If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is. —JOHN VON NEUMANN — : 1103
Some departments seemed too busy reforming themselves to actually reap any of the productivity gains that were the whole point of the reform in the first place. — : 1663
It may sound a bit Panglossian in hindsight, but the notion that advanced computer models—freed from partisan concerns and able to process enormous quantities of data instantaneously—would soon be — : 1688
making public-policy decisions was almost a foregone conclusion in many government circles. President Johnson was deploying PPBS modelers throughout the federal government. McNamara’s Whiz Kids were using computers to predict Vietcong attacks and decide where to move troops and drop bombs. In a speech before the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, influential defense intellectual C. West Churchman predicted that by 1990, decision-making technology would outstrip the minds of high-level thinkers and policy-makers, and presidents would consult computers for advice on how to fight wars and manage the economy. — : 1689
The root approach is, of course, necessary for the kinds of large-scale projects that big cities often need—no one was going to take part in a decentralized, uncoordinated effort to dig the Erie Canal or fill in the marsh that is now Boston’s Back Bay. The trouble with the root approach is that it’s extremely vulnerable to bad ideas. Given the hasty, often unexamined nature of the branch approach, bad ideas are perhaps more common than with the comprehensive planning of the root approach—just think of the number of businesses that open on the wrong block, only to close up shop shortly thereafter. But there’s a safety mechanism in that failure: the shop owner sees the error of his ways and closes before he wastes even more time and money. Because the root approach presumes to have considered all possible options before proceeding, there is no equivalent rethinking, and bad ideas are given a much longer life-span. — : 1934
In the “old days” of Tammany-style governance, O’Hagan and RAND’s big ideas and ambitious reform agenda wouldn’t have mattered much. Local ward bosses, irate at watching their constituents being burned out of their homes, would have drawn together the relevant authorities and cobbled together a plan. In all likelihood, fire patrols and building inspections would have been increased, negligent landlords brought into line, redlining dogmas put aside to make loans available, renovation and poverty programs put in place, fire-awareness campaigns begun—in other words, exactly the kinds of things Chief Kirby was recommending. Such plans would have been classic Tammany pluralism—true branch-approach problem-solving. The programs would be hastily assembled and muddled through by trial and error. Some would succeed, others fail, and most would be rife with backdoor politicking and corruption. It wouldn’t have been particularly analytic, scientific, transparent, or progressive, but something would have been done, and done quickly. There were too many buildings, votes, and dollars being lost. — : 2670
Within the broader field of systems analysis, this weakness—having to ignore certain realities because they are too complex to quantify—is so common that it even has a philosophical justification. Simple models, the conventional wisdom of the field holds, are better than complex models, because it’s harder to keep track of all the moving parts in a complex model. This is true enough, but it raises the question: If modeling can’t handle complexity, why bother with it in the first place? — : 2904
Had the analysts taken a step back from the models, perhaps they would have thought there was something fishy about closing companies in the most fire-prone neighborhoods in the country and opening them in Staten Island. But lost in a modeler’s world that was increasingly divorced from reality, the fire project had “stepped through the looking glass,” as RAND physicist Sam Cohen once said of his colleagues who worked on systems analysis, “where people did the weirdest things and [used] the most perverse kind of logic imaginable and yet claimed to have the most precise understanding of everything . . . because it all sounded so damn rational and so damn reasonable as to be unassailable.” — : 3019
To err is human—and to blame it on a computer is even more so. — : 3120
tradition and intuition. The old ways of doing business certainly had their irrationalities and shortcomings. But in the quest to rationalize and centralize from the top down, to focus on the big picture and the comprehensive plan, the realities of a bottom-up jury-rigged city had fallen through the cracks. Just as neighborhoods consumed by flame were pushed to the side by the city and the department responsible for protecting them, so too were the lessons to be learned in those neighborhoods. Like the War Years themselves, the Waldbaum’s collapse was a presumed act of arson that turned out to be caused by big ideas, misaligned priorities, and the lost lessons of the Bronx. — : 3761
Tammany chieftains and ward bosses didn’t pretend to know what was best for individual precincts or neighborhoods on the basis of some statistical measurement. They were more ploddingly reactive, letting constituents come to them with new ideas for improving things and backing the ideas that seemed most credible or were the easiest to drum up support for. Intrinsically connected to the street, machine bosses had no time for abstract notions of how impoverished immigrants should be housed or fed or educated; they were forced to contend with the problems of the slums as they were. After all, stray too far from reality and someone with a better sense of what voters wanted would up and take your place. — : 3810
It’s no wonder that Roger Starr was so shocked at the acrimonious reception of his calls for planned shrinkage and his assertions that “American communities can be disassembled and reconstituted about as readily as freight trains.” He was just giving voice to the conventional wisdom of his field. — : 5471
One of the great ironies of the anti-root-approach rallying cries of Reagan- and Thatcher-era conservatism and its rejection of big government is that conservative politicians were forced to look to the private sector (where the high-handed root approach flourished) for new ways of running the government. — : 5474
But the divide between reformers and the machine went beyond the simple question of which social classes and ethnic groups would be in charge to a deeper disagreement over the basic philosophy of government. At its best, Tammany was an exemplar of what political scientist Charles Lindblom would call the “branch” approach to decision-making: an incremental, usually decentralized and bottom-up process of “continually building out from the current situation, step-by-step and by small degrees.” Nearly every major aspect of New York City—its economy, population, ethnic mix, real estate market, transportation, and public health system—was in a constant state of flux, and Tammany’s job was to stay out of the way when possible, provide services and deal with crises when needed, and remain flexible and responsive enough to keep the votes coming, practitioners of what Lindblom called “the science of muddling through.” Educated reformers, on the other hand, tended to favor what Lindblom called the “root” approach to decision-making: comprehensively analyzing a situation, determining the ideal course of action, and then charging forward with it, a generally centralized, top-down process of “starting from fundamentals anew each time, building on the past only as experience is embodied in a theory, and always prepared to start completely from the ground up.” There are merits to both approaches, but the two sides were rarely comprehensible to one another, root-approach reformers seeing the machine’s branch approach as cynical, plodding, and wasteful (not to mention corrupt) and the pragmatic Tammany chieftains writing the good-government types off as starry-eyed dilettantes too concerned with simplistic theories of what government and society should be to deal with the complicated realities of what the city itself actually was. — : 717
The problem with the reformers’ approach was that they didn’t have the intelligence network necessary to truly understand the city and bureaucracy they were trying to control: Tammany had legions of ward bosses, precinct captains, street organizers, and civil servants collecting stories from their constituents and reporting back to the higher-ups. Reformers couldn’t hope to build such a machine without becoming a “machine” themselves, but by the early twentieth century, a few new developments gave them the chance to build an information-gathering apparatus of a whole different sort, one based not on individually collected stories but mass-aggregated numbers. — : 737