Why Governments Fail
persuasion.community
persuasion.community
In other words, the mechanism by which lobbyists get their way is by weaponizing regular citizens into voting in their interests. It's marketing and mass manipulation rather than the "quid pro quo" corruption people imagine it is.
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.
It’s a sobering realization that none of our elected legislators are competent to actually write laws. Occasionally you’ll see an example where they’ll have a staff attorney draft something for the purpose of political grandstanding, but that’s a sideshow compared to the amount of legislation written by the people with the real power.
The dynamic of how the sausage is made in DC is why, incidentally, Trump had to go. For all his many many faults, one thing he did right was bring buying legal privilege in the form of laws or federal regulations to a grinding halt.
Even if they wanted to, they couldn't. Their staff offices don't have the payroll budgets to pay a decent analyst a living wage so their offices are staffed by the rich children of donors who can afford to be paid a pittance while living in one of the highest cost-of-living metros in the country. Smart legislative analysts are expensive, but none of them can afford to pay off student loans and raise a family at the payscales available to them. So they end up going into advocacy, big law, or lobbying once they cut their teeth on the Hill.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessm...
Also fundraising, public communications, and case-work are all bigger determinants of them getting reelected than legislative acumen or policy-making skill so big surprise what kinds of people the job selects for.
Philosophically opposed, whatever that means, is an obvious fig leaf. The system observably can’t actually be functioning as advertised. Whatever the conditions of the actual operationally descriptive system are, they select for people who vote as they’re told in exchange for a minuscule fraction of the loot.
Which means there is a problem even if the money never even touches a politician's / campaign's bank account. It's too easy for a politician to say something like "If elected, I will remove burdensome regulations on airlines" as a dog whistle for "I want the airline industry to buy ads that attack my opponent".
The only obvious ways to prevent that are to somehow prove that the politician coordinated their position with the industry (which seems impossible) or banning companies from ever expressing a political opinion (which apparently some politicians would like to achieve, but only those political opinions that they disagree with).
Fortunately there does exist one slightly less obvious way of preventing this, which doesn't require nullifying all the freedom of speech principles of the First Amendment. What is needed is a law (and probably an enabling Amendment) which limits political advertisements to N dollars per person per year (with N being 1% of the median US income).
Importantly, other forms of political speech and expression wouldn't be restricted. This way the law is targeted at the specific loophole that lobbying exploits, which is that people can be bombarded with a message against their wishes, generating an "illusory truth effect". People can still go out and find information, or march in the street to spread awareness of a political cause, but having more money wouldn't give you a greater ability to get your message in front of people who aren't interested in it.
The idea above is basically the core of CFR28 which is explained more in the relevant Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_reform_in_the...
But even though they outnumber the "big industry" lobbys they just don't have the money, connections, or influence.
Used to be called a free press, until we allowed massive mergers creating single companies with control of a massive media market share, and journalism trade unions to be eliminated, leaving journalists no choice but to cover what they're told.
Despite the mergers, there are still news outlets that produce accurate and in depth reporting, and of course it's possible to consume news from multiple opposing sources, but most people either don't care about the news or only care if it gives them a reason to hate the other side.
By contrast, ad based news gets most of it's revenue from vitality, shares, and clicks. They create hyperbolic headlines aimed to create an emotional response (usually highly negative) in order to induce people to click in a rage.
"Where do rich people hide their wealth in the West?"
"In tax havens."
"And where do they hide it in Eastern Europe?"
"In plain sight".
A free press won't do squat if there is no consequence for the behavior they expose. If neither the public nor the courts punish such behavior having a free press cover it will amount to very little.
That is a lot. Look at the competitive landscape in other industries. There are basically 4 tire companies, 4 or 5 home builders, 6 or so mobile handset manufacturers, 4 or 5 US based airlines... You get the picture. And all of those industries are still decently competitive.
(American here, so I don't know. But the idea seems insane to me.)
Usually, the "problem" they exist to solve is that some government functionary wants to look like they're "doing something", which is itself a form of corruption. Regulations also commonly serve ideologically-motivated belief that some faction has managed to force on everyone else. Everything else that is "corrupt" about proscriptive regulations follows from the fact that the belief in proscriptive regulations is a corrupt belief (and illegal under the US Constitution as it was actually written).
These are the types of regulations that can change on a moments notice, and that the American citizen has no knob to turn to influence once the paper to establish the Agency in question is inked.
Executive lawmaking was never supposed to be a thing.
I tend to disagree. Most regulations address some problem, and in fact, the rules around changing regulations are strict enough that most of Trump's appointees' attempts to do away with regulations were ultimately reversed by the courts.
