All three types of complexity are only going to keep growing. (What intervention could possibly stop them?) If we continue on our current path of not giving the government adequate policy capacity, the gap between what our policymakers need to know to effectively govern and what they actually know will only increase. Corporate lobbyists and the most ideological of “the people” will continue to be happy to tell our government what to do, and how to do it. Lacking their own capacity, government will have no other choice but to increasingly turn to them for help. And lacking their own knowledge, policymakers will have an even harder time evaluating these analyses and suggestions on anything other than quantity and volume

Imagine that you are a rank-and-file member of the House. Your small office of at most three or four policy staff is already stretched thin. The policy staff are also likely to predominantly be in their twenties or maybe thirties, something that shocks observers from abroad. In the 2009 movie In the Loop, a senior British civil servant, upon meeting an American twenty-something in a suit, trenchantly observes, “He’s probably running something relatively major …They’re all kids in Washington. It’s like Bugsy Malone but with real guns.” If your constituents knew just how much you delegated to your fresh-faced staff, they too might be shocked. Your staff may be bright and energetic and have genuine power (because you are too busy fund-raising or smiling before cameras somewhere, and therefore must delegate). But they don’t have the serious policy chops that can only come with years of experience.

If you want to accomplish something and raise your profile, you can turn to the armies of corporate lobbyists, who are only too happy to enlist you in their substantive policy ambitions, or you can turn to your party’s base with some symbolic position taking. You probably already chose one of these paths in your rise to getting elected. But even if you didn’t (or if we somehow reformed campaigns), you’d still find only these two paths forward to prominence. So pick one.

If you are a committee leader in the House, you will have slightly more internal policy capacity, but the demands on your attention will be far greater. Everyone wants to talk to you and your staff. How will you manage these demands? If you want to accomplish anything, you will need outside help to draft and vet policy proposals.

You will also need the support of the rank-and-file members of your committee. How will you get this? Your staff is just not big enough. You will need external help. You will need to lean on either the lobbying machine of big business or the research machine of ideologically motivated or industry-funded think tanks.

Because all of your committee members have turned to outside support to develop their policy positions and proposals, you as committee chair will have less influence over them. This means that you will get a more limited set of bills and proposals out of committee. If you propose anything that goes against the preferences of big business or the ideologically mobilized, these actors will lobby the heck out of your committee members. They will deluge you with claims of the dire consequences of actions they dislike, or claim that substantial, complex measures are needed to avoid disastrous consequences. Even if you are suspicious of such claims, you are unlikely to have the knowledge to push back. If you are risk averse (and susceptible to that classic of defensive lobbying: “You don’t know what you’re doing! Section B, Subsection 48 could have unintended consequences that will cause the economy to collapse”), you will do what they suggest. This, in a nutshell, is the story of the last three decades of financial regulation, and explains why an industry that is in such bad odor still mainly succeeds at getting what it wants.