Repairing social systems faces a tug-of-war between fallacies. Is it throwing the baby out with the bathwater, to start over? Or is continuing to try to fix a broken system throwing good money after bad? (Sunk Cost fallacy)
It seems almost as if every political decision we face can be framed that way. And it isn’t just the decisions we face as a community when we go to vote. Every person who talks to their neighbors about those decisions, Everyone who asks questions, has to decide how best to distribute their efforts.
So, how do you determine how much you can spend (time/effort/energy)? And then, how do spend it in the most efficient way.
Starting over is always hard. It requires a higher influx of energy to establish and then, at least for the initial period, to maintain. Is that cost greater than the cost of continuing to shore up something that works badly? Is the cost of having something that works badly (but well enough to prevent better solutions arising) too high? Doing nothing isn’t free either.
The fact is that there are more issues that impact us than any of us as individuals have time to devote ourselves to addressing. So, the first challenge is choosing priorities. The next is budgeting time, energy, money, etc. And then, the ongoing evaluation. Is this working? Is it time to stop throwing good money/time/energy after bad? Time to reallocate resources?
I don’t have the answers, because no one can answer those for someone else, but I know that asking is important.
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