Sometimes, the problem no longer applies. But, I don't just want to disagree. So I'll tell you what. Throw 3 or 4 regulations out there you think are insane, and we'll see if I can explain a real problem for at least 1. I'd bet I could with a single regulation chosen at random, but your choices will be anything but random.
> serve ideologically-motivated belief that some faction has managed to force on everyone else
This one is true. Like, I believe murder is wrong and want it to be outlawed. But there are tons of other beliefs - e.g. rich people should a higher percentage of their income - that are ideological as well as pragmatic.
Governments are a service that people buy, which we have collectively voted on, agreeing that there are things that a purely corporation driven society would not do.
It is a fundamental attribute of power that it corrupts, and any agency with the power to decide what is corrupt and enforce against other agencies /government bodies their idea of corruption - is pretty much all powerful no?
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.
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?
It's pretty hilarious both ignored discussing the current failing government: China.
- Came up with a 50% effective vaccine sinovac, and forces its citizens to take it
- 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
- Ballooning debt (they don't own global currency, unlike US), declining marriage/birth rate, middle income trap, unrest in many provinces
- 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_...
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.
a. as the other comment pointed out - they aren't getting a pass on this. b. Multiple news agencies reporting on failures of the government's response to the second wave of COVID (and as usual the government is reacting by clamping down on the louder voices - as they did with the farmer protests) c. the religious nationalism that embodies the current right-wing government of India has been a subject of op-eds for the past couple of years (not criticised loudly enough IMO)
I think it would be best to have a backup plan for what happens if China doesn't implode.
What does the debt buy them? If it buys them increased growth why even care? Assuming you can grow forever, you can get into infinite debt.
Can someone explain me to myself?
IMHO, (too much) inequality is fundamentally a problem because respective people’s power/influence in a market society (which we’re tending to) is proportional to their wealth — and that is intrinsically incompatible with the notion of participative democracy.
Imho Cowen makes obscure arguments to inequality not being a problem because he is paid from the Koch empire (for at least a significant portion of his career w/ George Mason University) which has put in significant resources into developing multiple Economic arguments their their wealth and influence are not a problem.
As a rule, when people try to remove inequality everybody gets poorer, not richer. Countries are more successful at reducing poverty when they focus on lifting all boats. India and China were communist countries in the mid 20th century. As a result of them abandoning that approach, we have seen the greatest poverty reduction in human history. Check the GINI coefficients of those countries, it isn't great. Ask Chinese/Indian citizens if they are wealthier now than 60 years ago and its not even a question.
Poverty is the water source argument - let's just have more water flow so that those that want to keep it in buckets can do so without affecting anybody's ability to drink. That's floating amount thinking.
Money is a floating concept not a fixed one. The fixed amount is the amount of hours a person has in a day.
Poverty is solved by distributing needs by hours and relegating money to the distribution of wants.
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?
If you have multiple different policies (i.e. laws) with no clear indication of what is legal/illegal, you have neither law nor government
(Competing state and local governments, federated together and governed by a centralized federal government, which grows over time as citizens of the states agree on what laws they want to enforce).
Most laws passed by the federal government were first experimented with at the local or state level, until a majority of the peoples’ representatives believed they should be applied universally with a centralized implementation. Of course there are many loopholes and exceptions in the US’s system, but this was one of the foundational ideas of the current constitution.
1. What constitutes a well regulated militia
2. Whether certain drugs should be legal to consume
3. At what stage of development human life begins
Moreover, I can't help wondering how popular such an amendment would be with voters, and with the two main parties.
What would change, however, is the temperature of debates about federal politics, and it would become harder for the two main parties to distinguish themselves and divide the population.
That being said, I don’t think any of these three particular things would become the underpinning of a society or an economy, to the extent that slavery was in the antebellum South. So, there probably wouldn’t be another Civil War fought over it.
I think the 2nd amendment one is the most interesting one to me, since our interpretation of it has become so distorted with the passage of time, and since we don’t seem to be converging over time on a consensus (unlike the other two, which were basically contrived for political purposes in the last generation). It’s almost impossible to imagine what the founding fathers would think about its application today.
Would companies State A (where drugs are legal) be able to trade freely with citizens in State B (where drugs are illegal) without an inspection at the border? Would citizens from State B (where guns are legal) be able to travel freely to State A (where they are heavily restricted) without an inspection at the border?
