“The” problem?
One of the biggest problems I can see in our national discourse is that each interest group tends to see its issue as “THE” problem facing the country in one area or another.
But is this true? As an engineer by trade, I’m very familiar with a “Pareto” diagrams named after the Pareto Principle. More or less, 80% of the problem is related to 20% of the factors.
While that would seem to indicate that if we fix 1-2 problems, we’d be almost there, reality is that often the factors we see are not the full spectrum of problems, but rather only the top 20%.
Upshot? There’s plenty of room for solutions. If we use the crisis of the Detroit 3 as an example, there is plenty of blame to spread on the Detroit 3, the unions, CAFE standards, and more. We don’t need to insist that it’s just one party’s fault here.
