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Why Governments Fail

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Re: Why Governments Fail

#21

Post by kspacewalk2 »

TrispusAttucks wrote: post #15
oddmiral wrote: post #3

Every organisation has 3 major stages: newborn, mature, and old. When competition is present, old organizations are eaten by newborn organizations. Government is monopoly, so no competition, thus old organization must die first.

I have to agree. Governments seem like legacy code bases. Technically the laws are a form of code. People and institutions are the hardware the code runs on. Changing requirements of the environment the machine runs in (reality) mean we must refactor and maintain the code. If the environment changes too quickly and the code is too fragile to change at the required rate then some part of the system will crash. Enough…

This doesn't seem in agreement with the parent comment, and is a much better analogy than a mere 'government as something that will eventually die'.

Sure, governments are organizations that will eventually 'die' in some form, but how is that a useful observation? The British government has a lot of 'legacy code' going back to the deep middle ages, and yet (in its current 'state of the codebase', which can improve or worsen over time) it is much further away from 'death' than many newcomers in the third world who had no codebase to speak of 60 years ago. Theirs are badly maintained forks and occasionally the whole thing blows up and needs to be monkey-patched to keep creaking on in some fashion.

Age is thus no impediment at all to having a well-functioning, efficient government, and 'startups' are often in the most disadvantageous position of all. So even the software analogy fails us at some point, and cannot be taken any further.

Re: Why Governments Fail

#22

Post by gonehome »

naravara wrote: post #20
varispeed wrote: post #14

The problem is that nobody cares about corruption, or the so-called "lobbying". Big companies get their way at the expense of regular citizens meanwhile police and other agencies are busy enforcing big pharma monopoly on drugs. Most governments run until they are exposed and people are mad enough to march on the streets, or they simply run out of "their" monopoly money. To improve that we need a ruthless agency that…

This misses the actual mechanism by which political corruption works. Lobbying is merely any person going in to press their interests with their representatives. Where large, monied interests rig the game is because they run election campaigns and implant narratives in the media. In other words, the mechanism by which lobbyists get their way is by weaponizing regular citizens into voting in their interests. It's mark…

Yeah - I basically agree with this framing.

I think Lessig's talk is the best summary of this: https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_...

Lobbying itself is fine - we want experts with deep domain expertise interacting with law makers. We just don't want them also funding their campaigns.

Re: Why Governments Fail

#23

Post by gonehome »

jonathannat wrote: post #11
giantg2 wrote: post #4

There's a lot in here. I was going to make some quotes and comment about some of this, but it's a pretty diverse set of topics. The main thing is that I didn't see a solid definition on how a failing government is defined or a concrete connection between that and the topics covered. It seems to be Q&A about a bunch of loosely affiliated topics.

The discussion is a bit all over the place. The main points are that EU failed vaccination, and US failed covid testing (Statista disagrees https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104645/covid19-testing-... ) , as well as having a decline of innovation and movement (disagrees here, people moved everywhere during covid, and US came up with tons of effective vaccines) It's pretty hilarious both ignored discussing the curr…

> "The CCP is so insecure that they banned broadcast of oscars because of Chloe Zhao, because she mentioned CCP as failing one time in 2013"

They're even here downvoting you.

When they're willing to censor pooh bear there's nothing that doesn't cross that insecurity threshold.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnie-the-Pooh#Censorship_in_...

Re: Why Governments Fail

#24

Post by mcculley »

slibhb wrote: post #7

Did the government fail? I don't know. We got a vaccine remarkably quickly and the governments (federal and state) distributed it efficiently. I don't blame the government for not taking the virus seriously to start with. SARS and MERS didn't pan out and people, on the left and right (including me), figured COVID would be the same. Some people predicted COVID would be bad but it wasn't crazy to think COVID wouldn't t…

Yes, the U.S. government failed.

We should have implemented testing at scale immediately, found the infected, and paid them to stay home. While this would have cost a lot of money, it would have been less than the PPP and stimulus efforts.

