To understand what is wrong with the west, think of libraries
vaghetti.dev
vaghetti.dev
I hate when people complain about government inefficiency or incompetence when the government is being opposed and sabotaged. My county’s DMV has been nothing but a pleasure to work with. When a government system in the west is failing it’s because it’s probably underfunded or weaponized (such as punishing unemployment insurance rules).
False premise: Most librairies in the United States were funded and built by private philanthropy. See: Carnegie Library
>"Sometimes you can even take the books to your home!"– Now imagine libraries didn’t exist and some politician came around proposing we create libraries exactly as they are. What would you expect to happen? I can tell you what I would expect to happen: Nothing at all: What about the authors and publishers? What about the bookstores! People will just steal and/or destroy the books! People don’t even read anymore! I am quite confident they would never get built in any major western democracy today.
If it's difficult to build libraries today, political will is not a limiting factor. Rather, technology has slowly but surely rendered the storage of dead trees as obsolete in all but a few circumstances (i.e. archival analysis) Just as we stopped using street cars when buses and cars proved to be more maneuverable and efficient, one shouldn't advocate a reinvention of the 19th century library simply because it delivered a unique benefit once upon a time.
Also Carnegie built the libraries under the provision that local governments would sponsor them going forward. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_library Furthermore today libraries have started to adapt by loaning digitally.
I was going to argue street cars were victims of GM but apparently you are mostly right. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_con... and https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c87l40/i_hav...
See DMV.
Ehh... Cars are something like an order of magnitude less efficient than street cars.
Street cars are definitely more efficient than buses, unless the buses are also electrified.
they do too much to be innovated away, perhaps the book part could be but they do digital borrowing too so it's unlikely. Libraries only go away if we lose sight of how much they impact our community and are no longer willing to pay for them as a society.
I think we "stopped" using street cars because cars became more affordable and made less expensive housing around the edge of cities (suburbs) possible. I've lived in a city which never got rid of streetcars, and has a good transit system; and many cities are bringing back such systems.
> because it delivered a unique benefit once upon a time
Do modern libraries not deliver benefits still? Or are you arguing that the benefit of lending paper books is in the past? I think that most libraries are adapting to their users, and have taken on new (digital) pieces in their collections -- but I do think there are still a great need for ordinary paper books for a lot of users.
It is my understanding that libraries serve as much more than storage places, but as community hubs. For example for many people the library is the primary place to use computers and access the internet.
Unfortunately modern (digital) libraries cannot currently be built in a way that would deliver on many of the greatest inherent benefits of digital technology (unlimited readers, free delivery to anyone in the world via the internet, unlimited sharing and copying, automatic translation into readers' preferred languages, no limits on number of books taken out or reading time, etc.) without running afoul of copyright law.
>"The status quo provides marginal individual benefit to the person making the decision while also causing marginal harm to society as a whole. Doing the right thing doesn’t really provide much tangible short term benefit."
This explains exactly why the majority of people living in a dictatorship don't try very hard to do all the things that they need to do if they want to change their own government.
They need to do things like finding out what is the truth about their government, and telling other people what that truth is. But doing that requires individual self-sacrifice, and most people, most of the time, don't what to do that.
All the other civilizations have large powerful governments that intervene in their society. The West's strength comes from the fact that governments are generally restrained, slow, and more power and freedom is given to individuals. Governments are supposed to not be able to get anything done.
Most of the highlights of Western Civ have been a result of collective action. If anything the libertarian mythos that was synthesized in the late 70s is our greatest weakness.
Look at Russia - The government, but more specifically Putin, just set the country back 20-30 years with one bad decision. China is on a hot streak, but the same could happen to them. What happens when Xi looses his mind? Or dies? Or when the economy takes a prolonged downturn?
Democracies win over the long term because they bet small and lose small.
Libraries aren’t being built because, A. We already have a lot of them in the west, and B. Typically they begin as part of a major philanthropic gift but right now our philanthropist class is focused on eradicating diseases and going to space.
just like it's not ambiguous that libraries are a net positive, it's not ambiguous whether we need more housing and infrastructure. it's not ambiguous that we should deal with climate change. the inaction is not because of ambiguity, it's because we are unwilling to make short-term sacrifices. it's because there is no shared belief in a greater good.
these are the kinds of decisions that were, for whatever reason, more easily made in the past than now. Look at the New Deal.
Climate change is a good one. The threat is real. It is at the door, but unfortunately democracies and capitalism will not really react until it is kicking the door down.
Europe avoided the Hitler problem until they invaded. US avoided Hitler and Japan until Pearl Harbor.
I am agreeing with the author. Democracies need to be stoked into action. Other forms of government are more likely to act quickly, but perhaps rashly. That is my point.
You might upset the economy a bit. Maybe someone will call you an idiot. But at any rate you made some jobs and nobody died. Nobody is going to demand sanctions unless someone is being badly abused.
We did not spring into action with the pandemic. The only thing we did was make the vaccine, and we can't even keep up with the variants with that.
If we really "Sprang into action" we would have small thermal cameras in our phones by now that would warn us of fevers.
We would have grates in the floor making a constant downward airflow, and vents blowing HEPA air in the ceiling in major public spaces.
Cashiers would have barriers and small filters making walls of clean air indefinitely, not just "Till the worst of the pandemic is over" It would be such a big industry they'd have advertising projections on the acrylic.
Busses would have the same thing.
We would have "Trying to get your employees to work sick" become a 10 year sentence kind of felony.
We'd have subsidized masks that actually do something, with battery powered fans.
We don't do these things because we accept infectious disease as part of life, and there's basically no interest in actually stopping it with any kind of sustainable long term technical evolution like we did with sanitary sewers.
It seems the current system is considered good enough.
Given where we are with COVID, that seems like it would have been a massively wasteful over-reaction.
You can raise the floor, just like you can drop the ceiling.
> that seems like it would have been a massively wasteful over-reaction
At least this person has some creative ideas for saving lives and actually evolving our society, so that we don't lose a million people to the next airborne virus, which I have little reason to believe won't happen next time.
That seems beyond optimistic.
I think you've demonstrated the above commenter's point that
> there's basically no interest in actually stopping it with any kind of sustainable long term technical evolution
I for one am not looking forward to the next killer airborne virus.
Instead, I found all the talking points to refute such extremist critiques, and a thoughtful expansion to problems afflicting western liberal democracies. Good read, very thoughtful.