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Radical Thinking

What do I mean by radical? I certainly don't define radical as "extreme," although that is a common connotation, and many radical view are extreme. Some dictionaries define political radicals as "someone holding political views of far left or right varieties, or simply of an extreme kind." But political views that are extreme in what way? Extremely annoying? Extremely uninformed or silly?

A slang definition I found in one source says that "Radical is a synonym for awesome or super, and is often shortened to simply 'rad'." Well, we are going to cover some "rad" ideas in this course. But here are the more traditional and relevant definitions.

Etymology: 14th century Middle English, from the Latin radicalis, radic-, or radix, meaning root or more at root;

1: of, relating to, or proceeding from a root.

2: of or relating to the origin : fundamental.

3: marked by a considerable departure from the usual or traditional.

Radical thinking then, is thinking that gets at the root of things. The results may seem extreme, but that isn't the important factor. For example, favoring huge tax cuts or huge tax increases may be extreme, but not radical. A radical idea would be one that questions the reason for taxes in the first place and suggests a new way to fund government.

This, then, is the essence of this first lesson. To think more creatively and radically, you have to look beyond the more shallow factors to the deeper issues and questions involved. "Shallow," by the way, doesn't mean unimportant in this context. The tax rate is very important issue after all, but there are more fundamental issues to explore if you want radical new ideas.

Let's look at an example of using radical thinking in another area: auto accidents.

Over 40,000 people die in car accidents each year. The usual approach to this problem is to pass laws and regulations that save lives. Seat belt laws, safety features for cars, traffic laws - all sorts of partial "solutions" are out there. Those proposing any particular measure usually justify it with the cliche "if it saves one life it is worth it."

This cliche makes a nice sound-bite, but it is nonsense. For example, as a nation, we could probably save over 30,000 of those 40,000 lives by strictly limiting highway speeds to 20 miles per hour, and taking away the drivers license of any who violate the new law. It is hard to die in a car crash at 20 miles-per-hour. But even 30,000 lives saved isn't worth it, right?

We are willing to have the higher death rate, and with good reason. Such a law would be inconvenient to say the least. It would also damage the economy, by making transporting things and traveling less efficient (not a small matter). It just plain costs too much for us to accept. We intuitively know this, and so nobody actually suggests a law making the speed limit 20 MPH.

Unfortunately, the things that are done to make driving safer are mostly arbitrary. This or that idea is thrown out there and adopted or not according to how the various political and business and consumer advocates fight it out. But what if we applied a little radical thinking here? What ideas would result?

Radical means getting to the root of the matter, so we don't start with any specific regulations, devices or laws that might help. Instead, we ask why we have these things. The answer, "because we want to save lives," is the root where we start our thinking then. A natural question then, is "Why can't we keep everyone from dying?" The answer to this gets us to some new thinking.

We can't save everyone from dying because it is too expensive to do so. Isn't that the truth? Whether the economy suffers - as in the case of low speed limits - or "safe" cars cost $150,000 each due to the safety features required by law, we don't want to pay the cost. (And if you don't think it's possible to make cars for $150,000 that would cut the death rate in half, you need to work on that imagination.)

The radical question that needs to be asked then, is "How much is it worth to save a life?" The common lie is that saving a life should have unlimited value to society. Nobody really believes this, of course, or we would have that 20 MPH speed limit already. But should we put a dollar figure on life? Let's look at what happens when we don't.

The consumer will only pay so much for safety. If cars really costs $150,000 due to safety features required by law, most people would buy a car, and they would seriously consider throwing out the government that imposed such costs. Bureaucrats and lawmakers know this, so overall regulatory costs are kept to an acceptable level (acceptable to many, anyhow).

The problem is that the costs of saving each life by way of each specific measure isn't tallied. What does this mean? Suppose new air bag requirements save 1,000 lives for a cost of $600 per car. Is this good? How do we know if we haven't assigned a value to the lives saved? What I mean is that there may have been measures that cost only $300 per car and would have saved 4,000 lives. That's eight times as efficient!

Does it matter? Of course it does. We already can agree that there is some limit to the costs we will accept in terms of safety devices required by law or traffic laws and regulations, right? If we reach that cost limit by inefficient means, we may be missing the opportunity to save 10,000 more lives - just because we are afraid to put dollar figures on those lives and think about this rationally.

Any regulation has a cost, and no society or person can pay unlimited costs. So if we impose costly laws and regulations for less efficient safety measures, we have the ability to save fewer lives. There is a limit to what we can do, after all.

One radical approach, then, is to ask, "How much is it actually worth to us to save a life?" or at least ask the similar question, "How much does it cost to save each life with this measure?" so we can compare our options more objectively. Looked at in this honest way, more lives will be saved, because regulations and traffic laws will be aimed at maximum efficiency in achieving results.

A Radical Thinking Exercise

To train your mind in radical and creative thinking then, you need to develop the habit of looking to the root of a matter. Do this as a mental exercise for a few weeks and it will become a normal and automatic part of your thought process. With that in mind, here are a few questions to ponder - with pen and paper if you have time:

1. People argue about how to save the social security system, but what is a more radical question you could explore?

2. Prisons are a part of every society. People argue about how to punish criminals or how long jail sentences should be. A more fundamental question is why we have prisons. What possible solutions to the problem of crime does this question lead to?

3. With a little imagination, you could design a new house, right? But what if you consider the "root" concept of "shelter" and why we need it? What radical new thoughts can you come up with starting there?

Note:

You can consider the above questions a "course assignment" of sorts, but that's about as formal as the course will get. Until next time,

Steve