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Comment by chroem- | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's just me, but generally I would expect a higher level of competence from the leaders of our public and private institutions, than "throw bodies and money at the fire" would imply. If there had been any sort of long term planning or disaster preparedness, we wouldn't be forced to choose between our personal wellbeing and the continued operation of our economy. Unfortunately, that long term thinking fell outside the scope of next quarter's earnings. The fact of the matter is, the emperor has no clothes.

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> generally I would expect a higher level of competence from the leaders of our public...institutions

Speaking from the American perspective, I think people broadly assume a level of competence in elected leaders but either aren't able or simply don't care to seek out and identify leaders who meet the standard. There are a lot of factors in play here - time, attention span, media, political polarization, etc - but at the core it feels like there are huge numbers of voters today who simply don't appreciate how hard it actually is to do these jobs well.

There's a quote from the West Wing that sums this up pretty nicely:

"Yeah, but a funny thing happened when the White House got demystified. The impression was left that anybody could do it."

> there are huge numbers of voters today who simply don't appreciate how hard it actually is to do these jobs well.

I would put it a bit differently: there are huge numbers of voters today who simply don't appreciate that nobody can do these jobs well. Not with the expectations voters currently have of them. The solution is to lower expectations: stop demanding that the government solve all problems, and limit it to the few proper functions that it can actually perform decently.

> limit it to the few proper functions that it can actually perform decently.

I have many thoughts on this subject and HN isn't really the best venue in which to articulate them, so let me just say this: in democracies, people tend to get all the government they deserve.

An engaged electorate which values competent administration, interrogates candidates on their qualifications, and votes according to merit will probably get a highly effective - though perhaps mildly sociopathic - government.

An apathetic electorate which dismisses qualifications, abhors nuance, demands ideological purity, and votes (or doesn't!) emotionally, well...

> An engaged electorate which values competent administration, interrogates candidates on their qualifications, and votes according to merit will probably get a highly effective - though perhaps mildly sociopathic - government.

Can you give any actual historical examples of this state of affairs?

You don't need to look very far: countries like Denmark, Germany, and New Zealand are high-functioning democracies that exist right now.

Depends on your definition of "high functioning" and "democracies", I guess.

> Depends on your definition of "high functioning" and "democracies", I guess.

Well, let's take Denmark for example.

They typically record more than 80% participation in elections; they score 9.22 out of 10 in The Economist's democracy index (7th globally); they score 1.87 out of 2.5 on the World Bank's government effectiveness index (also 7th); and the population consistently views their government favorably and reports high levels of satisfaction in their personal lives.

I'm not really sure that there's any other more closely fitting definition of a "high functioning democracy" than one in which the population is repeatedly shown to be prosperous, happy, and broadly engaged.

> An engaged electorate [...] will probably get a highly effective - though perhaps mildly sociopathic - government.

> An apathetic electorate [...], well...

...will get a ineffective and massively sociopathic government.

Nice "small government" propaganda. Surely the private sector can do these jobs better, right?

> If there had been any sort of long term planning or disaster preparedness.

Any politician that would have said "hey, we need to prepare for a global pandemic" would have been a laughing stock. Bill Gates knew (see ted talk), the rest of us didn't.

I think the only teacher we accept is a pandemic itself. Therefore I'm very happy it's Covid19 and not something worse.

Let's hope we learned our lesson and are prepared next time.

> Bill Gates knew (see ted talk), the rest of us didn't.

This assertion is false.

Generally speaking competent governments routinely do threat level risk assessments.

For example previous UK governments produced comprehensive pandemic response plans:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_Cygnus

In the US the Obama administration produced a pandemic playbook.

Obama gave speeches highlighting the threat of pandemics and left a fully staffed pandemic response team:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-pandemic-preparednes...

However:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/25/trump-coronavirus-n...

I hope this is not seen as a political attack but presentation of facts.

Some governments are simply more competent than others.

