Summary
Chapter 9 is about changes that need to be made to government in order to truly progress into better innovation and more beneficial technoscience. Woodhouse argues that we CANNOT progress without changing the government and that there are little ways we can make changes, each of which have their own pros and cons. These mainly include dealing with the problems facing our representatives and our interaction with them. Congressmen are all rich, white people and thus we are misrepresenting the population; the population is uneducated and uninvolved and thus vote ignorantly or not at all; elected officials are afraid to make the hard public decisions because of the unavoidable consequences in either direction. Our model of Democracy is merely an image of what it can be; we need to seize the opportunity and potential and make changes, because no change is worse than a change with some negative effects.
Analysis & Synthesis
There was one main quotation by Woodhouse that stood out to me: "desirability of modernizing government to induce elected officials to make harder choices, sooner, as often as public needs and technological pace require" (109). This is the optimal Democracy Woodhouse is working towards with his possible solutions. So, I wanted to look at his main proposals and compare them to the democracy described in this quotation.
Woodhouse’s first proposal was for that of a ranking system for the United States’ congressmen. The rankings could convey power and the responsibility/purpose of the representative in a simple, comprehensive way. This would allow the public to comprehend and have access to this knowledge more easily. Currently chairs in Congress are given by seniority. The higher ranking Congressmen, knowledgeable officials or those who were more effective problem solvers, would get the higher authority. The problems with this, as Woodhouse describes, is in discerning what exactly makes someone more knowledgeable/ a better problem solver, as well as in corruption of the rating system, as legislators persuaded by selfish interest could gain rank by appealing specifically to a group or groups of people rather than the good of the whole. However, the positives come in the required transparency and breaking of the re-election system that keeps the same people in the chairs. By dropping the lowest ranking every cycle, we would weed out poor legislators and keep input fresh. With such an easy to understand and public system, news casts/ papers would surely cover lowest/highest ranking. Thus, politicians would have to be aware that every move is watched on a grand-scheme basis, and could jeopardize their ranking. This transparency would obligate these elected officials to make noticeable changes that the majority wants in order to get higher ranking. The urgent choices and problems required by the public and our technology-riddled daily lives would be at the front, allowing for decisions to be paced with them.
The second possible improvement was some sort of required education of officials before they are officially placed in positions of power. Woodhouse describes this as being some sort of experiences, visiting sites having to do with the type of decisions they would be making, for example the worst/best jails, prisons, schools, neighborhoods, organizations, etc. The problems seen here are once again a judgement call, this time on what was qualified/studied “enough" to be put in position. The other problem is this type of information gain and organization of visits, times, where to go, etc. requires an institution and other infrastructure that would oversee all of this. Also, of course, this would be susceptible to corruption in terms of discerning all of the who, what, where, how. However, as technology and social issues are integral to all aspects of the United States daily function, this holistic insight would highlight what needed to be done, prioritized, and the pace at which to do so. Officials would have to be aware of it and thus take it into consideration.
Woodhouse’s final idea was that of paid incentives for congressmen. Currently the representatives’ main increases in salary “are undesirable for the rest of us: outright bribery, misallocation of campaign funds, favors from wealthy people (such as trips on yachts), speeches to the National Association of Business or equivalent groups willing to pay honoraria of $50,000 or so (bribe in disguise), or continue working part-time in their law practices. All these activities DETRACT from actually serving as a representative of the public doing the public's business" (115). The idea is for each problem solved, the official would receive a bonus, the more successful or important the change made, the larger the bonus. It’s the exact same scenario he proposed for getting CEO’s to be more honest and socially motivated. Of course, this is extremely prone to corruption- whenever there is the distribution of money, the discretion is at those who have such money, in this case…other government officials. Still, in terms of this ideal Democracy where decisions are in time with public need and technology’s pace, technological and urgent public problems are very all-encompassing. Thus, they would result in higher bonuses when solved. As with ranking, this would also push them to do it sooner because they would want as many bonuses as possible. Even as policies take years to be put into practice, the system could reward them for setting them in place to begin with.
Overall, these proposals are riddled with flaws, but so is our current system, and I believe making these changes is necessary and important. All of the problems Woodhouse describes, the discrepancies and lack of understanding comes from a corrupt, confusing government that is not trusted by the citizenry. So, my question would be, how can we make and enforce these changes from within the public sector? Instead of the change being made by this undesirable government and its representatives, how could we build it from the ground up, or set up a system for the people of America to run it? Is that even possible? I believe that is the best and only way for this change to be effective and sustainable.
