Via Instapundit, a look back at a manufactured crisis, and how it gained traction.
In 1993, a tech consultant named Peter de Jager wrote an article for Computerworld with the headline "Doomsday 2000." When the clock struck midnight on 1/1/00, he wrote, many of our computers would lose track of the date, and very bad things would happen as a result.
Looking back, De Jager's article is remarkable for its pessimism. He interviewed several IT experts who said the tech industry was completely ignoring the computer-date bug. Many didn't think it was a real problem, and those who did felt no pressure to do anything about it—after all, the year 2000 was a long way away. "I have spoken at association meetings and seminars, and when I ask for a show of hands of people addressing the problem, the response is underwhelming," de Jager wrote. "If I get one in 10 respondents, I'm facing an enlightened group."
But then something strange happened: Everyone started worrying about Y2K. Over the next few years, people across the tech industry took up the cause. In 1996, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan asked the Congressional Research Service to investigate the issue, and he became alarmed by the findings. In a letter to President Clinton, Moynihan urged a huge federal response to address what he called the "Year 2000 Time Bomb." Moynihan clearly expected the worst: "You may wish to turn to the military to take command of dealing with the problem," he wrote to Clinton.
Bill Clinton's second term isn't remembered as a model of comity between the executive and legislative branches. On the issue of Y2K, though, the Republican Congress and the Democratic White House were on the same page: They all pushed for a huge federal task force. The White House appointed a Y2K coordinator, John Koskinen, who headed an effort that spanned every cabinet agency and the military. (Koskinen is now a high-ranking official at Freddie Mac.) Following the government's lead, just about every business in the country took up the cause of heading off the Y2K crisis.
This is a hopeful story, isn't it? Anyone who's ever marveled at the government's inability to address an obvious, impending threat can find solace in the Y2K narrative. In 1993, even tech people ignored Y2K; just a few years later, it had become an issue at the top of the world's agenda. How did this happen? And does Y2K provide any lessons for dealing with other long-term national and international crises?
One the face of it, Y2K shares several features with other seemingly intractable problems. It was big, expensive to fix, and its worst effects would only be seen in the future—just like global warming or the health care mess. What's more, from the very beginning, many wondered whether Y2K was a real problem. Though the tech consensus eventually shifted to the affirmative, there were always people on the fringes of the debate who insisted that the whole thing was overhyped (as in global warming or, more recently, H1N1).
How did the people on Y2K's front lines overcome these hurdles? They focused on the worst. "We're accelerating toward disaster," de Jager wrote in 1993. In his 1996 letter to Clinton, Moynihan frets about the Social Security Administration and the IRS' continued ability to function, worries that banks would need to spend billions to address the problem, and suggests that the nation's economy may spiral out of control if the problem isn't fixed by 1999. If the proponents of fixing the problem acknowledged the naysayers, it was usually only to swat them down with variations on an adage that was hard to rebut: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Kind of sounds like the message of today on several issues, doesn't it?
