Why Governments Fail

Why Governments Fail
persuasion.community

I was going to say the same thing!

I would be interested in breaking down the question into much more comprehensible chunks such as, "What does a Government do that they are unable to do effectively by definition?"; "Is there a balance between public and private sector providing services to the taxpayer and how do we decide the balance?"; "If a Government is necessarily slow-moving, what is the correct way to achieve fast-acting and tactical solutions that will be accepted by the public when the time comes to do them?"

I think a really common issue is that Governments are seen as a single entity, when in fact they are more like an ever-changing combination of ideals, abilities and pragmatism. The UK Government is not the same now as it was even 6 months ago, so learning lessons never really works. Any retired Politicians going to face the music for a decision made 10 years ago?

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 turn into a pandemic.

The countries that did well with COVID are mostly islands and East Asian countries. I doubt the "Chinese and Japanese are really obedient"-type expanations. I wonder if some East Asian countries had antibodies from similar viruses that flew under the radar and granted partial immunity. That's pure speculuation...but even if those countries suceeded due to law and order, that's a double-edged sword. Do we really want to build our society to survive viruses with the fewest causalities or are there perhaps higher ideals (freedom, self determiniation) that we should aspire to? And of course there's no freedom without the freedom to be wrong.

> And where the world needs to head is to establish new means of producing credibility and good reputation that are robust to current technologies. What we’re now calling “populism” might turn out to be the least of our problems.

In terms of populism stuff, I think there's some truth to the idea here that the internet has led to the unmasking of leaders/government as incompetent. To some degree, modern populism consists of people recoiling in horror after realizing just how dumb you can be while holding power. But it's easy to notice other people being wrong and quite hard to do any better yourself. Mostly, these populist movements seem bereft of ideas and are just expressing incoherent outrage.

It will be interesting to see if the internet makes it possible to have better, more accountable governments. I don't discount the possibility. The thing that worries me is that, in my opinion, more transparency is in some sense the problem. We learn about governmental incompetence via the internet but the internet also turns politicians into influencers, and that's a signiciant part of the problem too.

I think this is true in some cases, but not necessarily in all the issues we today. We're all just human and we all make mistakes. I think the part where it is ok to think we can do better is in how we handle those mistakes. It seems that most leaders tend to be hypocritical, blame the 'other side' for failures, and even ignore failings. Of course, it seems that's the way people get to be in power in the first place in the current political environment, so the people who act differently rarely stand a chance at the federal level.