The Entrenched Political Duopoly is Ruining Our Democracy
Contest between Democrats vs. Republicans is like a staged wrestling match; the participants cooperate as much or more than they fight
Michael Porter is famous for bringing data-driven decision making to industries around the world. As a tenured professor at Harvard Business School (HBS) and a successful consultant in this own right, he has helped thousands of world class enterprises understand their businesses better through data analysis, improving executive decision making materially. Working with a specialist in political systems, Katherine Gehl, he has brought this analytical focus to the industry of politics.
One of the data sets that he looked at came from a horizontal study of opinions of HBS alumni, who reported from around the world on how they see the United States performing compared to other advanced economies. The dimensions of the quadrants were strength vs. weakness, and improving vs. deteriorating (see chart behind Porter in pic above). Tellingly, items in the upper right (strong and improving) — things like entrepreneurship, communications infrastructure, corporate management, capital markets, and others — typically related to private sector activity. Most of those in the lower left (weak and deteriorating) — such as logistics infrastructure, K-12 education, health care, regulation, and others — were from the public sector.
This negative correlation is no error. The success of one comes at the expense of the other. And in the cellar and getting worse is our political system (blue box on the chart), which is also nominally in the public sector.
Explaining our system of elections and legislation as if it were any other industry, Porter and Gehl laid bare its structure in a lecture at HBS April 24, 2019. As they revealed its mechanism, they illuminated our politics, revealing a system at once surprising and, in retrospect, inevitable. That mechanism is no clanking Rube Goldberg. It is well buffed to a high polish and functions extremely smoothly.
That’s right. The first surprise: our political-industrial complex is doing what it was designed to do. A finely tuned duopoly, the U.S. political system operates perfectly for its…
