Americans' Confidence in Institutions Stays Low
gallup.com
gallup.com
Not all institutions are the same; some are better than others and we shouldn't just accept problems and corruption. But why do people keep believing big talkers who say they're going to magically eliminate all those things and make it run like a hyper-efficient 5-person business?
IMHO, much of it is people looking to get elected by looking for problems and things to complain about, rather than looking how to get things done.
Without time to examine it in detail (I've got to run), I'd hypothesize that most of what's important in the world is accomplished and has been accomplished by large institutions.
The trend since Reagan / Thatcher years (neoliberalism) and anti-government free market fundamentalism threatens this constructive partnership where private sector and government were both rivals and partners.
On the one side you have "starving the beast" (think Grover Norquist, Tax Pledge), defunding critical programs to the point of dysfunction. Does it surprise anyone that the IRS is underfunded by Congress to pursue tax evaders, as Congressman are lobbied to keep loopholes open?
Another calamity is NASA's Earth Sciences, the part that studies Earth itself (climate change, etc).
On the other side of the isle, the dems have failed to make government /efficient/ and a visible positive force in the daily lives of average people.
(1) https://www.amazon.com/American-Amnesia-Government-America-P...
>...On the one side you have "starving the beast" (think Grover Norquist, Tax Pledge), defunding critical programs to the point of dysfunction.
With overall taxes paid as a percentage of GDP about the same as they were in the post WW II era it isn't clear how there has been much "starving the beast" https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FYFRGDA188S
What has changed since after the WW II era, is that the spending on the safety net is many times larger than it was earlier. Even with overall spending going up, this has resulted in less spending on federal R&D, infrastructure, NASA, etc.
>...anti-government free market fundamentalism ...
Offhand, I don't know of any economist or politician who has said they believe in "free market fundamentalism" - as such I don't think the term is useful as it just becomes a label used to poison the well and prevent meaningful discussion.
The Dems fail to provide an alternative narrative; they let the GOP frame every issue and the debates are over before they begin.
Lecture brought to you by The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA (http://www.computerhistory.org/)
TL;DR: The foundation for the SV was laid by the US government in WWII. Only on that basis did private enterprise build the industry.
From today's point of view, WWII saw today unimaginable spending - huge waste! - by the government. On research, research, more research and infrastructure, and more infrastructure, and even more research. Imagine even half the amount they spent back then announced today (in today's dollars). The cries about government overreach and waste and "oh my god the debt!" would shake the North American continent down to 5 km below the surface.
Teams of people are good at solving problems that individuals could not do by themselves, nothing new there. On the flip side of this hypothesis, the most grievous acts have also been committed by teams of people.
Accountability and transparency are the important factors here.
- Corruption. money gets access
- Elected government folks over promise and under deliver.
- Elected government folks' priority is getting reelected.
- Unelected government folks have far too much power
- Lack of accountability for wrongdoing and incompetence
- Waste of taxpayer money
- Good people don't want to run for office because the scrutiny is too high
> Corruption. money gets access
Back in the day, money used to buy votes and offices outright.
> Elected government folks' priority is getting reelected.
That's always been the case.
> Unelected government folks have far too much power
The power of the administrative state contracted dramatically during the Reagan/Clinton era. Measures like price controls are taboo today, but were seen as a standard tool of governance in the 1950's and 1960's.
> Lack of accountability for wrongdoing and incompetence
Government is way more transparent today than it used to be, both voluntarily and involuntarily. The FBI's investigations into MLK took about a decade to come to light. The NSA's activities are being leaked almost in real time. U.S. covert missions in other countries used to take decades to come to light. These days, we all but have a play-by-play of every drone strike.
Another example is that the morals of our leadership are subject to more scrutiny than ever. JFK was literally raping young women in office. George H.W. Bush had a mistress that everyone in knew about. But the media never talked about any of that--there was a code of silence about that. But that code of silence is dead today. Obama is probably one of the most morally virtuous men to hold the office--if he wasn't his failings would've been plastered 24/7 across the Internet.
I'd argue that peoples' increased cynicism is not a response to government getting worse, but peoples' expectations getting higher because they have more information about everything.
I'm pretty sure that most people that work in hospital billing have little notion of how terrible a process it is. They just think they are doing the best they can given the situation (nevermind that the institutions have created the situation). For example, I was discussing a bill with someone (I was complaining that it seemed high) and their unimpeachable logic was that I shouldn't care about how much it was because it had already been applied to my deductible. Yes, they actually said something along those lines.
Mostly, I think the way to fix broken institutions is to dismantle them.
And then what?
Because a new institution is going to sprout up in its place. Maybe some aspects (e.g., medical billing) will be improved. But there will still be a new institution and it will still have lots of bugs, some new and some old.
Your suggestion is like noticing that a few modules of an XX MLOC code base suck and then deciding to rewrite the entire code base.
