How did the US end up with such a system? It seems to be rather an outlier in the negative sense when it comes to government efficiency. Winner-takes-all elections?
E.g. one thing I‘d wish every legal system would introduce is an expiry date for laws - if a majority cannot be reached again after a set amount of time, the law would be removed. For efficiency this could be combined with an exponential backoff algorithm - e.g. the expiry dates are set 10, then 20, then 50, then every 100 years in the future.
And yet, here these things work all quite well. There must be something else. Maybe a continuity problem in government where a party switch leads to many public officials being replaced? Or are they just not paid enough, so you get the bottom of the barrel?
Public infrastructure has positive feedback loops, so if your neighbor canton has good train stations, you also want to have good train stations to connect to them.
You also don't want to depend on importing expensive oil, especially as a land-locked country.
Amazingly, some of it also comes from union contracting requirements. There’s some good reporting on NYC transit issues - hiring a dozen people to do the job of two, for instance.