Abraham Maslow Quotes
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
Abraham Maslow, 1908-1970, Psychologist, The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance, 1966
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He was referring to the fact that the American military is the best in the world, but we cannot and should not use it to try and resolve all problems.
He was discussing “Stand Your Ground Laws” which were enacted to solve one problem, but then effected many other things negatively. The law, once passed, is the law regardless of whether it has adverse consequences that the legislators never anticipated. This is one of the reasons that drafting legislation is such a difficult skill.
In every case except Obamacare, the Congress would pass technical correctional amendments as programs were implemented and glitches were found. However, with Obamacare, ultra conservatives were strongly opposed to it, and after the law passed over their opposition, they tried (unsuccessfully) to repeal it dozens of times. When technical glitches began to appear, they blocked correcting legislation on the political thinking that the defects would anger people and produce more support for repeal. Trumka observed that the conservatives had also bitterly opposed Social Security in 1936, but in the following years worked to pass correcting amendments and eliminate technical flaws. This was the first piece of major legislation that a substantial number of one of a political party members of Congress tried to sabotage the program and had enough intimidation power over the party leadership and statesmen, that they were enabled.
The New Hampshire House of Representatives is the second largest legislative body in the world with 400 representatives.
Explaination of why he threatened to block Senate approval of an appointment he favored in order to achieve another political objective.
Many new laws have unintended consequences. In many cases the laws are not sufficiently effective to solve the problems for which they were passed. In other cases, the laws are too draconian and the public and the legislators have second thoughts. Almost all laws of significance require amendments and adjustments over the years.
This principle is very important in all kinds of human activity. We design and test or pilot test products and programs of all kinds—governmental and not. The testing may uncover a flaw or problem, but the failure to find flaws or problems does NOT mean that they are not inherent in the program—they may well be there and have not been uncovered by the tests. Often when this occurs, we refer to them as “unintended consequences.”
There is an opposite school of thought which argues that because technology develops so fast, by the time you legislate about it of you understand it, it is too late to prevent major problems and abuses which can become institutionalized. Instead it is argued, legislate rapidly BEFORE you understand all the consequences and then repeal and revise very frequently as the technology develops. This school argues that Schmidt’s view is tantamount to not legislating at all as it will ALWAYS be too late if you wait till you understand the consequences.
Abraham Harold Maslow was an American psychologist who was best known for creating Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization. Maslow was a psychology professor at Brandeis University, Brooklyn College, New School for Social Research, and Columbia University. He stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a "bag of symptoms". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Maslow as the tenth most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
