The Complexity Curve

I forget where I first saw it, but the idea of a complexity curve stuck with me. Briefly, it’s a description of how someone understands a complicated thing as their knowledge increases. They move from simplistic to complex and then back to a form of simple.

The canonical example is the U.S. Civil War. A simplistic understanding says it was about slavery. A more complicated understanding involves conflicts between industrial and agricultural modes of production, different understandings of states’ rights as against the federal government, slavery, and the relevance of honor culture. A fuller understanding comes back to slavery as the central issue, albeit with other factors in supporting roles. At a certain point of understanding, simplicity and clarity return, albeit with more nuance.

I’ve been stewing on the complexity curve through returning to some of the major debates in political theory. I spent the ’90s immersed in the stuff, then had to (mostly) turn my attention elsewhere. Lately I’ve been wading back in. It turns out that letting the ideas simmer for a couple of decades has allowed some clarification. It feels like the right-hand side of the complexity curve has finally taken hold.

At this point, I can boil my premises down to two, which are mutually reinforcing:

1. Everyone is entitled to a baseline level of respect.
2. Ain’t nobody special.

The rest follows from those.

They seem simple enough—even banal—but they’re pretty rigorous in practice. Communism, for example, fails both tests. So does fascism. Monarchism fails the second one right out of the gate. Populism may be rooted in a compensatory version of the first test, but it quickly fails the second one. A politics based on what “real Americans” believe assumes that there’s a group—“real” Americans—that is entitled to privileges rightly denied to others (nonwhites, people on coasts, immigrants …). Nope. Ain’t nobody special.

Libertarianism passes the tests in theory but fails them in practice. Its dogmatic inability to recognize that economic power is, in fact, power, renders it oblivious to unconscionable abuses. The stories from Epstein island, as horrifying as they are, should remind us of how extreme concentrations of wealth enable systematic abuses. As grotesque as the abuses of the elites are, though, the abuses on the bottom are worse. Anyone who has had to work a minimum-wage job to survive, and had to endure a petty tyrant of a boss, knows this intuitively. As loathsome as Epstein’s associates were, the abuses the girls and young women endured were far worse.

If you’ve ever been broke and desperate, you feel the lack of a baseline level of respect in your daily life. An economy that systematically denies people safe housing, or that conditions medical care on having the right kind of job, fails the first test. A polity that allows secret police to arrest people for the crime of having the wrong skin color fails both tests.

The assumption embedded in the second test is that basic human flaws are ubiquitous. I’m in my 50s, I’ve held many jobs in multiple states, and I haven’t met a perfect person yet. Idiocy, selfishness, provincialism and impulsiveness transcend race, class, gender and geography; in fact, we all have our moments. Requiring people to be perfect—whether in terms of religious virtue or utility maximization—sets systems up to fail. We need basic rules to prevent horrible behavior.

But the opposite side of the coin also holds; just as idiocy transcends categories, so does talent. A society that passes the baseline-level-of-respect test would foster environments in which people can flourish. Sometimes that would involve markets as tools, and sometimes not. The key issue isn’t the tool; it’s the goal. To my mind, something like a universal basic income is a worthy subject of debate. Whether it’s okay to cause preventable deaths by price-gouging on lifesaving medicine is not.[1]

These tests are, of course, imperfect. For example, the term “baseline” could mean different things to different people, much as terms like “freedom” and “liberty” do now. But unlike those, it recognizes a bottom. The rich and the poor are equally forbidden to sleep under bridges, as the old line goes, but that really only affects the poor. Formal equality before the law is a necessary component of the baseline, but it’s only one part—for the baseline to mean anything in people’s lives, it needs to address both material necessities on the low end and economic power on the high end. Nobody should have to be homeless, and our politics shouldn’t be restricted to what a small coterie of billionaires considers acceptable.

Given these premises, when in doubt, I default to universalism. Certain basic goods are required for talent to flourish: for example, safe housing, good and reliable food, education, clean air and water, public safety, health care, access to culture, a livable climate, and a built environment that different sorts of bodies can navigate successfully. The mechanisms for ensuring universal access to those goods are worthy topics of debate.[2] Whether people are worth it is not.

This is part of why I’m so devoted to the community college mission. Talent lives in all corners, and everyone deserves a chance to foster their talent and see where it leads. Sometimes that requires tending to material necessity first, in order to make room for higher things. We just need to remember that people are more than consumers.

These two rules seem simple, and they’re certainly simple to state. For better or worse, they’re not too far from where I probably would have started, all those years ago. The complexity curve takes its sweet time, but the new clarity is refreshing.

[1] For those keeping score at home, yes, I’m aware that I’m echoing J.S. Mill, Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls. I’m also echoing my grandparents, who combined a Scandinavian sense of fairness with farmers’ blunt pragmatism.

[2] This is why I’m a big fan of the universal design movement.