Re: Why Governments Fail

#25

Post by johnchristopher »

TrispusAttucks wrote: post #15
oddmiral wrote: post #3

Every organisation has 3 major stages: newborn, mature, and old. When competition is present, old organizations are eaten by newborn organizations. Government is monopoly, so no competition, thus old organization must die first.

I have to agree. Governments seem like legacy code bases. Technically the laws are a form of code. People and institutions are the hardware the code runs on. Changing requirements of the environment the machine runs in (reality) mean we must refactor and maintain the code. If the environment changes too quickly and the code is too fragile to change at the required rate then some part of the system will crash. Enough…

When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail.

Re: Why Governments Fail

#27

Post by hungryhobo »

jonathannat wrote: post #11
giantg2 wrote: post #4

There's a lot in here. I was going to make some quotes and comment about some of this, but it's a pretty diverse set of topics. The main thing is that I didn't see a solid definition on how a failing government is defined or a concrete connection between that and the topics covered. It seems to be Q&A about a bunch of loosely affiliated topics.

The discussion is a bit all over the place. The main points are that EU failed vaccination, and US failed covid testing (Statista disagrees https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104645/covid19-testing-... ) , as well as having a decline of innovation and movement (disagrees here, people moved everywhere during covid, and US came up with tons of effective vaccines) It's pretty hilarious both ignored discussing the curr…

> Came up with a 50% effective vaccine sinovac, and forces its citizens to take it

is this worse than not having your own capacity to manufacture vaccine and having to beg other countries for vaccines? 50% efficacy is for transmission prevention, however when you consider effectiveness against deaths and hospitalization, it's >90%

> Wolf warrior politics has infuriated almost every democratic countries on Earth, and alienated China. When Merkel steps down in Sept, the Green party candidate is most likely to succeed. And the newcomer will act tough against China and Russia

oh god forbid a country standing up for its own interest.

> Ballooning debt (they don't own global currency, unlike US), declining marriage/birth rate, middle income trap, unrest in many provinces

something that's been touted for the past 30+ years. can we just wait until it happens?

> The CCP is so insecure that they banned broadcast of oscars because of Chloe Zhao, because she mentioned CCP as failing one time in 2013

funny that indian government asked twitter to remove anything critical of its handling over COVID, with 350k daily cases, but they are democratic so they get a pass. no this isn't whataboutism, this is pointing out the double standard.

Re: Why Governments Fail

#28

Post by virgil_disgr4ce »

lbriner wrote: post #6
oddmiral wrote: post #3

Every organisation has 3 major stages: newborn, mature, and old. When competition is present, old organizations are eaten by newborn organizations. Government is monopoly, so no competition, thus old organization must die first.

Are you saying that we should have competitive governments? Interesting idea! Unfortauntely, I think the states are too high at government level. Nothing too bad will happen when one trash company takes over from another trash company but what would happen if some random group took over the defence policy for a country because the current government didn't seem to be doing very well at it?

> Are you saying that we should have competitive governments?

If you have multiple different policies (i.e. laws) with no clear indication of what is legal/illegal, you have neither law nor government

Re: Why Governments Fail

#30

Post by slibhb »

mcculley wrote: post #24
slibhb wrote: post #7

Did the government fail? I don't know. We got a vaccine remarkably quickly and the governments (federal and state) distributed it efficiently. I don't blame the government for not taking the virus seriously to start with. SARS and MERS didn't pan out and people, on the left and right (including me), figured COVID would be the same. Some people predicted COVID would be bad but it wasn't crazy to think COVID wouldn't t…

Yes, the U.S. government failed. We should have implemented testing at scale immediately, found the infected, and paid them to stay home. While this would have cost a lot of money, it would have been less than the PPP and stimulus efforts.

I think this implies a historicist perspective. In other words, you tacitly demand that the government tell the future and act accordingly. Well obviously the government can't do that.

I think "failure" should be a question of incompetent administration. That is, once a policy is decided, how well or poorly was it carried out? It may be that the government failed at carrying out mass testing.

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