What laws could State B (where abortion is illegal) create to punish its residents for travelling to State A (where abortions are legal) to get an abortion? How would this disparately impact people based on wealth (i.e someone who could freely afford to fly to State A, vs someone who lives on a min-wage job)
Similarly it should be implicit from the existence and intent of the amendment that the Interstate Commerce Clause doesn't allow the federal government to render it null and void. I think it is a common legal principle that earlier, more general laws are overridden by later, more specific laws.
Finally, I don't think there is anything unique about this hypothetical amendment from the perspective of wealth inequality. There are plenty of things that wealthier people are able to take advantage of, including travelling to countries where the drinking age is lower, for example.
In Canada, police forces are compete. For example, municipality can sign contract with one of provincial police force or municipal police force, or create their own police force. This competition creates a positive feeback loop.
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 crashes and the whole thing collapses.
Then we have to rewrite the thing from scratch with the lessons we learned from the previous version. Unfortunately some governments make use of dark patterns that are bad for users but good for a few.
I'm done ranting...
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.
I would argue that what happens in practice is newborn organizations are eaten by old organizations. In fact, startups are being born these days with the express purpose of being eaten by a multinational.
There is no competition whatsoever between the old mammoths and the new things, and in fact it is the exception rather than the rule to see an "old mammoth company" disappear, fail, or be eaten.
>“Persuasion” stands for:
>1) A commitment to a free society in which everyone gets to pursue a dignified life.
>2) A belief in the social practice of persuasion, which necessitates free speech.
>3) A determination to persuade, not to mock or troll, those who disagree with us.
In my view, they are succeeding admirably in meeting these 3 goals.
[0] https://twitter.com/Yascha_Mounk/status/1278707858188664832
In particular, I see many obstacles to a "free society in which everyone gets to pursue a dignified life": healthcare costs, ongoing climate disaster, erosion of labor rights, rising nativism and authoritarianism on the far-right, etc. chief among them. To be as monomaniacally focused on "cancel culture" as Mounk (and many others on the center/right of the American political spectrum) strikes me as misguided at best and disingenuously self-serving at worst.
Persuasion seems to me a massive over-reaction to the minor injustice that is "cancel culture" wrapped in some self-important and grandiose rhetoric.
And generally, I find him to be the most prepared interviewer with the most thoughtful questions that I ever encountered in podcasting.
Yeah cuz the fortune 500 list is dominated by land-owners such as Facebook, Microsoft, and Google. Wealth inequality arises from capital concentration, of which land is just one of several forms of concentration. But the ability of large, powerful companies to protect intellectual property and harness network effects to derive large, reliable recurring revenues, which are passed on to shareholders, are other contributing factors. Tyler is a smart guy but is he like a fire hydrant at time that spews out things that are wrong or incomplete.
No. Wealth inequality is capital concentration. What you're saying is that rain causes rain. In actuality what causes wealth inequality is corruption. The financial sector has been extracting wealth from the people since the 70s. That's what causes wealth inequality.
It's a little ironic to use that as an example, because rain actually does cause rain. Falling water droplets induce a down draft which causes other water droplets to fall out of the sky as well. This is why water precipitates rather suddenly rather than as a constant gradual drip.
> In actuality what causes wealth inequality is corruption.
wealth inequality -> corruption -> more wealth inequality and so on.
I can't really say what is the root cause - but corruption IMO is a function of wealth inequality in action. Rich and powerful exerting influence to get more wealth and power.
The weird part is that if we assume that land owners are the only ones with the inequality, this is a self reinforcing cycle that keeps growing stronger to take over the entire country but yet somehow balances itself to keep interest rates and inflation low. They somehow control the entire economy and yet they don't have any effect on it at the same time.
If land owners are taking over the economy how come corporations were increasing their savings since 2000? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B057RC1Q027SBEA
Big Tech companies are not a real estate business. To believe that they are indicates extreme confusion about what a company like Netflix does. To shoehorn them into culpability for rent seeking in the housing market is to substantially miss the point.
yeah it's hard to be risk-taking when you aren't a tenured professor, I suppose. Moving is expensive and time consuming. Tyler says this same line in every interview, about how people need to move more and how people are too averse to risk and complacent. But there is plenty of risk-taking though. Look at all the speculation in crypto, or young people making huge, speculative options bets on r/wallstreetbets, or the web 2.0 tech scene. Coinbase went public a few weeks ago. To say there is stagnation or aversion to risk taking , goes against the empirical evidence otherwise. Also, entrepreneurship has a high failure rate and is very expensive on an inflationary-adjusted basis (insurance,eadvertising, rent, marketing, etc all very expensive). Unless the VC bears the risk by writing the check, I cannot blame people for choosing to not start businesses.
