Visions Of The Future: The Case Of The SST

     I recently posted an e-mail from the President of the union that represents most Social Security employees about the "plan" of a consulting firm envisioning a Social Security Administration without field offices by 2025. Reportedly, the company envisioned an environment in which most people never left their homes except to be entertained. 

     This vision of the future reminded me of the SST. You ask what is the SST? The Super Sonic Transport, of course. The Super Sonic Transport? That would be an airplane that can transport commercial passengers at supersonic speeds, of course. Remember the Concorde? It was an SST. The idea for the SST was that the globe is awfully big, so big that it takes a long time for a commercial aircraft to get from, let's say New York to Los Angeles, much less from New York to London. The time it takes to fly from New York to Tokyo is just ridiculous. It would be so much better if we had aircraft that could take passengers these long distances several times as fast. The vision of the SST emerged in the 1950s. A number of companies started to develop an SST but only one actually produced an SST for commercial use. That was a French-British consortium which produced the Concorde, which first took to the air for scheduled flights in 1976.

     Whatever happened to the Concorde? It turns out that there were a few problems. Planes flying at supersonic speeds create a very loud sonic boom. If you ever hear a sonic boom, you won't forget it. I have. I never heard the Concorde's sonic boom, just the sonic boom from U.S. fighter aircraft. It's literally loud enough to shatter windows. It turned out that no one wanted the Concorde flying over their house. They were banned from flying at supersonic speeds over land. There goes the New York-Los Angeles route and the New York-Tokyo route since so much of that is over land. It also turned out that the Concorde was very, very expensive to build and operate. Concorde fares were sky high, far higher than first class airfare on subsonic planes. The number of people who could afford such expensive airfare was extremely limited. The realization set in over time that there were no technological fixes for the Concorde's problems. The sonic boom can't be engineered away. The cost problem can't be engineered away.

     In the end only two Concorde planes were build. Two. They were gorgeous airplanes but only two were built. The two Concorde aircraft operated for some years but eventually one of them crashed and the other was retired.

     The SST was a wonderful vision. It's a shame that it didn't work but the reasons it wouldn't work were obvious from the beginning. People just ignored the problems because their belief in the vision was so strong.
     The problems with a vision of the Social Security Administration without field offices should be obvious to those who actually have ground level experience with Social Security. The agency doesn't just take retirement claims. It takes disability claims. It takes survivor claims. It takes Supplemental Security Income (SSI) claims. Even though most of the money paid out by Social Security goes to retirement benefits, most of the work its employees do is on disability, survivor and SSI claims. These claims are messy and complicated. There's no way to remove the messiness or complexity. It's an inherent part of these benefits. While more and more people are computer literate, many of the people that Social Security employees deal with will never be computer literate enough to deal with the Social Security Administration just over the internet. That's because their transactions with Social Security are complicated and many of these people suffer from cognitive problems or mental illness. These problems aren't going away any more than the Concorde's problems would go away.