From Pencils to Politics

The role of error correction in social institutions

Most people who have been bored at school or work will, at one point or another, have tried to balance a pencil on its point. This game is challenging because the pencil is unstable: it will tip over when balanced on its point, so the player must continually stabilise the pencil, or else it falls.

In physics, this instability has the technical name unstable equilibrium. Equilibrium means that the pencil could in principle be positioned on its point so that it does not tip over, even without being stabilised by anyone. Unstable implies that any deviation from this ideal position, however slight, will nonetheless cause the pencil to tip over. The unstable equilibrium is therefore unobtainable. 

Conversely, the pencil also has a stable equilibrium: when it is held from its point (or rubber end) and left to swing, the lowest point of the pencil is its equilibrium point. A deviation from this equilibrium will cause the pencil to swing back towards that point – hence the name stable equilibrium.

Stable and unstable equilibria are widespread. Another place one can notice an unstable equilibrium is when driving backwards in a car with a trailer attached, in which case the trailer is hard to steer in the right direction. Yet such equilibria are not merely properties of pencils, trailers, or inanimate matter, as economic and political institutions can similarly possess stable and unstable equilibria.

Popper's theory of politics

Before Popper, political philosophy was about the question, 'Who should rule?' Popper criticised this question by pointing out that it is of secondary importance to political philosophy: no matter who rules, we should expect the ruler and his administration to be fallible. The ruler will make errors; he may enact bad policies, and likewise, the electorate will make mistakes in electing good rulers. Thus, the problem that political institutions should solve, first and foremost, is not 'who should rule?' but how to facilitate a peaceful transfer of power. Countries that have found ways of enabling a peaceful transfer are what Popper called democracies.

Put differently, Popper's solution is that countries should search for political institutions that enable error correction, which is a stable equilibrium: when a country's leader makes errors, the country's political institutions incentivise the leader and the electorate to correct those mistakes. Perhaps the electorate will vote to replace the ruler, or maybe the ruler anticipates this and changes course. Or something else may happen. No matter which of these outcomes occurs, the country's political institutions give people the right incentives to correct mistakes, so when errors do occur, they are corrected in time; the country's politics moves towards 'equilibrium' instead of away from it.

What is the 'equilibrium' in this case? A country's 'equilibrium' in the above-described sense is an idealised state where all its problems are solved. Although no actual society can ever reach this idealised state, as it represents unobtainable perfection, a country can move towards it by solving problems efficiently. A country can, for example, have made more progress towards 'equilibrium' than another country or itself in the past. It does so by having more political stability, more efficient governance, and better policies.

Conversely, authoritarian countries have an unstable equilibrium. There is an equilibrium in such countries because it could be that an ideal leader may rule a country perfectly despite being authoritarian – just as the pencil could, in some sense, be balanced on its point if it is ideally placed. But such ideal leaders do not exist. People are fallible; problems are inevitable. And when the leader of an authoritarian country inevitably makes mistakes, the country is moved further away from equilibrium. The country's politics become less stable; there is less effective governance, and fewer problems are being solved. In short, the country deteriorates.

Economic theory

Error-correcting institutions are not exclusive to the domain of politics. In the economy, markets are error-correcting institutions. For instance, in a competitive market, producers are motivated to sell their goods or services at the market price. Doing so maximises 'human welfare,' a term that roughly means people's overall quality of life and general well-being. 

In any realistic setting, producers will not know, a priori, what the ideal market price is, so you may expect human welfare not to be maximised in real-world markets. But markets are self-correcting: if a producer sells a product at a price that is either above or below the market price, he earns less profit. So producers are naturally incentivised to sell their products at a price that maximises human welfare: any deviation from that price will incentivise the producer to return to the market equilibrium.

This is known as the fundamental theorem of welfare economics, which postulates that competitive markets tend towards a state of equilibrium that optimises overall welfare.

Education theory

Similarly to pre-Popperian political theory, most modern theories of education start with the question, 'what should children learn?' This is a bad question because it begs for authoritarian answers while neglecting the more critical problem of what to do when, inevitably, there are conflicts between adults and children.

Conventional education theories are so rudimentary that they typically blame childer for all conflicts. Children are, for example, often assumed to be too unintelligent to make their own choices, which is why their parents must rule over them. Conflicts are subsequently explained away as, say, children being disobedient, but this is a wholly one-sided view of the conflict in which the parents are invariably right. According to fallibilism, that cannot be so: parents are people too and are, therefore, error-prone.

More rational parenting philosophies acknowledge that these conflicts between parents and children exist and prescribe that they should be resolved in a way that both parties consider beneficial. Any parenting philosophy that does not recognise that a conflict must be resolved in a mutually beneficial way entrenches errors, moving parents and children further away from equilibrium.

It is the journey that matters, not the destination

Even when institutions enable error correction, mistakes are still inevitable, and people remain error-prone. But those mistakes can be corrected, and the institutions can guide people towards the equilibrium situation instead of away from it.

It's not uncommon for individuals to express dissatisfaction with error-correcting institutions, primarily because these institutions tend to expose human fallibility. In politics, people are sometimes frustrated that their preferred party does not win the election and that the incumbent leader can introduce apparently disastrous policies. Similarly, within an economic context, the downfall of companies or the realisation that a product is a scam can lead to public frustration.

Yet the error-correcting institutions can only function by allowing errors like the above ones to be made. Hypothetical policies that would make it illegal to vote for the 'wrong' party or to sell bad products would severely harm the error-correcting institutions and the good that they do. Error-correcting institutions cannot prevent these object-level conflicts from occurring. Instead, they assume such conflicts are everpresent (because they are) and help to solve them efficiently. 

The existence of errors is fundamental to all human endeavours, be it in politics, economics, or education. Rather than trying to implement an impossible perfect state, one that is free of error, the focus should be on creating and maintaining institutions that allow for efficient identification and correction of these errors. Popper's view, albeit counterintuitive, emphasizes the significance of a system that doesn't evade mistakes but embraces them as inevitable and integral to the process of continuous progress.