I do think there is some underlying insight here in terms of risk ability.
From my view a lack of safety net, healthcare specifically tied to employment, is a big reason people can't afford to take those risks like you mention.
I wonder if there is further research? hard to control..
One counter argument I found this pdf has some hard stat examples despite our failings US still leads entrepreneurship:
- expect to start new business US 16.4, UK 11.1, France 17.2 - 3 Month new business US 8.9, UK 5.1, France 3.1 - France slightly wins survival .8, UK US tied .7
Towards the end of the article, he seems to argue GDP lifts all boats?
But the Fed seems to acknowledge that they specifically took their 'foot off the gas' because inflation was #1 priority, and that black and brown Americans were not actually 'lifted.'
Monetary policy alone isn't enough because so many Americans don't own the means (stock) nor the land (seems basically free infinite money driving up housing and valuations).
But good news Fed seems to have changed, will now use race and income equity as a policy factor for the future.
https://www.enterpriseresearch.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017...
People want to take lucrative risks, but they don't have the money to do it right, and the opportunities just aren't out there. It's not that people need to move more or take more risks, it's that there is demonstrably less opportunity out there today because our governments are corrupt and have destroyed the economy.
Is this really representative? What %-age of each age-cohort engage in speculation on WSB or play around with crypto? I'm just assuming as well here - but i think that WSB speculation is being done by a extreme minority with a lot of people just looking at them for entertainment. Is there any data you would be able to share?
Really enjoyed it.
That is not true. Flu is significantly less deadly for the same age bracket. You have to compare young healthy people dying from flu with young heathy people dying from covid.
Here is a more direct link to the graph [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/figure/...].
Covid is too new, and we’re too unclear on how widely it is spread to have solid CFR or IFR data at this point. NYC did a decent study post outbreak early last year however using antibody tests that is probably not complete junk. You can read one of the many studies here [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...]. The pertinent quote is probably - “ City. Our estimated infection-fatality risk for the two oldest age groups (65–74 and ≥75 years) was much higher than the younger age groups, with a cumulative estimated infection-fatality risk of 0·116% (0·0729–0·148) for those aged 25–44 years and 0·939% (0·729–1·19) for those aged 45–64 years versus 4·87% (3·37–6·89) for those aged 65–74 years and 14·2% (10·2–18·1) for those aged 75 years and older. In particular, weekly infection-fatality risk was estimated to be as high as 6·72% (5·52–8·01) for those aged 65–74 years and 19·1% (14·7–21·9) for those aged 75 years and older.”
I do see the wild differences in the estimates. This one is interesting. https://www.nbc26.com/news/coronavirus/cdc-estimates-covid-1...
Population wide, across all risk groups (including very low risk), it appears IFR (a typically lower end number anyway) for COVID is .9-1.5%.
Which is anywhere from 50-100x higher in real crude fatalities, if I’m squinting correctly.
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.
The unmasking of incompetence is real, but much less clear is the degree to which it occurs and whether it's the exception or the norm. But it's very easy to assume it's the norm from what one sees on a Facebook wall (and on a different Facebook wall, or in a different group, it's very easy to assume it never happens or all reports of it are overblown).
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.
I don't see why these have to be mutually exclusive goals. Arguably, there are better ways to get an entire society to cooperate toward a goal without resorting to authoritarianism. This sort of societal engineering is demonstrated in religions, cults, and political tribes all the time. If we can harness it at the scale of an entire country, or even a majority of the world, we could accomplish quite a lot. It's been done before, and today's technology could theoretically enable it at a level that's never been seen in human history. Though we currently seem to be experiencing more of the dark side of the whole phenomenon.
https://www.businessinsider.com/seatbelt-car-habit-obligatio...
Because that was the message in the echo chamber they didn't know they were in.
1) In my country, some of the same scientific advisors to the government on the COVID response, are also criticizing the government for requiring masks to be worn outdoors in deserted streets, even though the science says that the risk of transmission there is negligible. They say that this kind of "hygiene theatre" can ultimately diminish the state's authority to mount efforts that truly matter to stopping the spread. A problem is that the outdoor mask law also appears to discourage outdoor exercise (even if people could exercise in a mask, the psychological barrier is real), and exercise is something public-health experts naturally want to encourage, even during the pandemic.
2) In some countries, the authorities have eased up on restrictions, or kept them on the books but ceased enforcing them, after the broad population flaunted them. Ruling parties are sensitive to what the population is willing to accept, lest unpopular restrictions cost them the next election.
