That's all true. Process and bureaucracy are guard rails, and guard rails limit change. So when the whole system is barrelling towards a cliff (default, hyperinflation, kinetic war), what should the leaders try and do?
It probably seems like I'm defending their actions, I genuinely don't know if their actions are correct and I'm not defending them. I'm just acknowledging it seems like many US institutions haven't been appropriately evolving, and now the US as a whole is between a rock and a hard place.
If I'm going to spend time thinking about these things (that I have virtually no control over), I would prefer to do it in a curious and mostly emotionally detached way.
I don't quite get the metaphor - you might have reversed it. The whole system is barrelling towards a cliff because of the current administration, who took away the guard rails that stopped the system barrelling towards a cliff, and then set course directly towards the cliff.
The old system could well have been, like, scraping against the guard rails, flattening them gradually over time. The solution to that is not to remove the rails and aim directly for the cliff.
Unless you're an accelerationist. Accelerationists are people who view bad times as inevitable, and want them to come as quickly as possible so we can get through to the other side (where times are good again) as quickly as possible, instead of prolonging the collapse by doing it more slowly. Does that describe you?
In this video Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger talk about how the US system is heading towards a cliff, and the video was recorded in 2005. They articulate it well, although the video has a couple glitches in it.
If you are actually interested in what's going on, I think what they are talking about is a big important piece of the puzzle.
20 years ago. We had the 2008 GFCI and COVID since then. I'll take whatever cliff they are referring to over the deliberate madness of Trump.
It's awfully convenient that "in economics you can say what's going to happen but not when." So you really don't know where the cliff is, how steep it is, what else is between us, etc etc. They even say at the end it's possible to outgrow the debt, but then just dismiss it.
I know you're trying to approach the whole thing in an abstract unemotional way and not defend Trump. But there is just no world in which what he's doing is somehow better in the long run... Well maybe being a pariah state solves the trade problem, but that's not "better" in my book.
The answer is for Congress to balance the budget and intelligently incentivize new industries. The fact that Congress has failed doesn't mean an incompetent strongman is the answer. The things he's doing to reorganize the executive and ship people to foreign gulags with no trial have nothing to do with improving the economy. And the legal argument he's using to claim tariff power is specious at best.
The structural reform we need in the US are things like: ranked choice voting, proportional representation, eliminate the electoral college and/or redraw state boundaries, and for the love of God get limitless corporate money out of politics.
I think that the most appropriate strategy depends on the specifics of the situation. For some types of problems the best course of action is to do nothing, some times the best course of action is to make small adjustments, sometimes do less, sometimes do more, sometimes slow down, sometimes speed up, and sometimes the best course of action is to make radical changes. I don't over-generalize and prescribe the same ideological answer to everything.
I have also witnessed first hand how new terminology can have very different meanings to different people. Ask 100 product leaders to define what a "customer need" is and you will probably get dozens of different answers. Ask 100 CIOs to define what a "data mesh" is, and you will probably get dozens of different answers.
I think that when an environment is changing at an accelerating pace, its necessary for the organisms living in the environment to adapt at a similar pace in order to survive/thrive. I also believe that our environment is changing at an accelerating pace.
I suspect that you think I have reverse the metaphor because you have been paying more close attention to recent rage-baiting news, and I have spent a longer time paying closer attention to "boring" economic analysis. My model of the situation includes many historical examples of hyperinflation and what led to them, the consequences of Muammar Gaddafi dropping the petrodollar, the impact of citizens united on the military industrial complex, the exploding web of "NGOs" meddling in world affairs, how technology is an extremely deflationary force and how regulatory capture shifts economic benefits of new technology from the consumer to industry incumbents, how the Bretton-woods era started and ended, and how the neoliberal era started (and was ending regardless of political party), etc, etc.
Despite all this perspective I mentioned, I feel as though I know a tiny % of what is important to know in order to judge the situation accurately. The more I learn the more it seems like I don't know, and the more curious I get. Color me in the Dunning Kruger "valley of despair".
So no, I don't think the simplistic blanket decision making protocol you defined describes me.
It probably seems like I'm defending their actions, I genuinely don't know if their actions are correct and I'm not defending them. I'm just acknowledging it seems like many US institutions haven't been appropriately evolving, and now the US as a whole is between a rock and a hard place.
If I'm going to spend time thinking about these things (that I have virtually no control over), I would prefer to do it in a curious and mostly emotionally detached way.