While researching the Treaty of Versailles, I found out that two “wrong thinkers” — John Maynard Keynes and Herbert Hoover — thought that the steep demands on Germany for reparations would create so much financial destabilization that it could lead to a Great Depression — and maybe even to another world war (WWII).
But capitalism “could have taken care of” the reparations. The payments ended up being around 2% of German national income, but more than that much slack is already present in capitalist social systems. Even looking at the variation in total taxes paid for the US, you find a range of 6 percentage points where people did fine.
A tractable social problem can be “as easy as pie” in that rules which are guaranteed to work — such as “I cut, you pick” — can solve social problems.
Page URL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pumpkin_Pie.jpg
Attribution: Peggy Greb, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In dividing a pie, if you attempt to imagine a scenario where “I cut, you pick” doesn’t work out, you come up short. When one person is charged with slicing the pie in half, and the other person is charged with picking which side they want, everyone wins. In other social problems, there are more levels, like there are in a Sudoku puzzle.
In Sudoku, numbers must meet 3 conditions simultaneously — but Sudoku puzzles are tractable (solvable). We get into trouble when attempting to piece together things that cannot be true simultaneously — such as both a welfare state AND open borders. Most social problems are fully solvable “on paper" yet often solutions still aren’t used.
The question of “political will” arises in most cases, and sometimes most everyone involved knows what needs to be done, but short-sighted strategies lead us to attempt to kick the can down the road and utilize the present lopsidedness to a narrow, personal advantage. An example is when politicians ignore the Social Security crisis.
They may get elected by deliberately being so short-sighted, but the whole “ship of state” ends up sinking.