The pragmatist’s trap¶
“The problem with your proposal,” said the chairman of the Budget Committee, “is that it’s simply not realistic.”
The young wizard from Unseen University had proposed a city-wide literacy programme. Nothing fancy. Basic reading and writing for anyone who wanted it. He’d even done the mathematics: seventy thousand euros annually, which was less than the city spent on decorative street furniture.
“Not realistic,” the chairman repeated, as if this settled the matter.
“But we could fund it by—”
“Where would we get seventy thousand euros?” the chairman interrupted. “Money doesn’t grow on trees, young man.”
What made this conversation particularly interesting was that it happened on the same day the council approved one hundred and forty thousand euros for the Grand Trunk Company as an “essential infrastructure investment” despite the Company’s habit of occasional spontaneous fires and routine worker deaths.
No one asked where that money came from. Money for essential infrastructure apparently did grow on trees, or at least in the city’s coffers, which amounted to the same thing.
“We must be pragmatic,” the chairman continued. “In an ideal world, yes, everyone would read. But we live in the real world. Priorities must be set. Hard choices must be made.”
The hard choices, as it happened, always seemed to involve not spending money on poor people whilst simultaneously finding adequate funds for Guild subsidies, merchant tax incentives, and what Drumknott’s notes euphemistically called “commercial development initiatives.”
Lord Vetinari had perfected the art of the pragmatic objection. It was devastatingly effective because it sounded so reasonable.
“I would love to fund public healthcare,” he’d said once, “but we must be realistic about the costs.”
The costs of not funding public healthcare, which included regular plague outbreaks and a life expectancy in the Shades hovering around “not very long at all,” were apparently not relevant to the realism calculation.
“Affordable housing is a wonderful idea in theory,” he’d told another petitioner, “but practically speaking, the market must be allowed to function.”
The market was functioning beautifully, particularly if you were a landlord charging forty euros monthly for a room with visible rats and a door that locked from the outside.
The genius of pragmatism as a political philosophy was that it sounded like wisdom whilst functioning as a brick wall. You couldn’t argue against being realistic. You couldn’t fight practicality. Only unreasonable people demanded the impossible, and who wanted to be unreasonable?
“Perhaps we could start with a small pilot programme?” the young wizard tried.
“Ah, a pilot programme! Yes, let’s explore that.” The chairman made a note. “We’ll need a feasibility study first. Cost-benefit analysis. Impact assessment. Then we can consider a properly scaled pilot programme, perhaps starting with… shall we say five hundred euros? For the study, not the actual programme. That would come later, pending results.”
Five hundred euros to study whether teaching people to read was worthwhile. Seventy thousand euros was unrealistic. Five hundred euros to think about maybe possibly considering it was pragmatic.
The young wizard left feeling like he’d missed something but couldn’t quite identify what.
Up in his office, Vetinari approved the Grand Trunk subsidy with a flourish. Essential infrastructure. Pragmatic investment. Realistic priorities.
The beauty of it was that he never had to say “no” to anything. He just had to question the practicality, wonder about the costs, and suggest being realistic. The petitioners defeated themselves, convinced by their own reasonableness that their unreasonable demands were, well, unreasonable.
And if occasionally someone pointed out the inconsistency, the curious way that pragmatism always seemed to favour those who already had money whilst finding reasons to deny those who didn’t… well.
That simply wasn’t a realistic observation.