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Our Crisis of Institutional Competence
Why things don't work anymore.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds
A famous essay by Nico Colchester divided approaches into "Crunchy" and "Soggy." When things are crunchy, you know how you're doing:
Crunchy systems are those in which small changes have big effects leaving those affected by them in no doubt whether they are up or down, rich or broke, winning or losing, dead or alive. The going was crunchy for Captain Scott as he plodded southwards across the sastrugi. He was either on top of the snow-crust and smiling, or floundering thigh-deep. The farther south he marched the crunchier his predicament became. Sogginess is comfortable uncertainty. The modern Scott is unsure how deeply he is in it. He can radio for an airlift, or drop in on an American early-warning station for a hot toddy. The richer a society becomes, the soggier its systems get.
Systems are soggy when nobody's life is obviously affected by failure. Any system involving civil service employees or contractors on cost-plus contracts is likely to be soggy. As long as Elon Musk is at the helm, SpaceX will be crunchy, though given time it's likely to tend toward sogginess, as most institutions do.
Colchester concludes: "A crunchy policy is not necessarily right, only more certain than a soggy one to deliver the results that it deserves."
