ABSTRACT
Complexity is not in our DNA – far from it. Our founding fathers devised the simplest yet most effective constitution of any republic; for a couple of centuries our political system helped us overcome two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War; most of our successful businesses were built upon simple and winning premises; our greatest business and scientific pioneers, from Alexander Bell and Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, promoted non-incremental inventions that rendered more complex incumbent systems obsolete.
So how did we get to the current state of affairs, where we are literally surrounded by complexity in pretty much all aspects of our lives? It was a complex path as well … full of incremental changes, one on top of each other. There are five major causes for this negative transformation of our society, spanning over seventy years: our recent history and politics; the increased role of finance in our economy; the combination of globalization forces and outsized CEO packages; our education system and its “college for all” mentality; and America’s insulation relative to the rest of the world. One common factor in the many complex processes we have to deal with in our daily lives is that our governments, federal and local, are more often than not intertwined with the private sector in many ways. This leads to complex collages of overlapping activities and a very large number of costly interfaces, with much expense, energy, and time wasted as a result.
Moving forward, we should re-invent our system of government to delineate very clearly what our federal institutions, their state counterparts, and the private sector do. And most importantly, what they should no longer do.
