Does anyone else feel like all of our institutions are crumbling in real time? And to the degree they still work is a product of momentum?
That being said I only saw 3 (eastern) states, maybe it's different elsewhere.
The high variance in road quality and cost is a very visible example of how varied the effectiveness and efficiency of individual State governments can be in the US.
Cross walks that cross 3 lanes (each side)with traffic going 40mph and no signal.
Stop signs that doesn't tell you if the intersecting direction stops or not.
Half-assed painted gutters for bike lanes.
Places with 4 signs to indicate when you can park, each with different (sometimes overlapping) times and conditions.
the list goes on.
There’s brain drains from some states to other states.
What we are seeing is shifting tides of a large country that makes it easy to move from coast to coast
51 years ago was 1971.
The bottom 50% of American's control 2% of the nations wealth. Helping the plebs simply isn't going to be profitable. All that to say, yes, I worry about crumbling institutions.
I first thought about this while considering the rise of SaaS software. Software sold with a one-time cost, an honest transaction, is dying. Perhaps common people simply don't control enough wealth to make honest software worth while. Instead, companies want our data they can sell to other wealthy entities. "Common people are out there, they don't possess any wealth to speak of, but we can spy on them and sell the data to other wealthy people."
Overly generous tax breaks, bailouts, "cancelling debt," etc. etc.