Now put those two facts together, and people refusing en masse to wear a mask outdoors (while continuing to responsibly wear masks in crowded open areas and in indoor spaces like shops and other people’s homes) might be effective in ending a measure that even actual public-health experts say is pointless and oppressive.
Which is not to say that freedom is never worth restricting. My general point was that I prefer American notions of freedom to East Asian notions of freedom.
What you're talking about is the harmonization of all interests around a single ideal, something that never ends well (including Plato's attempt in Syracuse). It's been criticized to death by liberal philosophers, in my opinion rightly.
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 "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.
This quote is demanding that the government has access to future numbers, isn't it?
I don't agree that it was obvious what was happening in March. It's only obvious in retrospect.
Now we pay the price.
They got rich off it
This is a common excuse about every bad plan after the fact; that the critics are expecting decisionmakers to have been psychic. It scrupulously ignores that the critics were offering the same critique at the time.
It scrupulously ignores anything specific to the problem being discussed. It's the "no one could have known" or the "it's easy to be a backseat driver" defense.
> 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?
All people with responsibility agree with you, which is why they carefully avoid formulating a policy.
It would be different if we had never before experienced a pandemic. It would be different if we did not have the examples of countries and cultures with effective implementation of testing at scale while we did nothing.
This defense of inaction is like leaving potholes alone because doing the obvious thing might cause harm somehow.
It may be fair to describe the lack of available tests a failure. All the PCR testing sites near me were 100% booked whenever I checked and the state did nothing (as far as I know) to tell us where we could get tested. Perhaps that could be described as a failure. But the rhetoric from you and the other poster is post-hoc silliness. Neither of you seem to be aware that you're expecting the government to tell the future or what the drawbacks of that might be.
For a taste, consider that citizens blaming the government for 9/11 plausibly led to a years-long illegal wire-tapping and at least one clearly unnecessary war.
When a government fails to do something about an entirely predictable outcome, that is not just an error, it is also a failure.
You have a really surprising way to view things: All governments can be excused for inaction or even the wrong action with this logic.
I spent three years with my company selling into the Trump administration. I had a solution to the American energy crisis. After my company closed, because I couldn't get a call back to save my life, I learned that there were no people at the offices I was calling. Trump left 35% of the renewable energies offices unappointed.
I'm bringing this up because no one here is mentioning the elephant in the room. Trump completely eviscerated the CDC epidemic watchdog groups, the CDC funding allocated for emergency response, and the FEMA funding for epidemic response. Our government didn't fail. We lacked infrastructure to chase the answer we needed in a timely fashion.
Looking back at all we've lost, this grave time will actually spur a much larger scope of growth over the next 20-30 years. We will have another roaring twenties. Yet, here in the US, people walk around talking about how little the government works or how incompetent lawmakers are. Well, it's not all of them. Just enough of them that they keep the system gummed up.
Term limits are the singular answer the US needs, now more than ever. It could beat back the corruption we see from the likes of McConnell and Pelosi, two people more concerned with their grip on power than actual for-goodness changes. But as long as Trump remains relevant, we will see a vast division among lawmakers, which will destroy infrastructure built by the government to help people. The voting rights laws being rolled back in Georgia are a fantastic example. However, on the grand stage, those same supporters can never win any real gains. This boils down to the fact that his backers do so based on a lie. As long as that lie exists McConnell and Cruz, and their like, can never engage in any advancements for fear of being killed by Trump's base.
If Trump had followed his supporters to the Capital on Jan. 6th, our government would have failed. We were close. It's a good thing he's more interested in tv ratings than reality.
We have some examples of "failed states" where the average people still live better than in many of the states with "good and responsible" government.
Some examples from Europe, which may have been controversial:
- Italy & Greece - big country debt, corrupt government, but average people still own more property ("richer") than people in north European countries like Germany with "better" and "more competent" governments.
- Russia, Belorusia, Serbia - corrupt government that tends to suppress human rights of its citizens, but still during the covid pandemic the restrictions of basic human freedoms were much less than in countries where human rights are most important, without significant impact on the corona casualties.
> Covid-19: Russia admits to understating deaths by more than two thirds
> Russia’s true death toll from the novel coronavirus pandemic is not about 57 000, as official figures claim, but more than 180 000, the country’s deputy prime minister, Tatiana Golikova, conceded at a press conference.
> The figures mean Russia ranks third in the world in terms of deaths from covid-19, behind only the US and Brazil. It would also give Russia the fourth highest per capita death rate, about 1273 deaths per million population, behind only San Marino, Belgium, and Slovenia.
Maybe good government matters more than you thought.