Ground Truth

Just read "The Ground Truth" by John Farmer, about what the 9/11 commission was able to find out about the events around the 9/11 attacks. I picked it up from the library on a whim, just because there was a blurb from William Langewiesche on the back.

In brief, the book summarizes discrepancies between the actual series of events and the version presented in the days and weeks following 9/11, which has become the dominant narrative of those days. He provides transcripts of logs/tapes and compares them with official statements. As I read it, his overarching conclusion is that government fails to prepare for and react to catastrophe because it refuses to publicly acknowledge and thoroughly address mistakes. This causes a failure to prepare adequately, which increases the likelihood of future mistakes.

I suppose there are those within government who expect it to function better than this. Mr. Farmer was attorney general of New Jersey, and served as counsel to the 9/11 commission, and certainly seems to feel it should. His book ends with some recommendations for 'reinventing government', basically by trying to bring policies in line with what actually happens during a crisis. But from what I've experienced in my (mercifully) limited experience with bureaucracy and government, these failures come as no surprise. The primary objective of most organizations is CYA&mdash' "cover your ass" — and the primary goal of high-level figures in government is to construct a narrative of events that reaffirms their importance and effectiveness. The Bush administration was not different from previous administrations in kind, and only perhaps to degree. That they lied to the press and to the commission in order to make themselves look good, well, that was standard operating procedure for them. It's always easy for the powerful to conflate their own interests with the interests of the organization they manage or those it serves. I'm sure they felt that providing a reassuring, if false, narrative of how the government was in control of events was best for the country, and if it was 'incidentally' also in their own self-interests, well, what's the big deal?

Fundamentally I see this as a divide between those who get things done, and those who take credit. Those who get things done have to pay attention to reality, because if they don't, ultimately their efforts will fail. Their goal is to effect a change in reality. Those who take credit pay attention only to how things are perceived, and their goal is to effect a change in perception. There's a symbiosis and a tension between these groups. The symbiosis is due to the fact that in order to marshal the resources to get big things done, the perception has to be created that the change is necessary, and that the people in charge know what they're doing. And in order to manufacture the perception, there has to be a germ of reality that the manufacturers of perception can leverage (well, some of the time, anyway). To the extent that people can perceive the reality, it can't diverge too much from the perception. So, there's the symbiosis, which is, I suppose, obvious. The tension is yet more obvious— the doers need to acknowledge and learn from mistakes, while their counterparts need to hide them. Thus the 9/11 commission wants to learn all the facts so that it can address the problems, while the white house and the military want to keep the inconvenient facts hidden.

They also operate at different time scales— the doers operate long-term, while their counterparts operate short-term. From the perspective of those who take credit, delaying apprehension of inconvenient facts is sufficient. They appreciate that information has time value, and that the information available while the narrative is being formed is the most important, because the narrative, once formed and widely adopted, will persist. Thus immediate suppression of inconvenient facts is the goal. The trickle of books that come out years later (as this one did) is not really of interest to those who shape the narrative, because they know that after sufficient time most people have lost interest— their perceptions will have been set, the narrative established. So, for example, the narrative of 9/11 is that we were attacked by evil, wily foes who had the advantage of surprise, but that the government, at all levels and especially at the highest levels, reacted swiftly and effectively to protect us. Once this narrative was established, they just had to delay until the actual information no longer mattered. Thus the delay in, and timing of the release of, the results of the investigations in response to the 9/11 commission findings.

Farmer notes, for example, that the narrative has our F-16's tracking flight 168, ready to shoot it down if need be, when the passengers assaulted the cabin and the plane went down during a struggle with the hijackers. The central issue there is the difficult decisions the leaders must face in determining whether to sacrifice the lives of those on board the plane. This narrative affirms that the military and government was in control, and that the leaders were making quick, informed decisions and wrestling with large moral issues under time pressure. In reality, he points out, we didn't even know where flight 168 was, had no F-16's anywhere near the aircraft, the plane had gone down before the leaders even knew it existed, and the eventual directive to take down the plane if necessary was never passed to the pilots because the military official in charge knew that there were no suspect planes currently in the air when the order arrived.

Being allied, as I am, with the 'reality-based community', I agree with Farmer that the facts need to be acknowledged and addressed. But I cannot share his surprise (though I share his dismay) that they were not. And while I appreciate his suggestions for improvement, I think he doesn't fully appreciate the reality that must be addressed. The "ground truth" is that those who wield power do so because they know that perception matters, and know how to manage it. The only way to make reality drive policy is to make reality drive perception, and it can only do so when the facts are timely and relevant. I'm glad he wrote the book, and it's a small push in the right direction, but it's too little, too late. It won't be read except by those who still care, and they are few and wield relatively little power. Priorities won't change, and policies that align better with demands won't be effected. Guess I'm pessimistic, or perhaps a cynic, but that's how it's always been.

p.s. Also read "The Atomic Bazaar" by William Langewiesche. I'll write about these soon, I need to return these books to the library before it closes.

World Distribution of Wealth, 2008

 

I was feeling frustrated with a book on socially conscious investing that I was reading, and so turned (of course) to wikipedia for more solid information. This took me (via reference links) to some UN publications, in one of which I found the above chart.

The chart shows the distribution of adults whose personal wealth is in the top 10% of world wealth. As can be seen, the US has 25% of the richest 10%. (As several publications pointed out, it's important to be mindful of the distinction between wealth from income.)

The paper (note: it's a discussion paper only) is from UNU_WIDER (United Nations University — World Institute for Development Economic Research):

Discussion Paper No. 2008/03
The World Distribution of Household Wealth
James B. Davies, Susanna Sandström,
Anthony Shorrocks, and Edward N. Wolff
February 2008
ISBN 978-92-9230-064-7 (printed publication)

I found the following paragraphs especially notable:

"Table 2 summarizes our results on the distribution of household wealth across the world population of 3.7 billion adults, based on official exchange rates and figures for the year 2000. According to our estimates, adults required just $2,138 in order to be among the wealthiest half of the world. But more than $61,000 was needed to belong to the top 10 per cent and more than $510,000 per adult was required for membership of the top 1 per cent. The entrance fee for the top 1 per cent seems surprisingly high, given than the group has 37 million adult members. Furthermore, the figure refers to the year 2000 and is now likely to be considerably higher, especially when measured in US dollars.

"The wealth share estimates reveal that the richest 2 per cent of adult individuals own more than half of all global wealth, with the richest 1 per cent alone accounting for 40 per cent of global assets. The corresponding figures for the top 5 per cent and the top 10 per cent are 71 per cent and 85 per cent, respectively. In contrast, the bottom half of wealth holders together hold barely 1 per cent of global wealth. Members of the top decile are almost 400 times richer, on average, than the bottom 50 per cent, and members of the top percentile are almost 2,000 times richer."

"... The final column of Table 3 records wealth Gini estimates ranging from 0.547 for Japan to 0.801 for the USA and 0.803 for Switzerland. The global wealth Gini is estimated to be even greater at 0.892. This is equivalent to the Gini value that would be registered for a 100-person population in which one person receives $900 and the remaining 99 people each receive $1."

Amazing. The world is a rough place.