Chapter 1: It Begins with ‘Why?’
The Rules that Shape the Rules: Governance Science, in Principle
Introduction
We have been told our entire lives that the way to improve government is by engaging with democracy. At the lowest level, that is casting your ballot every few years. At the highest level it is running for office. [note: “the highest level” is deliberate here. Because even political scientists and activists don’t shape our democracy nearly as much as the people who write the rules. ]
But that is a myth.
Take getting elected to the next logical step. Freshly elected members of Congress arrive charged up with ideology [again, deliberate, once you know what campaigns select for versus what governance demands] and ready to fight like hell for their constituents.
But not much else. They have no institutional knowledge, no political capital, no access, and no influence. [I can see there being pushback on this] When it comes to making things happen in Washington D.C., they are at square one.
To earn any of this, to be able to make a difference at all to those people that elected you, you’re going to have to work within the system.
That’s what this book is about. That’s the system we need to understand.
What are the rules that shape the rules?
I am writing this book for people who want to understand how the institutions that dictate a large portion of their lives operate, but have felt ill-equipped to participate in the conversations. The politicians, political scientists, scholars, attorneys, and economists currently in the conversation about government use language and frameworks that feel oracular. They deliver pronouncements with confidence, sounding authoritative and profound, but the explanations are circular, and vague enough that they can’t be checked against reality. The explanations can feel true in the moment, but never really seem to elucidate what we witness happening in our government. We’re left with the feeling that we’ve been invited to a dinner where only imaginary food is being served and are told to dig in and enjoy. We wonder why we’re still hungry when voices are clamoring that we should be full.
For those of us who see through the illusion, a natural reaction is to want to get involved with the cooking and the serving, to hopefully make it better. But we’re told that engaging with our democracy requires dedicating an enormous amount of time, energy, and resources. We’re told that if we want to be involved in shaping the society we live in, we need to devote our lives to it: run for office, organize communities, volunteer. The perceived expectation is that we’ll study specialized fields like political science, history, economics, foreign policy, technology, and climatology just to be qualified to evaluate candidates or comment on legislation.
This is a heavy burden that can make us feel inadequate and push us to disengage from politics. But we can’t disengage from politics and government. I have tried. They touch nearly every aspect of life. We’re going to have to pay taxes, acquire licenses, and have myriad other interactions with the government, just to live. Government and politics are inescapable. We’re seated at the table whether or not we like what is being served, or not served. And whether or not what we’re tasting, or not tasting, is reflected in the menu.
The mismatch between what we are told about how our government functions in theory, and how it actually functions in practice is bewildering. We are taught of democratic accountability, checks and balances, political parties that aggregate voter preferences, and politicians who advocate for those preferences and their constituents. Yet, in my lived experience, and I imagine yours as well, it’s fleetingly rare to witness it operating as advertised.
We are told that our government functions one way, but can’t see that reflected in what actually happens. When we try to get answers from the people in the system, we are told that it’s our problem, that we’re the problem, that we need to devote more to it. More time. More energy.
But what if we, the people, are not actually the problem? What if the people in the system aren’t even the problem? What if the dysfunction we witness in politics and government is the natural consequence of the rules the system operates by?
My goal with this book is to introduce a new framework and vocabulary to understand how our government functions, if it is functioning, and how we could implement changes that actually matter.
Chapter 1: It Begins with ‘Why?’
What do you think is wrong with our government? Not what you’ve heard is wrong. Not what your preferred party, politician, or pundits say is wrong. What have you actually observed?
Have you been affected by government shutdowns? Do you see the increasing use of executive orders in place of proper legislation? And when legislation is created, does it actually solve the problem it was supposed to? Or does it cause more problems?
Whatever government failures you have witnessed or experienced, that is a debris field to be investigated, not ignored because the mess is overwhelming. Recurring crises and broken political promises have become the norm, and for many of us, a government that could actually solve problems instead of creating them seems like an idealist’s unrealistic dream.
I started this project because I believe our government should not fail over and over again.
A disturbing, but increasingly common viewpoint is that U.S. democracy is beyond salvation, and a revolution is the only way to change it. I do not hold that view. I do not believe that, with the foundation we already have, a revolution is required to create a government that serves its citizens. My hope is that by the end of this book, you also will think our country’s government can be repaired. I’m not saying it is trivial. It won’t be easy; the U.S. government is a massive system that touches virtually every part of our lives, but that’s all the more reason to fix it, rather than burn it down and rebuild it.
That may seem inconceivable in a world that is so divided and chaotic, but humankind has learned to solve exceptionally difficult and complex problems.
The Method of Inquiry
The aviation industry is well known for transporting people and goods around the world safely and reliably; most of us complain about legroom before we worry about dying.
But the aviation industry wasn’t always like this. The old aviation adage cheekily says “any landing you can walk away from is a good landing; any landing where you can reuse the airplane is a great one.”
