Decisions also differ with respect to whether they are instantaneous or sequential. An instantaneous decision occurs completely at a given point in time, even if a long period of consideration preceded it, while a sequential decision occurs at various points in time as reactions to previous parts of the decision entail additional adjustments, improvisations, or reinforcements. The basic difference between them is that one decision is made completely on one occasion, while the other decision occurs piecemeal over a period of time. With sequential decision making, all the knowledge which is finally available to the decision maker is not initially available when the sequence of decisions begins, and the course of action followed may be wholly different from what it would have been if all the knowledge had been available at the outset, or if any decision could have been postponed until after all the facts were in.

Many early supporters of the Vietnam war came ultimately to the position that it was not worth the cost, after the full cost had been revealed by time, and that early official estimates of prospective casualties and prospective outcomes were either grossly mistaken or deliberately misleading. Another contemporary example of sequential decision making in a very different area is the progression from the Supreme Court’s Brown decision in 1954 that the state cannot classify students by race for differential treatment to its controversial “busing” position in which that is what it requires states to do. Years of opposition to desegregation of the public schools led to progressively tighter judicial control, designed to overcome the various strategies of opposition, delay, and evasion — ultimately arriving at a point the opposite of the court’s original premise or intention. In an earlier era, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain conducted a foreign policy designed to avoid war with Hitler through relatively small concessions, but the ultimate result of an unanticipated series of crises and concessions was to so shift the balance of power in Hitler’s favor as to make war inevitable.

None of these sequential decisions was the result of a “society” that was stupid in the light of information now available in retrospect, but rather of piecemeal decisions which acquired a momentum of their own, and of the individual decision makers who were unequal to the unfolding complexities inherent in sequential decision making. Praise or blame is not the point. What is important is to understand (1) when a situation facing us is part of a sequential decision making process, and what that implies, and (2) to understand when our own institutions set up sequential decision-making processes when there is an alternative decision-making process available. For example, Chapter 9 will analyze the criminal justice system as a series of sequential decisions presented to the young criminal in such a way as to lead more people to persist in a life of crime than would do so if all the knowledge of prospects and penalties were made fully available to them at the outset.

In addition to considering decision-making processes, we need to consider decision-making costs. These costs are not simply the salaries of decision-making officials during the time when they are pondering what to do. Clearly the cost of evaluating intelligence reports on Japanese intentions to bomb Pearl Harbor was not simply the pay of the military functionaries who handled these reports. The cost of those processes included one of the largest military catastrophes in American history, and the loss of life and material not only at Pearl Harbor but in a series of major military defeats in the months that followed, in the wake of the crippling and near-annihilation of the American Pacific Fleet on December 7, 1941. The point here is not to condemn, or even to evaluate, the decision-making process as it existed in the military at that time. The point here is to emphasize that the cost of any decision-making process must be assessed in terms of the full consequences entailed by alternative decision-making processes. Such processes cannot be judged by narrowly conceived economic or financial criteria. As we shall see in Chapter 3, even economic decision making cannot be evaluated narrowly in money terms alone.

The chapters that follow will consider the use of knowledge in economic, legal, and political institutions, the nature of the intellectual process and the role of intellectuals as a social class in influencing trends in modern society. Some disturbing implications of those trends will then be weighed.

Chapter 2

Decision-Making Processes