How the Hell Do You Govern in a Complex World
howthehell.substack.com
howthehell.substack.com
Less federal and state government, more local government.
After decades of not being involved at all, I was shocked how easy it was to get involved at the municipal level and what kind of difference I could make.
Also: stop depending on government. Want schools to improve? Go volunteer. I cold called a high school and got involved in a FIRST robotics team and it's been amazing.
Having more people working on providing basic services is a good thing. We are an incredibly productive species: we need to use that increased wealth to improve the quality of life for people. Government is one way to do that.
Volunteering is nice but it’s not the answer to systemic problems. I’m glad that you found a concrete way to contribute and find joy in doing so for your community... that’s great! But it’s not something that can replace Government or public funding.
Agreed - a prominent example of this in the UK in recent years is the sharp rise in volunteer-run food banks. Which was a reaction to the huge cuts to public services, in both funding and availability, driven by our government's toxic right-wing ideology.
It's great that people stepped up to help, but it shouldn't have been necessary, and indeed wouldn't have been if things were being run effectively and for the benefit of all.
One charity trains seeing eye dogs in the US -- costs about $40,000 per person helped. A cataract surgery in India can cost as little as $40.
Best research on (and framework of thinking about) charities comes from GiveWell - https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities over 10 years of research on this topic.
Overall, I would say that for any given problem, it should be handled at whichever level results in the fewest coordination/externality problems, with ties being broken in favor of more granular control.
Every municipality (well, at least state, but usually county and sometimes city) does have the option to develop and enforce its own electric code. For the most part they've converged on a standard National Electric Code developed by an industry consortium, without any Federal requirements.
This has almost never happened without the threat (implicit or explicit) of regulation. The only time large corporations willingly standardize is when they have control over the entire market, and standards are a tool of cost cutting more than as a means of enabling cooperation with other companies.
This just makes too much sense for either the "More Local!!!" crowd or the "More Federal!!!" crowd to ever get behind. None of them ever want to concede the common sense fact that most of the time, "It depends."
Should we have more federal control? It depends.
Should we have more local control? It depends.
Control of what?
Are there coordination issues?
Is anyone's human rights trampled?
What are the externalities?
Can local governments other than SF and NYC actually afford the infrastructure and resources required to control whatever it is we're talking about?
Can states other than Cali, Texas, and NY afford it?
On and on.
These are not simplistic issues.
A local or state government can't provide healthcare or a military, because then everyone else freerides. Just live in the low-tax state and move if you get sick, or bank on them if there's a threat.
Certain things depend on the feds not because they'll do it well, but because they'll do it less badly.
He has had much influence on the people of Utah today. Utah gets high rankings from various places about being well-run. I've read repeatedly in state status reports on covid-19, that Utah has among both the lowest death and unemployment rates in the USA, during this pandemic. Here is one article (admittedly this one is sponsored by the Gov's office): https://www.ksl.com/article/50105209/utahs-covid-19-economic... . But I see such things in the news from time to time.
So teaching correct principles and letting the people govern themselves seems to be a valuable consideration, probably among others that have been mentioned here.
Also, self organization is an important feature of a complex system.
The problem with appealing to the Founding Fathers is that they were profoundly uninterested in equality of opportunity, due to who they were. It is a useful exercise to consider what they would have done — that does not itself demonstrate anything.
Slavery eventually eliminated (before most other nations), at tremendous cost not appreciated by many benefiting from that payment.
Colonial slavery oppressed conquered people's on their local soil where they were the majority. This is hard to keep up for a global power constantly at war with its neighbors.
American slavery oppressed ethnic minorities ripped from their homeland and taken to a different continent. Slaves had a harder time coordinating rebellions as they were not a single conquered peoples, and were in the minority so couldn't count on winning battles of attrition.
American slavery, like the Roman version it was patterned against, could have continued for hundreds of years if not for the Civil War.
Colonial slavery though was a lost battle from the start. Colonial powers needed to develop their colonies, but the moment you do that you increase the chance of successful rebelion. The only way to defuse it is to reduce the oppression.
The Founding Fathers didn't have a shared opinion on the issue, and the only concrete action they jointly took was directly protect it and to bake in extra political power for slavers.
> but had to compromise lest the fragile Union break before it could form
The people those founding fathers who wanted slavery eventually eliminated had to compromise with were also founding fathers.
1. The Founding Fathers were products of their place and time. Many other countries engaged in the slave trade and employed slave labor, and women played a similar role in other societies. Racism and sexism were commonplace around the world during their time. You can reasonably argue that American slavery was uniquely cruel and long-lived if you want, although I would say that position downplays the horrors suffered by slaves under other governments.
2. The Founding Fathers, for all their faults, were clearly very poignant observers of human nature and history. They thoughtfully designed an extremely successful form of government that has inspired countries around the world to copy their model and arguably contributed to material prosperity unparalleled in history.
