We’re built for instant gratification. Correspondingly, we don’t often create ten or fifty year timetables for solving problems, yet there is a class of problems that takes at least one or more generations to solve by their nature. Imagine two scenarios along with their respective goals:
- Vaccinate a country against Hepatitis-B: 99% vaccination
- Improve literacy in a country with low literacy rate: 85% literacy
On the surface, these two problems seem comparable. Now let’s imagine I give you $50 million dollars for each goal and ten years. Now you’re thinking, “I can do this, no problem.” I’ll even throw in a cooperative government, strong rule-of-law, and population under 20 million. Now you’re thinking, “I could do this in five years, easy!” Take a moment to think about your plan of attack.
An ambitious plan...
Let’s take a look at each problem individually:
1. You need to purchase or create enough vaccine for each at-risk individual, train or hire people to administer the vaccine, and find the best way to track down and record each person who’s been vaccinated. Each individual step is solvable and as long as the populace reacts positively to the process, you shouldn’t have too much of a problem. After all, inoculation takes just one series of three or four shots. The hardest part is tracking down everyone, especially if they don’t have birth certificates or any other form of identification. However, you could create an entire system yourself if need be.
2. You need to hire or train enough teachers to instruct the population and set them to work. That’s easy…except that we’ve already established that literacy rates are low. So we try to hire foreign teachers for everyone. Whoa, that’s expensive and not very effective. Or we could just hire enough teachers to train an initial set of teachers, who in turn will educate more teachers and so on. The problem is that the growth in number of teachers takes so long to ramp up. Only a certain percentage of students will go on to be teachers themselves. After all, a society needs educated people in all sectors of the economy. In fact, no matter how much money we have, literacy will only grow as fast as teachers get educated. This initial growth period is a hard bottleneck.
Problem 2 is what I would call a generational problem in that it presents a bottleneck that we can’t fix through money alone (at least in any currently feasible way) and takes at least one generation to solve. Institutional and societal changes are often classified as generational problems (think racism, democracy, or WoW). When you hear someone talking about solving generational problems, ask them how long their timetable is. If it’s under ten years, you can stop listening.
