I’ve been inspired to explore the barriers to self-correction after reading an Economist article on gender-affirming care. An excerpt:
“Proponents say that the care is vital to the well-being of dysphoric children. Failure to provide it, they say, is transphobic, and risks patients killing themselves. The affirmative approach is supported by the American Academy of Paediatrics, and by most of the country’s main medical bodies.
Arrayed against those supporters are the medical systems of Britain, Finland, France, Norway and Sweden, all of which have raised the alarm, describing treatments as “experimental” and urging doctors to proceed with “great medical caution”. There is growing concern that, if teenagers are offered this care too widely, the harms will outweigh the benefits.”
- What America has got wrong about gender medicine. The Economist, April 5, 2023
Note the governments of Britain, Finland, France, Norway and Sweden had previously supported gender-affirming care for children. But they reconsidered in light of new evidence that such care could sometimes be harmful. American activists know about this evidence as well but many have chosen to dig in, not yielding an inch.
However, this post is not about the merits of gender-affirming care for children. It’s about why people and policymakers persist in old ways of thinking and doing despite evidence that the old ways are suboptimal or worse. I actually got started on this topic over a year ago, when I wrote about why it’s so hard to undo ‘legacies that have gone bad’. Here’s that post…
Eight Reasons Why Old Ways of Doing Things Persist despite Diminishing Returns
I’ve been thinking a lot about legacies, especially why some things become legacies and others don’t. For example, some contemporary safety net programs trace their roots to programs enacted during the Great Depression, but not every Great Depression program left a legacy. What keeps a legacy going?
Well, sometimes old ideas are still good ideas, so they persist on their own merits. But what about legacies that have gone bad? To rephrase the question: why do old ways of doing things persist or influence the present way of doing things when the old ways are counterproductive, or at least suboptimal? Here are a few possibilities:
Satisficing: a mindset that is satisfied with a good-enough result, rather than the optimal solution. This is because going for the optimal solution may require more time, energy, and resources than decision-makers wants to invest. In other words, who needs an ‘A’ grade when a ‘C’ is good enough? Stick with the old and you’ll pass, at least for a while. Investopedia
Bureaucratic inertia: the tendency of bureaucratic organizations to perpetuate the established procedures, even if they are counterproductive and/or undermine important organizational goals. Wikipedia
Path dependency: a phenomenon whereby history matters; what has occurred in the past persists because it is often easier or more cost-effective to continue along an already set path than to create an entirely new one. Path dependency explains why people or organizations continue using a practice or product even if better alternatives are available. Investopedia
Lock-In Effect: occurs when early adoption of a technology, policy or practice locks-in specific pathways that are difficult and costly to escape. Locked-in pathways use resources (e.g., money, time, expertise) that are otherwise unavailable for exploring or exploiting alternative ways of achieving the same goals. As a result, locked-in pathways tend to persist for extended periods despite the availability of potentially superior substitutes. Richard Perkins/ Internet Encyclopedia of Ecological Economics
Switching Costs: switching to new ways of doing things involves time, money, effort, uncertainty, risk, disruption, feelings of incompetence, and changing roles/relationships. These costs are especially high during the transitional period, as the comfortable and familiar gives way to floundering, doubt and subpar performance while everyone is still learning the ropes. Investopedia Wikipedia
Habit persistence: habits tend to be sticky, because they achieve good-enough results with relative ease. Work habits often provide a sense of competence, belonging and predictive certainty that comes with the exercise of well-honed skills in a familiar environment with established roles and relationships. You know what you’re doing, you know what to expect, and outcomes are okay. Change takes us out of our comfort zone. Oxford Research Encyclopedias
Sunk Costs: when people and institutions continue something just because they have invested unrecoverable resources in it in the past. The tyranny of sunk costs keeps us throwing good money after bad, whether that bad is a failed policy or toxic relationship. Harvard Business Review
Special Interest Groups: private and public institutions may keep to the old way of doing things due to political pressure from groups with an interest in preserving the status quo. These groups often resist innovation as a threat to their power and hard-won gains. . For example, some unions fight modular housing developments, whose workers are cross-trained to perform a range of construction tasks, e.g., carpentry, plumbing, electrical wiring, because traditional work rules do not allow workers to perform tasks outside narrow job classifications. These rules may protect union bargaining power in the short run, but in the longer run, they lead to construction delays, housing shortages, and an erratic labor market for construction jobs.
If the past has such a hold on the present, why, then, do people and societies change, sometimes dramatically? Why is “creative destruction” a thing? Because the past is not a thing; the past is an intermingling multitude of contradictory influences that spur new ways of thinking and doing in their mixing. The old makes the new possible.
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Next: Ideological Commitment and Resistance to Self-Correction