Analysis paralysis.
It's the bane of countless corporate and government projects - when all the different variables, and risks attending them, paralyze a team, a project, an entire department or office, and completely stalls all progress toward the goal.
There's always one more risk, one more unaccounted variable, one more possible way to improve things that brings its own risks and problems.
It happens when a team loses the ability to keep risks in perspective against the possible rewards of accepting the risks and pressing on.
When you're designing something with human safety in mind - say, software on an airliner - the risks that come from getting things wrong are pretty formidable; people can die. Redesigning a corporate logo? More risk to shareholder portfolios than human life.
Social problems?
For most of human history, governments have known that of you want to solve a fairly apparent problem, you...solve it. If a road has a pothole, the city that owns the road patches it, or makes the case to the city council to come up with the budget to fix it.
But over the past generation or so, that hypothetical city council was likely as not to have had the discussion about fixing the pothold derailed by an abstruse debate about the "root causes" of the potholes; global warming, people switching to SUVs, or the need for mass transit to get people to the businesses served by the road.
And the road would remain like an Andean goat path.
Western societies have gotten mired in analysis paralysis on a range of issue where the solution is...not "uncomplicated", but pretty simple in concept.
If people are committing crime? Put them in jail. Not only that, but give them the impression that someone is actively looking to put them there.
El Salvador has been a synonym for hopeless criminality for decades.
Then they started putting people in prison.
And suddenly:
Find more statistics at Statista
They started prosecuting and jailing career, habitual criminals - and the homicide rate dropped from "way worse than Camden, New Jersey" down to "way better than Belgium". You could say they did it using means that would curl an Ameircan civil libertarian's nose hair, and I might agree - but it's not like the alternative, gangs controlling society, was humane in comparison.
And we've seen echoes of this in the District of Columbia this past few weeks: crime has cratered since the grownups started addressing the real root cause of DC's crime problem: a culture of permission:
Since Trump surged police and national guard in Washington: DC has gone a week without a murder, the first time in a summer that has occurred on record. Carjackings are down 83% and robberies are down nearly half. Pretty incredible crime results already: pic.twitter.com/T8fqRKgLF3
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) August 21, 2025
Another?
I'm old enough to remember when the talking heads declared the border crisis and our immigration quagmire intractable. The root causes were just too complex.
And they were - to the Obama and Biden regimes, whose goals were better served by embrazicing the paralysis than by doing anything about the crisis.
But for those not obsessed with obsession over "root causes" (or who benefit politically from it, there is a fairly obvious solution to at least half of the problem; close the border. Put the "power" back into "enumerated powers:
This is what should happen EVERY TIME
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) August 22, 2025
Sergeant Miles with Trenton New Jersey Police Department is protecting ICE agents doing their jobs. Liberal activists show up, start screaming, impeding ICE’s operation and causing problems. They are arrested pic.twitter.com/hyfgdleV9m
And there you go:
Preliminary Records Set in July:
- Lowest Nationwide Encounters Ever: 24,630—down 2.4% from June and nearly 90% lower than the monthly average under the last administration.
- Lowest Border Patrol Apprehensions Nationwide: 6,177—shattering June’s all-time low.
- Lowest Southwest Border Apprehensions: 4,598 nearly 500 than the daily average under the last administration, which averaged 5,110 apprehensions per day from Feb 2021–Dec 2024.
- Lowest Daily Apprehension Average: Just 148 per day—that’s lower than the average rate of 152 apprehensions every two hours under Biden last July.
- Lowest Single-Day Apprehensions in History: 88 at the Southwest Border, 116 nationwide on July 20.
So what about the big kahuna - our rapacious and growing national debt?
The root causes - a population where half the people claim to want to reduce the size of government, but a solid majority votes against anyone that tries to?
I mean - when things get bad enough, the solutions get more obvious...
Milei’s radical economic policies hardly cost him public support. In his inaugural address, he warned that “there is no alternative to shock” and a year later, most Argentines apparently agree. In the November Poliarquía survey, Milei registered a 56% approval rating, the exact level of support he attracted in the election. Consumer confidence is rising. There have been several national strikes by confederations of labor unions and two multitudinous protests against spending cuts at public universities. But generally, Argentines are calmly sipping mate.
Why did most of us get Milei wrong? For one, the scale of Argentina’s troubles would have been daunting for a seasoned politician with overwhelming public support, and Milei was none of those things. Before his election to Congress in 2021, he was best known as a shouting TV pundit who had cloned his dogs. In the first round of last year’s election, he won just 30% of the vote. Even Milei voters often described their choice as a salto al vacío, a jump into the void.
Call me a dreamer, but if voters take away from this era, here and abroad, the idea that the best way to solve problems is to solve the problem, it will be a presidential term well spent.
