Preventive Paradigm

A decent piece in The Nation on the Bush administration's "preventive paradigm" in fighting terrorism. It has not only not worked; it has wrought its own peculiar forms of destruction. I've discussed the epistemological circularities before in the implementation of US torture (here and here, etc.). Prevention of harms usually seems like a pretty good strategy in most if not all areas of life. But when this is combined with creeping paranoia about the ubiquitousness of enemies and the use of political fear, "prevention" is placed in a context that can easily spark that curious sense of unreality typical of authoritarian leaders. Competence, of course, nearly always goes out the window as well when tale upon tale first serve to hide error and fallibility for political reasons, then become the foundations for an increasingly complex fiction over which no one truly has any control. That's when we all become susceptible to overlooking the abuses in our midst.

The government's "preventive" immigration initiatives have come up even more empty-handed. After 9/11 the Bush Administration called in 80,000 foreign nationals for fingerprinting, photographing and "special registration" simply because they came from predominantly Arab or Muslim countries; sought out another 8,000 young men from the same countries for FBI interviews; and placed more than 5,000 foreign nationals here in preventive detention. Yet as of September 2007, not one of these people stands convicted of a terrorist crime. The government's record, in what is surely the largest campaign of ethnic profiling since the Japanese internment of World War II, is 0 for 93,000.

UPDATE (17 September):

Similar logic (via (via)):

Economics professors have a standard game they use to demonstrate how apparently rational decisions can create a disastrous result. They call it a "dollar auction." The rules are simple. The professor offers a dollar for sale to the highest bidder, with only one wrinkle: the second-highest bidder has to pay up on their losing bid as well. Several students almost always get sucked in. The first bids a penny, looking to make 99 cents. The second bids 2 cents, the third 3 cents, and so on, each feeling they have a chance at something good on the cheap. The early stages are fun, and the bidders wonder what possessed the professor to be willing to lose some money.

The problem surfaces when the bidders get up close to a dollar. After 99 cents the last vestige of profitability disappears, but the bidding continues between the two highest players. They now realize that they stand to lose no matter what, but that they can still buffer their losses by winning the dollar. They just have to outlast the other player. Following this strategy, the two hapless students usually run the bid up several dollars, turning the apparent shot at easy money into a ghastly battle of spiraling disaster.

Theoretically, there is no stable outcome once the dynamic gets going. The only clear limit is the exhaustion of one of the player's total funds. In the classroom, the auction generally ends with the grudging decision of one player to "irrationally" accept the larger loss and get out of the terrible spiral. Economists call the dollar auction pattern an irrational escalation of commitment. We might also call it the war in Iraq.