Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?
Politicians are amateurs. I don&#x27;t mean that in a pejorative way. Politicians are experts at politics, they can achieve consensus in seemingly impossible circumstances. If you pick a random politician, and ask them to design a transmission, or perform open heart surgery, they&#x27;d do as poorly as you or me. Yes, there are politicians from all walks of life, and you can probably find a surgeon politician. In general, the thing they&#x27;re really good at is politics.<p>It sucks because they&#x27;re called on to provide solutions to deep problems, with only the skills of enthusiastic amateurs. Manufacturing solved a lot of problems. It&#x27;s completely reasonable for an amateur to look at history for past solutions to current problems.<p>For reference, the us congress has a panel of 700 or so experts in all sorts of fields to help write policy. This is in addition to each congresspersons&#x27;s staff. There&#x27;s something on the order of 2000 people available to write legislation. And about 10000 pieces of legislation written. So each potential law gets a few months of effort.<p>It boils down to a congressperson (probably a lawyer), a few enthusiastic political scientists, and a few economists to shape national policy.<p>It&#x27;s not that they don&#x27;t produce good work. They&#x27;re smart hardworking people. A trillion dollar budget is probably as difficult to produce as a decent compiler. That&#x27;s the kind of thing we&#x27;ll see congress try to slap together right after the election. It&#x27;s not much different than a team of undergrads trying to get their compiler to pass test cases.<p>It&#x27;s not inherently bad, it&#x27;s that sometimes problems are really hard, and they should probably be handled by experts. We don&#x27;t have a good way of collectively picking experts, so we pick amateurs and hope for the best.