Sure, but let's be honest here: nobody cared. I know I didn't care, and my neighbors and friends didn't care. And we are the ones voting for people to govern our country.

Nobody cares until shit hits the fan.

And the above theory complies with practice. If you look at the countries that were able to properly handle Covid19, they had similar cases before. The people over there were already wearing masks. Not because they are smarter, but they were just always closes to the action.

I know myself (=male ;)): I don't learn from somebody telling me something. I learn by hitting my head against the wall, and then say "hey this person was right, let's avoid doing that". The rest of the world seems to have the same strategy.

Just my observation.

But you are right that other people looked into it, but I just have the impression that most of us really didn't care (including myself)

>But you are right that other people looked into it, but I just have the impression that most of us really didn't care (including myself)

I'm with you about not caring enough about pandemics before. But this is where bureaucracy can shine: hire somebody whose entire job is to care about a niche thing. They usually don't need a huge budget to get a good foundational plan set up: one person, a computer, a phone, and proper security clearance.

One of the problems with the current administration isn't that they value some things less, but they have a drive to undo their predecessors' work.

In the case of Trump, my impression is he purposefully set out to undo anything Obama had done as some sort of weird, childish, vendetta. That aside, in general though I think these things happen because rulers are looking to reduce taxation for the rich, and things like "pandemic response team" are pretty well hidden from public view, and can usually blagged ("we kept 10 million face masks as an emergency reserve" fading to mention that's a day's worth, say, or that they were out of date, or not the right type of mask).

It's not just the politicians though: the private sector deserves just as much of the blame. Watching this unfold from inside BigCorp has been truly eye opening. In a company of 100k people, nobody thought about preparedness or risk management. Instead, BigCorp bought its own stock on margin, and now it has to throw thousands of human beings at a worsening viral pandemic in order to generate cashflow. People are going to die so that the company can stay in business.

I have to say, my opinion of Elon Musk has lowered as a result of how he's handling this situation. If he can't get things sorted here on Earth with regards to a pandemic response, how is it going to work out in 10 years when he has a Mars colony to govern? Is there even any plan for how a Mars society is going to proceed in these conditions?

I guess its time to dust off the ol' Zubrin material and catch up with where things are these days, vis a vis the human factors of a Mars colony, but the seriously feudal rants of Musk lately are disheartening to say the least ..

I don't know if you are running your own business, but it's just so hard to take into account all kinds of possible risks. It's just impossible to work like that. Most of the time you gamble which resources to put where. Else you end up in analysis paralysis.

We're talking about very large businesses. Risk analysts should have been anticipating a pandemic given the several near-misses (Ebola, SARS, MERS, H1N1, ...) that we've had recently. If you're a large business that risk is going to be significant enough to consider.

When I took family holiday insurance in early January, I had to check that pandemics were covered, and they were specifically mentioned. So I'd expect them to be a general part of risk analysis.

A pandemic that's covered by insurance is a massive risk for an insurance company, so it's always going to be a paragraph in business insurance, I'd expect. Which should raise the question, "as this can't be insured against, for us, what's our contingency".

> I think the only teacher we accept is a pandemic itself.

It does seem that way.

> Therefore I'm very happy it's Covid19 and not something worse.

That's a truism, I suppose. But it's perhaps too early to conclude that it won't become much worse.

> Let's hope we learned our lesson and are prepared next time.

Sure. But the requisite changes might be more than people will accept. Such as traveler quarantines, and other restrictions on international air travel.

In 2005 President George W. Bush clearly stated that we needed to prepare for a global pandemic. No one laughed at him for that.

There are some strains of avian flu that cause a ~50% fatality rate in humans. Those aren't very transmissible between humans, but a mutation could change that.

“Bill Gates knew (see ted talk), the rest of us didn't.“

Let’s not make Gates into a superhero here. A lot of people knew what would be coming but got ignored.

I don't know why anyone expects competence from public elected officials who just collectively represent our own stupidity since they're elected by the general population.

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