Complicated and Inscrutable

Recently some smart cool college students came up with the SOccket – a soccer ball that stores the kinetic energy created by being kicked around and makes it available as electricity.

SOccket has attracted plenty of media attention, which is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, anything that gets people thinking about the lack of power in the developing world is good. On the other, anything that gets people thinking that the solution is going to be something as telegenic as an electric soccer ball is bad.

Most people who have spent time in the trenches of development know that the real problems are crushingly un-catchy. In terms of difficulty, of trying to do something we just aren’t quite sure how to do, spurring development is up there with reforming healthcare, regulating the stock market, and coping with global climate change. It shares with those problems a combination of complexity and inscrutability.

A problem is complicated when it’s, well, complicated. Sending a man to the moon is complicated. A problem is inscrutable when it’s hard to tell what a “solution” would look like, or if one even exists. Living a good life is an inscrutable problem.

Complicated problems with clear end posts can be thrilling. No matter how difficult the path, the goal is always visible. That’s why, for example, tasks which might otherwise be considered drudgework become appealing when inserted into the highly structured, goal-oriented worlds for videogames.

Inscrutable problems devoid of technical complicatedity can be rewarding subjects for artworks or daydreams. Tolstoy for example threads a theory as to the proper interpretation of history through War and Peace, and of course Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is largely involved with an examination of how and whether personal identity persists.

It is when complexity and inscrutability collide, however, that truly mind-numbingly boring and hellacious problems are created. This is why you will never see a (successful) video game based around reforming the health care system, or a novel whose central conceit is an exploration of the melancholy truths revealed by the depressive effect of mark-to-market accounting standards on corporate balance sheets.

The question of how to spur development is surely both complicated and inscrutable (how does one even define the word development in this context?). As such the greatest strides forward are apt to be found in the least sexy of places.