The Birds, the Bees, and the Swiss Do It, So Why Can't We?

Arthur C. Clarke’s First Law of scientists can be slightly modified to illustrate a similar truth about central planners: “When a distinguished but elderly central planner states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

And the one thing central planners know is impossible is getting along without them. This is true among the entire brotherhood all over the world. In The Sword and the Shield: The Secret History of the KGB, Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin reveal that KGB leaders in the old Soviet Union never could grasp how the US could produce such a high quality of life without "a strong central direction and a command economy." A KGB defector named Arkadi Shevchenko wrote:

“Many are inclined to the fantastic notion that there must be a secret control center somewhere in the United States. They themselves, after all, are used to a system ruled by a small group working in secrecy in one place. Moreover, the Soviets continue to chew on Lenin’s dogma that bourgeois governments are just the ‘servants’ of monopoly capital. ‘Is not that the secret command center?’ they reason.”

The central planners in Washington DC are probably scratching their heads over the recent news that Mercer Human Resources Consulting has released its annual list of the most livable cities in the world, and once again, the Swiss Confederation has come out on top. Zurich and Geneva placed first and second while Bern tied for fifth. The poll takes into account factors such as the political and social environment, the level of education, the efficiency of transport systems and standards of recreational facilities. No American city made the top 10. The best the US could do was number 20 for San Francisco.

So where is the Swiss secret command center responsible for such a high quality of life?

America has hers, and its name is the Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD Strengthens America’s Communities. We know this because the HUD website says so. One of the chief ways HUD creates more livable cities is by promoting "affordable housing" through Section 8 programs, which encompass an array of "Housing Choice Vouchers" for welfare recipients. Former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros called Section 8 “a wonderful mechanism because it gives people tremendous choice and mobility.”

Since HUD's annual spending has reached $38 billion, America's cities should be the model for the rest of the world. But they aren't. James Bovard, the author of Freedom in Chains, explains that HUD's heavy hand is actually harmful to America's cities. By financing welfare recipients so they can live in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, HUD is destroying the cohesiveness and integrity of communities. Bovard says that Section 8 is "a symbol of government welfare run amok – of social workers using the power of subsidies to forcibly change the nature of hundreds of suburban neighborhoods.”

Not only are the Swiss spared the costly machinations of an Alpine version of HUD, they do not even have a unitary state to support a bureaucracy of that magnitude. The Swiss Constitution of 1848, modeled on the American Constitution, created a confederal system that recognizes the autonomy of its 26 constituent cantons. All powers not specifically delegated remain with the cantons, a provision borrowed from the American Constitution’s 10th amendment.

Even more puzzling to the central planner is the seemingly unstable composition of the individual cantons. In 2002, the citizens of Geneva and Vaud considered merging, but rejected the proposal. In 1996, the village of Vellerat seceded from Berne and became part of Jura. To a mindset that views economies of scale and uniformity as ultimate goals, the cantons' right to realign appears a recipe for chaos. Instead, it is a source of vitality and self-renewal.

Indeed, autonomy and self-reorganization are now seen as regular features in all organized systems, whether natural or human. Organization science, which grew out of the work of ecologists and systems engineers, teaches us that the health of the overall organization is optimized when its constituent components have the freedom to realign themselves as they see fit. Central control, then, is now seen as not only impossible in the long term, but counterproductive. Organization scientists point to spontaneous self-organization in nature to illustrate how organized systems maintain their own quality of life. When bee colonies become too large to sustain themselves, part of the hive will break away and establish a new home. Tuna schools that grow beyond 50 members will split into groups of 10 to 20. Reconfiguration, then, is a common behavior of all healthy organized systems. But reconfiguration is possible only because the constituent members (which organization scientists refer to as "sub-systems") possess some degree of autonomy.

Jay Forrester is a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and has written and spoken extensively on the application of organization science to the problems municipalities face. Local autonomy, he says, is essential in creating livable cities. He argues that the positive or negative repercussions of actions must inform future actions; otherwise, mistaken policies can become institutionalized when they should be discarded. He would likely characterize HUD's Section 8 program as an example of suboptimization, which organization scientists define as overdevelopment of an isolated component of a system without regard to overall system vitality:

"Suboptimizing allows different groups to pursue their own ends independently, with confidence that the total good would thereby improve. But as the system becomes more congested, the solution of one problem begins to create another. The blind pursuit of individually laudable goals can create a total system of degraded utility."

Such a situation can continue to exist only so long as those responsible for implementing it do not have to confront its effects. Local autonomy, says Forrester, not only sets a limit on the harm bad ideas can do, but opens the way to creative application of local intelligence to solve local problems:

"Unless control through such self-interest is acceptable, and ways are available to exercise control, there is no incentive for any city or state to solve its own problems. Its efforts will be swamped from the outside. There must be freedom for local action, and the consequent differences between areas, if social experiments are to lead to better futures and if there is to be diversity in the country rather than one gray homogenized sameness."

~ The Collected Papers of Jay Forrester

Hope for local governments in the US is closer than the lessons from Switzerland and the natural world. The news that Killington, Vermont has voted to secede and join low-tax New Hampshire illustrates that the impulse to reconfigure political ties in the pursuit of self-interest has sparked backed to life here in the US. With the specter of the Soviet Union permanently eradicated as an overarching restraint, local autonomy movements may again rekindle in the US. In 10 or so years, who knows what new ideas and solutions empowered citizens can create at the local level? Watch out, Zurich!

March 19, 2004

Michael C. Tuggle [send him mail] is a project manager and software trainer in Charlotte, NC. His first book, Confederates in the Boardroom, explores the implications of organizational science on political systems, and is published by Traveller Press.