I've often wondered if we humans are making life so complicated that eventually we won't even be able to navigate our own lives. Every time we find a problem, we add another layer of complexity to solve it. Eventuially the over-complexity becomes a bigger problem than any of the original problems, but we for some reason just can't stop adding to it.
It's like the tax code. We discover that rich people are getting out of paying income taxes, so we add the Alternative Minimum Tax. But oh wait, now there's a penalty for being married. Let's add another thing that fixes that. Eventually it gets to the point where no one can really keep it all straight, and it's hell to try to muddle your way through it each April.
I think that the recent economic collapse is in part due to this phenomenon. As I understand it, mortgages were broken up and sold as derivatives. Then they were packaged with other bits, and futures were sold against them, and then came credit default swaps and other crazy crap, Eventually it got to the point when no one really knew what they were buying or what they were selling. The financial sector made a system that even they couldn't understand, and ended up making very bad, ill-informed decisions as a result. The whole thing collapsed when the exponentially growing complexity surpassed the finite capacity of human beings to understand it.
You deal with this when you deal with health insurance too -- in that case, though, I believe the overcomplications are intentional. Between deductibles and coinsurance and limits and acres of fine print about what's covered and what isn't under what circumstances, they intentionally make everything so complicated that you can't really sign on knowing exactly what you're getting. And then when disaster happens, all they have to do is say, "Well, because of your deductible and coinsurance, you have to pay 90% of the first $5000 and then 25% of the next $3 and then all future expenses in perpetuity, because the full amount only covered on Tuesdays in autumn. It's in the contract that you signed, dummy. What are you going to do, sue? Like you have the time."
And they count on the fact that we either aren't smart enough to grasp it all or don't have the time to sit down and figure it all out. I've seen many news reports about people who got outrageous denials of coverage (one I remember was a woman who fell and broke her arm, and they claimed it was a pre-existing condition -- no joke), and then those people worked what amounted to second jobs to fight the denials. Eventually they won, but what about all the people who don't have the time or smarts to do battle against massive companies that marshal the best minds in the country to find extremely clever ways to screw policyholders out of money? Because that's where their profit motive lies, folks: in not paying your claims, not helping you when you're hurt, not doing the service you essentially contracted them for. They do it all through the time-honored practice of "delay, deny, defend." They put you through crazy hoops, delaying payment, denying coverage, and then defending it in court, all in the hopes you'll give up and just pay it yourself rather than fight. It works like a charm.
I'm not saying health insurance companies are evil -- they're just trying to make a profit. Therefore, they shouldn't be allowed to make profits. The profit motive works for many, many things, but not for health insurance. They make more money when they provide their customers with less. It would like a food producer that profits when it starves people. The answer is to take away the profit motive and make all health insurance companies non-profits. Or make it all run by the government. Hey, we all know that the government isn't perfect, but I'll take a messy, bureaucratic government system over a system that strongly incentivizes screwing consumers any day.
OK, this was not meant to turn into a tirade about health insurance. Sometimes my passionate hatred of health insurance overwhelms me, sorry. Back to the point: In this developed world of ours, are we just piling on more and more systems to navigate and things to learn so fast that eventually we'll reach an event horizon in which no one can get out of bed in the morning? Do we all need to give up, move to Walden Pond and grow peas? What do you think?
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2 comments:
Yes. Except I prefer green beans.
Your post makes me want to try reading Bleak House again, since it's about, among other things, a 100-year-old court case and no one knows what it's about anymore, even though they're still arguing it. But somehow, right around the spontaneous combustion chapter, I peter out and I can never finish it.
Anyway, regarding your post, yes, these things are ridiculously complicated and I don't know how in the world we can stop it. It's probably just our natures. Like last year, I strolled into the Hackensack, MN library. It was in a little hackenshack run by one volunteer who checked out books by writing your name and phone number down on a sheet of paper. I started fantasizing about how much I'd like to bring a computer into the operation, buy some sort of inventory and catalog program, organize everything, keep track of lenders, penalize the scofflaws, etc. I did eventually realize that I was mentally destroying by over-complicating something fairly insignificant and kind of neat. I mean, the library was only open for about four hours a week and it didn't even have any heat in the winter, for chrissake. does it really need a library of congress code sticker on the spine of each dog-eared donated romance novel?
Regarding Walden, talk about complicated! Have you ever tried growing your own food for survival? I haven't, either, but I know I wouldn't last long on chives and beet greens.
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