1.2: What Is a User's Manual?

Nowadays, cars, cell phones, and pretty much every other sufficiently advanced machine comes packaged with a user’s manual. User’s manuals vary in size and detail, but they all tend to cover the same basics of operation and maintenance: how to turn the machine on and off, what its buttons do, how to interpret the lights and sounds it makes, what to do if it breaks.

You’ve likely held at least a dozen user’s manuals in your lifetime, but how many have you actually read or even opened? Think about the last time you drove a car you hadn’t driven before or upgraded to a new cell phone. If you’re like most people, you didn’t take time to read the instructions before getting started. You didn’t need to: you simply put the key in the ignition or pressed what you assumed to be the on/off button and began using the machine.

Our tendency to operate complex machinery without reading the user’s manuals is less a failure of judgment than a triumph of engineering. Cars, cell phones, and many other consumer products are designed to be as intuitive and “user-friendly” as possible. They are specifically built for use by people who do not understand how they work. In fact, one measure of a machine’s quality is how little a person needs to know about it to use it effectively. If a well-designed machine is functioning properly, we only need to think about how it works when performing basic maintenance, like filling the gas tank or charging the battery. If we’re lucky, we may never need to know what’s really going on under the hood or inside the case, so long as we keep the fuel indicator above e or the battery icon above 0%.

Like a car or a cell phone, America was designed so that people could use it without needing instructions. Indeed, surveys of political knowledge (such as the one represented in Figure 1.2 below) confirm that many Americans are unfamiliar with some of the most basic aspects of how their country works. Few Americans ever acquire deep knowledge of their government, and those who do usually specialize in a small area of expertise. Accountants must become intimately acquainted with the U.S. tax code, trial lawyers must know the ins and outs of the legal system, journalists must be familiar with the political actors and institutions they cover, and so on. The rest of us mostly allow America the machine to keep on working in the background, only stopping to look more closely when something unusual gets our attention.

Figure 1.2: Americans’ knowledge of selected civics facts, 2022 (Source: Annenberg Public Policy Center)

Americans’ lack of familiarity with their government is often criticized. Some shake their heads or wag their fingers whenever the latest disappointing results from a political knowledge survey are reported, wondering what the Founders who labored over the U.S. Constitution would think of us. But the Founders knew they were crafting a political system that most of us would never understand well. The fact that we can use the machine they built so effectively despite our general ignorance of how it works is a testament to the quality of their craftsmanship.