Broken Loops

Subscribe and support at Underthrow.orgI would like to thank you, dedicated readers, for the feedback on Accountability Loops. Given your encouragement, I think Underthrow show listeners could use a dose. -MBMy deddy used to say that the 11th Commandment is “Thou shalt have air conditioning.”When your thermostat is in good order, it reads the room, checks the target, and acts to close the temperature gap. Output bends back into input. The system corrects itself because the news of how it’s doing reaches the part that can do something about it.That’s a feedback loop.Hold on to the idea, because the most important versions of it are almost as important as air conditioning.Call it an accountability loop. The defining feature is this: a person responsible for an outcome should feel consequences of that outcome. Do well, good things follow. Fail, and the failure lands on you. The signal returns to its source.Now let’s flip that rationale. An accountability void is a seat where someone wields real power over other people’s lives but stays insulated from consequences. So, decisions flow outward, but consequences never flow back to the decider.So here’s my thesis:Too many of our positions and offices sit in accountability voids. Far too few live inside accountability loops. And almost everything that is broken about our society traces back to that glaring asymmetry.The DeclarationThis year, America marks 250 years since a handful of learned colonists put the same complaint on paper. I mean, Jefferson didn’t refer to accountability loops, but the idea is there.We remember the Declaration as a birth announcement, but it was closer to a performance review. You can go back and read the middle bit—the long list of grievances—and you will find a catalog of accountability voids. A tyrant has erected a multitude of new offices. He has sent swarms of officers to harass the people. A distant power has wielded too much authority over lives it never really had to answer to.The Declaration’s remedy includes the most basic accountability loop there is. When a government becomes destructive of the people’s rights, the people have the right to alter or abolish it. When the government becomes destructive of people’s safety and happiness, the people have a right to alter or abolish it. That’s not purple prose. That’s a people declaring they have the power to walk away from a governance services provider who has stopped delivering the goods.Two and a half centuries on, the question is whether we rebuilt the very thing the Founders revolted against—only worse—without accountability loops.The Unaccountable ClassLook at who runs things now. Bureaucrats, managers, academics, media figures, institutional elites. They set the rules, steer the discourse, direct enormous resources. And when they’re catastrophically wrong, they’re usually still in the room a year later. Sometimes they get promoted!Now look at who actually meets reality. The entrepreneur. The tradesman. The owner of the restaurant down the street. A bad menu or nasty meal can empty a dining room. A bad build loses the next contract. A founder who misreads the market eventually runs out of money. The feedback is direct, quick, and it has his name on it.Nassim Taleb called it skin in the game. The Roman engineer slept under his own arch, but the economist who designs a healthcare policy pays nothing when it fails.The great gap between performance and reward infects our centers of power. Trust collapses. An aloof technocracy sits atop a parade of policy disasters for which no one is ever to blame. We built a managerial regime by handing problem after problem to new agencies, new experts, new networks—until governance failures were out of our reach. And the swarms of officers returned under a different label.Economists call this a principal-agent problem, which just means it’s really hard to get someone to act in your interest when betraying that interest costs him nothing. What we call incompetence is often just an unclosed loop.Anatomy of a LoopSo if we want to fix it, we have to know exactly what an intact loop looks like.An agent commits to a mission and to the objectives that serve that mission. The agent enters into a binding agreement: I will do X in exchange for Y.If he delivers X, he will receive Y. Fail at X, and he will receive less, or he may be asked to vacate the position. The seat was conditioned on X from the very start.That last part is what we routinely forget about in politics. In fact, politicians are in the business of punishing those who succeed at closing accountability loops and rewarding those who fail, over and over again.So this is worth carving into every column and above every office door in Washington:If failure cannot cost you your seat, you are not accountable. You are merely employed.The Simplest LoopThe oldest way to ensure accountability is also the most reliable. A client and a vendor. One party judges by their own satisfaction—and keeps the power to walk away.Hirschman saw it: exit is sharper than voice. Complaining to your provider is weak next to the credible threat of taking your business elsewhere. The vendor who stops delivering loses you, the client. Simple. Honest. And brutal.The American Founders reached for a similar instrument. The people would tolerate governance providers if there were real consent—a real path for dissatisfaction to reach the people responsible, change their behavior, or send them packing.RenewalOkay, so here’s the punchline:If I had to identify one way to renew an entire civilization, it would be tighter accountability loops.Look at everything. Every office. Every institution. Every seat of power. And ask one question:When this fails—who feels it?If the answer is no one who decided, you’ve found a void.Two hundred and fifty years ago, a few rabble-rousers found some accountability voids, listed them, and signed their names to it.For our anniversary, the question we should really be asking is whether this generation has the courage to insist on accountability loops in everything.Because remember:Where there is no accountability, there is power. The power to act with impunity.I’m Max Borders.Let’s criticize by creating. This is a public episode. 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