In the antebellum US the garment industry used a type of cloth known as shoddy. Shoddy was an early form of mass recycling because it combined used woolen cloth with new wool to create a mixed yarn. It was not the strongest yarn, but it kept the old cloth out of what then passed for waste recycling facilities. Hooray for environmental creativity, right?
The extraordinary amounts of money spent fighting the Civil War attracted less than honest suppliers to the military procurement programs and when the blue uniforms of the Union armies, illegally made of shoddy, began to fall apart, shoddy became the definition for poor quality and shady business practices.
In the past year we have been treated to stories about airplane doors blowing off, cowlings falling off midflight, wheels dropping to the earth and reports that large airplanes might break in half during flight. And the company producing these airplanes is planning to introduce flying cars. You go first.
Canadians cheered the federal government’s completion of a pipeline that mostly followed the right-of-way of an existing pipeline and that was more than 400% over budget and goodness knows how late in terms of schedule. That same government paid $50 million or more for a simple software app that didn’t work. This fiasco followed the scrapping of a straightforward database program of gun ownership after more than one billion dollars had been spent. In 2021, the federal government started the process to replace its failed Phoenix human resources program after seven years of development and undisclosed millions of dollars.
Citizens of Calgary have just discovered that their City Hall paid over a million dollars to scoop a corporate brand from Montana. Blue Sky, Big Sky what’s the difference? Maybe we should consider stealing from British Columbia or Quebec and use “Beautiful Alberta” or “Je me souviens” for civic branding. Next, the counsellors will want to densify all city neighbourhoods because Atlanta, Georgia is doing it.
A couple of weeks ago a senior editor of the US National Public Radio (NPR) wrote an opinion piece complaining that his editorial board was so ideologically bound that it routinely got important stories wrong and refused to make corrections or apologies. He has since been forced out of his job. The media industry is trusted by fewer and fewer people resulting in fewer and fewer customers for their products.
Now juxtapose all of this with the unrelenting demand that equality of outcome and diversity drive hiring, management, and investing. Universities are telling white candidates not to apply for tenure track positions. They aren’t looking for competence but for colour. Whistleblowers from software and technology industries are producing evidence of low-quality outputs due to a failure to hire based on competence.
Abraham Lincoln won his first presidential election partly on the strength of his “house divided” speech given two years earlier. He argued that the US would not survive as long as it was a house divided. The country would have to become all slave or all free. He, of course, argued for freedom.
Today our culture is riven with differences in the meaning of freedom and equality. These differences arose from events in the late 18th century when the equality of opportunity espoused by the US Revolutionary War was countered by the equality of outcome promoted by the French Revolution. We cannot have equality of both opportunity and outcome. Similarly we cannot be a nation both of isolated cultural islands, based on some misbegotten notion of multiculturalism, and a melting pot of mixed nationalities. To demand to be both creates a house divided. We must choose.
The issue is that a house divided leads to a shoddy world. And a shoddy world means that soon people as well as airplane parts will be dropping out of the sky. As an aside, there is one upside to a shoddy world. Can a government that can’t build an operating computer program threaten us with the intrusive authoritarianism of a central bank digital currency? It can’t capture the relevant data of a gun owner, but it can track and tell me that I have bought too many Mars bars so my bank account is frozen? I doubt it. The high cost of an inept government is an aggravation, but it isn’t a competent threat.
But it is depressing to live in a world of shoddy. A world in which subpar performance is tolerated. Where safety is honoured but not observed. Where biological reality cannot be acknowledged. Where the practice of science is turned into pagan worship. Will we unify our house around equality of opportunity and competence or will we unify around equality of outcome and shoddy? Will we be a welcoming melting pot with shared values or a scattered archipelago of competing values? We must decide.
We make those decisions in our multitude of purchasing decisions, our millions of conversations and at ballot boxes. Maybe it is better to pay more for the longer lasting domestic brands of goods rather than financing the war machines of countries that want to destroy us. Maybe we need to talk to our friends and neighbours about issues that count rather than restricting ourselves to laments about the poor performance of our favourite sports teams. Maybe it is better to forego drama teachers and journalists and vote for candidates who have demonstrated at least minimal levels of competence to run our cities and countries. Maybe the guy who lies congenitally about his background is not the best leader. Maybe the people who are in our legislatures making terrible laws while fattening their own bank accounts are better suited to serve us in jail making useful license plates. It seems pretty simple but it requires us to pay attention, make wise choices, have civil, if difficult, conversations, and participate in such tawdry events as elections.
The choice is yours. If you choose silence and shoddy, then don’t shake your fist at God as you plummet to your death from the airplane that broke in half.
Or just become an expert in engineering failure analysis
One word - yes