Chaos in Canberra: correction is possible

I recently found myself in the awkward position of having to defend human rationality. True, it was late on a Saturday night.

The context was a large social function and the drinks were going cheap. But it was one of those conversations where I woke up the next morning pretty sure I would have taken the exact same line again. Human beings are rational. We just don't get every decision right.

I'm not a psychologist myself. I haven't done the various social experiments which people like Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman conducted through the 1970s and 1980s to lay out the patterns in human decision-making. But one of the most articulate defences I ever heard on human rationality came from a geographer.

"Well of course we're rational," I remember him saying when I raised the question, "Human beings haven't survived for this long without pursuing a very simple, rational goal: self-preservation."

The geographer did confess that he thought climate change might be the exception to this argument. But assuming that we can solve climate change (and I think we already are), things are looking up-ish for human civilisation.

Being optimistic about our rationality doesn't mean I think we're infallible to human error. We are constantly making errors of judgment, whether it is simple things like choosing correctly from the restaurant menu to how we reason our way through matters of public importance. Finding a balanced position takes time and effort. The good news is that correction is possible.

Let me give you an example. Take off your glasses and you will see one of the world's most complex problems. A 20th of the world is short-sighted but only half of those people can afford a pair of glasses.

For a while in the late 1990s charities tried to help. Across Australia, community drives were organised so that rich people could donate their old pairs to the developing world. In one year the small Pacific Island of Tavulu received a shipment of a few hundred pairs from Australia. Islanders shifted through the boxes but it turned out that only about one in fifteen pairs were reusable. The thing about short-sightedness is that everyone's eyesight is different: there are rarely two people who can wear the same pair of glasses.

In the early 2000s, a brilliant Australian engineering student called Saul Griffith set out to solve this problem. Griffith had done his undergraduate studies at the University of Sydney and had been awarded a scholarship to do his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. In an article published in the New Yorker in 2010, Griffith was described by a former professor as a formidable inventor. "With Saul," his professor had said, "you push 'Go' and he spews out projects in every imaginable direction."

In 2004, Saul won $30,000 from MIT for inventing a portable device which made cheap, custom-made glasses. Traditional lens-making is a tedious exercise. You need a small factory and each prescription requires its own mould. To service a population you need several thousand moulds.

The genius of Griffith's device was that it got around this problem. It built a single, universal mould which worked a bit like a waffle maker. Quick-hardening fluid could be injected between two pieces of plastic. The concavity or convexity of the mould would then be set so that you could make an infinite number of lenses. The machine was no larger than a desktop printer and could be used by a minimally trained operator working solo in the remotest corners of the earth.

The low-cost eyeglasses machine won accolades. In 2006, Griffith won the MacArthur genius grant – one of the world's most prestigious awards for super intelligent people. Included in his roll call of achievements was the low-cost eyeglasses machine. It has "the potential to change the economics of corrective lenses in rural and underserved communities around the world," said the judges. By building a portable device to use in the developing world, Griffith had found a way to bring sight back to the poor.

No-one can fault Saul for trying. By his own admission, though, it turned out he was solving the wrong problem. He was focused on the hardware problem but had missed the software problem. Manufacturing cheap, customized lenses was something which had been solved years ago by Chinese industrialists and global shipping magnates. Pull a few levers and you could have dozens of cheap eyeglass lenses trundled across the global by the minute. The real problem was getting accurate prescriptions. If you travelled across rural Bangladesh you'd be lucky to find a single well-trained optometrist, let alone a network of well-funded healthcare workers to support them. Griffith had been fixated on one piece of the puzzle but had missed the hidden problem.

The story of Griffith's low-cost eyeglasses is a kind of allegory for what's happening in Canberra at the moment. We're suffering from what I call the magnifying glass trap. We focus on shiny objects – things which sit in our near-view vision – but we miss the bigger picture. Whether it is immigration or climate change, terrorism on economic crises – we invariably make a similar error. We are asking ourselves the wrong questions and coming up with the wrong answers.

Moving forward, we need to take a step back. If we are to drive productivity across the economy, we need to rethink how we approach the key factors of production – especially labour and capital. That means being open to foreign investment and accepting the need to fine-tune our industrial relations laws.

If the Government is to take a consistent position towards supporting technological change in the context of climate change, it needs to be clear about what it is trying to achieve. The worst possible outcome is a carbon tax across the economy, plus public subsidies to technological dinosaurs – whether they linger in auto manufacturing, aluminium or elsewhere.

As for the question of the boats, we must acknowledge something which has long been unspoken. Border security is any government's essential duty. But one of the reasons people struggle with this issue is unrelated to border security. It comes from a fear about the pressure that low-skilled immigration may place on their jobs and wages. Unless we address this concern, the issue will not go away.

The challenge with our political leaders is not that they are irrational or mean-spirited. Both sides of politics probably want a better future. But they have lost the ability to connect with people in a compelling way. We've taken a few wrong turns but there is a good news story behind the magnifying glass trap: correction is possible.