Just rambling……
As some of you know, I studied the teachings of Milton Friedman and W. Edward Deming. In today’s Star Ledge the attached articles capture two disasters created by our politicians. The Friedman article is at a higher level than the second which is a costly inconvenience to the public. These events all could have been predicted by these two men’s teachings. The articles are interesting.
On another note, a report came out on the plastic bag fiasco. Seems like plastic bags are turning up in landfills at a rate 3 to 4 times as many after the ban was enacted. Wasn’t the ban supposed to reduce the number? Well as best intentioned political moves, made without “profound knowledge 1 ” , the system goes haywire. Gov Murphy does what all good politicians do, and that is lie. He believes “banning them was the right things to do.” No, it wasn’t, but they cannot help themselves. When caught, they spin the truth. But outside the legal world, this is known as deceit and lying. We went through this with the red-light camera fiasco years ago. It took a 5 year “costly experiment” to figure out the assumptions were wrong for putting them in place 5 years earlier.
I could go on and on, but there is one simple truth. The general public does not correlate how a decision years earlier by our elected officials adversely affects the population. That delay on a timeline ensures that outcome. What comes to mind is the saying, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” That cycle will continue over and over. It would be better if the public demands that anyone running for office read the teaching of these two visionaries, Friedman and Deming.
1 W. Edwards Deming defined those words to mean a system made up of four components: Appreciation for a system, Knowledge about variation, Theory of knowledge, and Knowledge of psychology. Profound knowledge is also used to describe someone who has deep insight or understanding. – SB, my take, in short you have to know what you are doing. Expecting an amateur to make a professional decision is an act of frustration.