MAIN IDEA:

The main idea of this book is to analyze two different types of problems: simple problems that could be fixed, such as problems with clocks, and complex problems, such as understanding cloud behavior or societal issues, that are not easily described or fixed and demonstrate the feasibility of applying tools developed by humanity for fixing simple problems such as engineering to manage the complex ones. Here is the author’s description: “This book is double stranded. One strand follows a forgotten engineer; the other examines forgotten uses for engineering. Together, they weave an engineering vision for civics and a civic vision for engineering. While nonfiction, the book’s aspiration may feel like fiction. Engineers, after all, aren’t commonly invoked as pillars of democracy. Yet as we’ll see, engineering does more than tech support. Engineering is a carrier of history, simultaneously an instrument and the infrastructure of politics. It’s among the oldest cultural processes of know-how, far more ancient than the sciences of know-what. And through engineering, civics can gain a more structured, systemic, and survivable sense of purpose. By applying engineering concepts in a civic context, engineering can usefully grow the policy lexicon and enhance its cultural relevance. The usefulness of civics and engineering is often realized only in their breakdowns, much like trust, most longed for in their absence.”

Probably the most important conclusion the author comes up with is that the engineering of “Civicware” should be conducted cautiously and incrementally because it is way too complex, vague, and wicked character to apply relatively rigid engineering solutions:” Two decades before presenting on clocks and clouds, Karl Popper wrote about “piecemeal” social engineering. He argued for open-ended reforms over utopian blueprints. A piecemeal approach is evolutionary and begins by realizing that facts are fallible and contexts change. Yet, such increments require caution. Piecemeal responses can cancel one another out when not coordinated by an overarching principle or guided by a standard set of concepts. And obviously, you cannot optimize a system by optimizing its parts separately. Because wicked systems cannot be planned from the top down, they require an evolutionary approach to selecting and replicating improvements to civic welfare. The concept set of efficiency, vagueness, vulnerability, safety, maintenance, and resilience can facilitate such conscious cultural evolution.”

MY TAKE ON IT:

Engineering is the application of science to real-life problems. As such, it applies only to situations where a set of actions applied to a defined environment always results in the same or statistically consistent outcome. Consequently, it is very difficult but still conceivable to apply it to complex problems such as global climate control despite its wide variety of variables. However, this is never the case with society because society consists of thinking and self-directing entities- human beings, which brings the complexity level to near infinity because of a multitude of feedback loops, which makes the consistent outcome of any experiment nearly impossible. Consequently, to build such an organization of society that would reliably provide opportunities for human flourishing, one should look not at engineering approaches, whether piecemeal or global, but rather at resource allocation to individual humans so they could do with these resources whatever they wish and limit external, violent intervention only to situations when individuals attempt to use their resources to harm others.