You might decrease the code base. But probably not by an order of magnitude.
You might fix some bugs. But you'll sure as hell introduce new ones, too.
You're definitely going to end up spending a shitload of money.
And eventually, assuming your software is actually used by real people, your beautiful new code base will become a cluster fuck for the same reason the old one did.
In most cases, the wise move is to actually identify the problems and solve those, leaving in place the solid components that actually work well.
Just like the XX MLOC codebase, institutions aren't the problem; rather, they are the inevitability. You won't get rid of them by throwing away the ones we have now, and in most cases you're better off fixing bugs than starting anew.
Discarding and replacing those can be expected to have different dynamics than rewriting functions.
(the processes that an institution formalizes are certainly more relatable to code)
I mean, the cynics are correct, but they're also more than a little responsible for perpetuating that system by setting the bar so low.
[The] power of accurate observation ... is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
That's true, but most of it is, and I don't think that's entirely accidental. Many cynics are cynics because society expects them to be. People mistrust the government before they really even understand what it is.
>It's just that when a population is trained to recognize and dismiss cynics that is frequently what they become.
I would argue the population has been trained to be cynical in order to disengage them from politics, lead them to expect nothing from the system, and make them more easily manipulated. It does seem evident that there is a feedback loop between the cynicism of voters and politics.
I actually agree. However, I think the discussions we need to be having are ultimately cynical. We need to be able to tolerate it. The opinion you've just expressed is terribly cynical and that doesn't undermine it's legitimacy.
- Sabotage and subversion. (It is easy to forget to add this one to the list...but there is probably quite a bit of this going on at various levels).
- Lack of "Jokers" or lack of the right kinds of them...? [1] [2].
The Jokers bit is interesting. To quote [2], "Jokers are crazy, sadistic bastards who care nothing about the group benefit (so they don't consume it), but they do care about destroying things. They usually do so while cackling and making bad puns. They closely resemble Cesar Romero, Jack Nicholson, or Heath Ledger (depending on the decade), or sound like post-Star Wars Mark Hamill (the best Joker of all time)."
Interestingly, in a public goods game involving Cooperators (your good institutional contributors), Defectors (your bad actors), and Jokers, there are three possible outcomes:
1. Without Jokers in the game, Defectors do better than Cooperators.
2. With semi-effective Jokers in the game, an indefinite cycle of (a) Cooperators doing well, then (b) Defectors taking over, then (c) Jokers beating out Defectors happens.
3. With super-effective Jokers in the game, they take over and beat out both Cooperators and Defectors.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.3257
[2] https://thegoodreads.quora.com/Why-The-Joker-and-Not-Batman-...
I'm sure there's any way to have both of these be managed. If you give more power to elected officials, they have even more incentive to get reelected. If you take power away from them, the elections just matter less.
No project, much less institution, is "set and forget". Nor can any individual continually nor consistently "do the right thing" in the face of ongoing personal threat and insecurity.
Not every aspect of life benefits from loose, disposable relationships.
Professional, nor personal.
DMV (motor vehicle bureau/department) Post Office Police/Courts Local schools Social Security
Our government is not monolithic. It's vast (ranging from SS, military, FAA, FDA, NASA, etc etc) and on the state level as well.
But seems many Americans' experience are mostly with these front line departments and quite often it is not quite positive.
But many of us do not see beyond this and want to tear down everything regardless of how essential many of these agencies/services are.
I'm sure there's a term for this, but I don't know what it is.
It's hard to see locally, but we're a country that's deeply divided on some core issues. Half the country wants gay marriage, the other half doesn't. A single-payer-advocating socialist almost won the Democratic primary, where his opponent is talking seriously about trying to "roll back" the ACA ("Obamacare"), this president's legacy domestic policy achievement.
I feel like half the country wants to become more like Europe -- more socialist, higher minimum wage, high taxes, big social safety net, free universities, lots of job protections (and the reluctance to hire that goes with it), minimal/no religion, less marriage, whereas the other half wants to step back about 50 years to picket fences, nuclear families, and a more isolated national existence.
We aren't going to have another civil war but I wouldn't be surprised if, looking back, we're more ideologically divided now than the country was, then.
closer to 2/3 : 1/3 than half/half [0]
The same degree of division with different geographic and class distribution could very well not have similar results.
we definitely need term limits.
also, much like Soylent Green, companies are now 'people'...
Corporate personhood has also been a well-accepted legal practice since the 19th century.
The development patterns of the last 75 years, with their spreading out of people, have caused huge problems here, causing people to be physically distant from one another, eroding a very natural support network.
Additionally, we've lost powerful charitable forces over the recent decades: religion and unpaid women. Wealthy wives, being expected to stay home with the kids, were hugely important in social work. Now that church influence is in decline and women are paid for their work, we have to pivot to other institutions for support structures. In the US, we've not quite gotten that next generation of support figured out.