Before aviation became the ultra-safe industry we know today, the skies were defined by debris fields. For decades, investigators methodically combed through wreckage, tracing catastrophic failures back to their root causes to build policies that prevented the next disaster. Consider United Airlines Flight 173. In 1978, the aircraft circled over Portland, burning through its final drops of fuel while the crew troubleshot a landing gear malfunction. The captain became dangerously fixated on the gear mechanism. Though the co-pilot and flight engineer realized their fuel reserves were critically low, they failed to effectively convey the urgency of the situation.
The plane crashed, killing ten people. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation initially zeroed in on the mechanics: a corroded part had caused the landing gear to drop too quickly, preventing the cockpit indicator light from confirming it was locked. Officially, the probable cause was stamped as human error—the captain’s ultimate failure to monitor his fuel.
But investigators pushed deeper. They looked at the cockpit dynamic, identifying a rigid hierarchy where a captain’s authority was absolute, and subordinate crew members routinely avoided direct confrontation.
This tragedy forced the aviation industry to realize that safety wasn’t just about structural engineering; it was also about human communication. In response, United Airlines launched the first Crew Resource Management (CRM) program to transform how flight crews communicate, make decisions, and work as a team. Today, CRM is a global standard credited with saving thousands of lives.
Instead of demanding better, flawless people, we redesigned the system. We diagnosed the problem (a communication breakdown), isolated the root cause (a steep power imbalance), deployed a structural solution (standardized communication protocols), and measured the results.
We can see this method at work in the fields of medicine, construction, and the automotive industry, in skin care products, food preservation and treatment of athletic injuries—every case resulting in measurable improvements. Humanity has spent centuries refining this relentless method of inquiry — it isn’t perfect, but it builds systems that continuously improve. Wouldn’t we want to use what has been proven to work in the field that affects us the most?
Governance Science
This book proposes applying this method of inquiry to our government: methodically tracing poor outcomes to a root cause, and modifying the system to alter or eliminate the root cause in order to prevent repeating the poor outcome.
The approach, applied to government, is what I term “governance science.”
Politics is the contest over who holds power and what policies they pursue. It’s the debate about what government should do for society. And it’s inherently contentious because reasonable people disagree about values and priorities.
Government, on the other hand, is the machinery through which those decisions get made, laws get written and implemented, and institutions operate. It sets the rules of the contest, the field it’s played on, and the mechanisms that process the political decisions into actual outcomes.
One way to think about it is: politics decides where society goes, governance science studies how we actually get there.
For example, if you want to take your family on a trip somewhere, there are many, many places to go; some may seem better than others, but that is entirely subjective. Different people are going to prefer Disneyland over Las Vegas.
But when it comes to actually planning the trip, your choice in transportation and route can produce a better or worse outcome. If you only have one week of time off from work, and you live in North Carolina, driving to Vegas or Disneyland is, objectively, going to produce a poor outcome. Especially if you have children and the destination is Disneyland. If you have three weeks of time off, and in addition to Disneyland you are going to tour other parts of the country, driving may be the better option.
Politics asks “Do we go to Las Vegas or Disneyland?” Governance science asks “Given the constraints we are facing, how do we get there?”
It asks how political decisions get made, how legislation gets written, how laws get implemented, and how those implementations ripple through citizens’ lives, businesses, the economy, and the environment. And in order to answer the how, governance science asks why.
Unlike the frameworks you’ve probably encountered previously, this one produces predictions you can check. Given specific behavioral laws operating through specific structural rules, you can say in advance what outcomes you’d expect to observe, and then look to see if they do. If the predictions don’t hold, the framework is wrong. This makes the framework falsifiable. That falsifiability is what distinguishes science from doctrine.
The first step toward solving a problem is asking the right questions. When investigating Flight 173 it wasn’t helpful to criticize mechanics or personnel. A different mechanical problem on a different plane with a different pilot could have had the same outcome. It wasn’t enough to ask, “Why did the plane crash?” Answering that question was easy, but not helpful: the landing gear stuck and the pilot wasn’t paying attention to the fuel gauge. But neither the landing gear malfunction nor the pilot’s inattentiveness were the root cause of the disaster; with both of these problems unresolved the plane would have had a good chance of landing safely if there had been what we now call Crew Resource Management. To get to an actually meaningful reform, investigators had to ask questions about the system the crew was working within.
Saying “Government is broken!” doesn’t help. Broken how? Broken in what way? What specifically is broken? What is it failing to do?
A government’s most fundamental purpose is solving societal problems. Solving societal problems involves, among other things, creating laws, enforcing laws, and adjudicating laws. Accordingly, our Constitution divides those responsibilities across three branches, the legislative, executive, and judicial, respectively.
Which branch do we investigate first? The legislative branch seems like a logical place to start. The other two branches operate on the laws Congress produces; without legislation, they would have no laws to enforce or adjudicate.
The first question we need to investigate is: Is Congress fulfilling its responsibilities to produce legislation that serves the citizens of The United States? And if not, why not?
To answer that honestly, we need data, but not just any data. Subjective data like certain bills not getting passed pulls us into the realm of policy and politics; there’s a slew of reasons a bill might not pass. We need quantifiable and empirical data.
And we collect that data through observations…