'Complexity is fraud'

The late P.J. O’Rourke once wrote, in The Atlantic in April 2002, that: 'Beyond a certain point complexity is fraud…. when someone creates a system in which you can’t tell whether or not you’re being fooled, you’re being fooled.'

When people's wishes clash with vested interests it's the vested interests (the political class and those groups that can afford expensive lobbyists) that win every time. Our political systems are too complex, arcane or corrupt for ordinary people to stand a chance. The result is clear: an ever-rising gap between politicians and the people they are supposed to represent. 

Voting makes little difference. And, while we don't really know the intentions of the people in power, I suspect that whoever they are doesn't make much difference either. The vested interests are too powerful. They have perpetuated a policymaking process that effectively excludes influence from people outside their exalted circle. They have weaponised the complexity and obscurity of our systems of government for selfish ends.

They can get away with this because our political discourse centres on sound-bites, personality, and image. Actual policymaking is an entirely distinct process: much of it focuses on the structures and funding of government bodies, law and regulation; all of which are opaque to non-professionals - which is to say, ordinary people. The only people who now really understand policymaking are those who are paid to do so, and the only people who influence it are those who have the millions of dollars necessary to pay them.You might even think the system has been specifically designed to keep ordinary citizens out of it.

Bernardo Mueller's 2019, Why public policies fail, is perhaps less cynical: 

The failure of public policies is ubiquitous.This paper ascribes this failure to the complex system nature of public policies. A key characteristic of complex systems is that they cannot be closely controlled or predicted. Yet the traditional approach to public policy is fundamentally based on both control and prediction, as it proceeds by comparing the expected costs and benefits of a postulated set of alternatives. In this paper I provide five pathologies of complex systems and show how they cause the failure of the traditional approach. If a public policy is recognized as taking place within a complex system, it is necessary to use instruments that can work within those informational and epistemological constraints. I provide several examples of the types of policies that meet these demands. But when dealing with complex systems, even with appropriate instruments it is nevertheless necessary to adjust the expectations of what can realistically be achieved. Why public policies fail: Policymaking under complexity, Bernardo Mueller, September 2019

I believe that we can set up a system that solves our long-term problems by bypassing government decision-making and rewarding solutions however they are achieved and whoever achieves them. Social Policy Bonds would work by giving incentives to people to try many different approaches to problems, such as crime, conflict, climate change, and pursue only those that are most promising. Such a system would resemble biological evolution, in that there would be constant pressure, in the form of incentives, to select only the most successful approaches to achieving our social and environmental goals.

A bond regime would require that policymaking focus on outcomes, rather than the alleged means of achieving them. Outcomes are more meaningful to ordinary people than the current policymaking emphasis on legal pathways, funding arrangements, institutional structures and composition, and other arcana.

Meaningful outcomes are one essential element of the Social Policy Bond idea. The other is the injection of market incentives into their achievement: rewarding those who achieve our goals according to their efficiency in actually achieving them. The idea might sound outlandish at first hearing: handing over the solution of our social and environmental problems to investors. But government would still articulate our goals and raise the revenue for their achievemnt - things that democratic governments can actually do quite well. Only their achievement would be subject to the market, which economic theory and all the evidence suggest is the most efficient way of allocating society's scarce resources. No doubt the Social Policy Bond idea could do with some discussion and refinement. But the real question is: what is the alternative? To continue as we are doing, where the gap between vested interests and ordinary people grows ever wider, risks, in my view, social collapse.