Every government must deliver results, democratic government even more so. Delivering results can translate, to roughly, as the ability to solve problems. However, there is a huge variety of these. I am going to present a typological binomial and, then, I would like to reach some conclusions about how the current government carries out the political management of the problems.
In 1966, the great Karl Popper gave a lecture entitled “On Clouds and Clocks” (Of Clouds and Clocks). This metaphor about clocks and clouds helped Popper present two antagonistic ideal types of problems. The first, the clock type, results in a regular, ordered and highly predictable problem: it could almost be formulated as having clean and clear causal relationships. The second, the cloud type, on the contrary, is volatile, disorderly, irregular and unpredictable. A couple of years later, towards the end of the sixties of the last century, Horst Rittel—a German design specialist—coined the concept wicked problem (wicked problem).
With Melvin M. Webber, six years later, they published a work whose consequence was seminal for the field of public policies. It could be said that twisted problems (those that torment citizens and keep policymakers up at night) fall into the “cloud” typology, although they open, for the most optimistic, the possibility of finding imaginative resolutions to complex and unpredictable. Needless to say, the problems that dominate the attention of the social sciences are of a twisted type: poverty, income inequality, unemployment, public health, education, plus a long etcetera.
However, a government is not voted to have tea in the Ivory Tower (turris eburnea) of the science; It is legitimately constituted (electoral consent through) to face problems, whether of the clock or cloud type. The ingenuity or cunning of a government does not consist in trying to solve all problems, but in knowing how to choose which problems it can solve. A government, knowing that it cannot govern everything, chooses what to govern. In that sense, the current executive has chosen: he presents the fiscal surplus as the solution to the problems of Argentine “decadence.”
The problem has presented itself in a sequence: first, fiscal consolidation (resizing the State, elimination of “caste” privileges, among other core issues); second, elimination of the deficit (rationalization and reduction of spending); and, third, obtaining a fiscal surplus (which leads to a reduction in taxes). The problem that the government promises to solve is presented as regular, orderly, predictable, that is, of the “clock type.” It could be assumed, in effect, that the government knows that in experiential issues each of the publics of public opinion does not need to confront or grasp causal chains, while it does require causal chains in those where they cannot draw on their own experience. And, therefore, the duo “fiscal deficit/Argentine failure” and “fiscal surplus/welfare” requires, for the government, to be presented as predictable. Whether because it is or because the executive claims to have the ability to reduce a “cloud” type problem into a “clock” type problem, the president does not tire of harping on the issue. His insistence is so much so that he affirms that the fiscal surplus is not negotiable.
If the government is successful, citizens will perceive that the “clock” strategy was not only appropriate, but will function as a catalyst for future government decisions. If it fails, on the other hand, there will be no possibility of proposing a Plan B. It is crucial to affirm, in conclusion, that in a failed scenario, the simple and clear cannot be replaced by the complex.
CONICET RESEARCHER. DEGREE IN ECONOMICS
Source: Ambito
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