
who traded favors to get it;
who directly & indirectly benefits from it;
and who is directly & indirectly harmed by it, how soon.

Plus, we need an OpenSource model that at least tries to assess whether our national Adaptive Rate as a whole accelerates or decelerates because of that course of action. GDP as an outcomes guiding metric is nearly useless. We need to invent a better metric for assessing national outcomes, something closer to closing our Output Gap, so that it includes our imagination and other, uncapped, dynamic assets - not just increasingly more obsolete static assets.

We have endless mathematical models for where hedge funds best profit, but we use few if any similar public models to publicly assess where, when and how our nation adapts and benefits? Seriously?

If we did this, of course the game of narrow greed in politics would simply shift to strategies allowing "money" and power to hide behind further layers of front-men.  Yet at least that would keep everyone on their toes, ready for the next adaptive step. Sunlight is the best policy antiseptic, and practice using it is the best public health medicine.

Plus, it would alleviate the confusion over politicians not reading the Bills they vote on. All Congresspeople - at national to local levels - should be legally liable for signing off on the full meaning of Policy Impact Assessment statements.

Maybe peg Congressional pay, perks and pensions to general welfare of the people in current and succeeding decades? Then the public could hedge their electoral bets, and hedging wouldn't remain the private domain of banksters and gamblers.