None of that is to discount what you're saying, but it's only one piece of the puzzle.
Are there better people, today, who could lead the country? Of course. Will they ever actually be elected to do so? Sadly, no.
America in the late 1700s was a weird moment in history where educated, forward-thinking intellectuals (not nobility, not just the moneyed elite — actually a lot of men who (mostly) deserved to be called intellectual) actually had a chance to make the rules. They made pretty good ones. Some flawed rules, but good ones.
We're not going to get that again. The real-time feedback of TwitterDemocracy would prevent us from ever getting a document as general yet meaningful as the Bill of Rights, with basically unfettered rights to speech and assembly.
So until I see a viable path to put people in charge who actually surpass them in wisdom and foresight, I'm going to stick to what they put forward. It has aged and worked amazingly well, and have 0 confidence that the politicians of today, if starting from scratch, would do better.
And FWIW, there are (by most measures) no other democracies out there which have gone as long under peaceful rule of law as the US. Every other democracy (save by some measures the UK) has fallen to coup or revolution in less than this duration.
Their latest constitutions may work to keep them stable as long as the US has managed. Or they may not. Time will tell.
Are you taking the end of the US civil war as the starting point? If so, then Switzerland has a longer duration of peaceful rule of law.
Even if you do count from the end of the civil war, I would not consider my central thesis destroyed by the small and frankly uniquely weird country of Switzerland. Switzerland is a country that has done very well for its people, but the lessons which have kept it stable and safe over the past two centuries (have a lot of mountains, and don't be worth invading) are not ones which extrapolate out.
And let's be honest -- Switzerland was not functionally independent in WWII. It wasn't necessary to invade, because they did whatever the Third Reich wanted with their stolen gold and borders. This is not the stability I am looking for.
Would you say that Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political thought has been valuable and influential in the world?
What exactly is your central thesis? It sounds like you're presenting an argument of American exceptionalism, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point here.
The real outlier in the US is gun rights.
It has aged well only if you ignore the fact that millions of Americans who were at first considered property, and then “freed” only to be incarcerated and discriminated against, don’t have a say in what “well” means.
Politicians of today understand today’s problems and are better equipped to find answers to those problems. They are armed with a team of educated aides and have access to political science research. I’m confident they could devise a better, modern constitution today.
I agree, though, that the Founders did create something remarkable: a genocidal empire that draped itself in ideals of equality and righteousness when it was largely built by slaves and exploited workers; professed to love diversity and Christian morals as it genocided untold numbers of Native Americans; styled itself as a defender against European imperialism in the Western Hemisphere while it built its own empire and repeatedly intervened militarily in Latin American countries; claimed to be in favor of free markets while using its military and police forces to suppress workers/foreign governments to favor American corporate interests; and so on. It really is a remarkable project.
Let's be honest. The Founders were wealthy landowners that wanted to create a political system that favored themselves, while deposing the British powers that were a rung above them.
That's good if the status quo is working for you. It's not so good if you're somebody who the system fails for.
The really horrifying part is that there are people in the latter group who imagine that they're part of the former. The system is failing them, but for a variety of reasons they're convinced that any change will make it worse.
Much of the time, it's because they've been played off against other groups who are also having problems in the current system, and told it's a zero-sum game: if they do better, you must be worse. If you just keep revering the "founding fathers" eventually you too will be successful.
The worse they do, the harder they revere. It's a vicious cycle, and I have no idea how to break it.
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/colonial-complai...
Does not compute.
Defence is a sovereignty matter.
I thought we knew this for 2000 years now, since Punic Wars.
Russia nor any other country won’t take the risk to be nuked in return if they’re not facing evident life-threatening events.
As a Russian I would certainly negotiate with the invader on how to split and share the invaded country.
I would say nuclear weapons in general are posthumous weapons.
> I will not interfere in your lives in any way, neither as a tyrant nor as a friend. I will not light up the night sky, but neither will I block out the stars.
But I think the Swiss, in this hypothetical world, still misunderstood Russia's defense position.
> The only way, in which I shall “govern” is that I will take the nuclear football with me, and should we get invaded, I will nuke everyone. Not just the invading force, mind you, but literally the entire world.
The error in the article is, that the complexity of the world stems from formal government. This is partially true but not entirely. The social, power, business, human, legal etc. structures would continue to exist regardless of whether someone governs them. The nature of the complexity would change but it would not disappear.
You're supposed to do what the voters voted you in for.
Delete this comment, then?
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-signs-executive-order...
At this point, I don't even know why presidents promise anything... we only have a choice between 2 of them...
We know they'll be able to give you at most one or two, but it's not really their job anyway. Most of those promises are the jobs of legislators, not executives. But people imagine that they're learning how that person will execute, a thing that's a little hard to convey otherwise.