[HN Gopher] Why Governments Fail
___________________________________________________________________
Why Governments Fail
Author : seriousquestion
Score : 80 points
Date : 2021-04-26 15:05 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.persuasion.community)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.persuasion.community)
| slibhb wrote:
| Did the government fail?
|
| 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.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Also didn't they change the definition of a pandemic in 2009
| such that it wouldn't have even been a pandemic prior? I read
| that somewhere standby...
| https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/89/7/11-086173.pdf
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I think the Internet (in particular, the social media a lot of
| people are consuming their news from) is really good at
| providing anecdata, but really bad at giving perspective to
| determine context and how to fit the anecdotes into a bigger
| picture. Because of, for example, correlation algorithms
| determining what someone reads in their Facebook feed and
| trying to maximize the topic for engagement, a person chasing a
| few threads of stories of incompetence can quickly end up with
| a wall that is nothing _but_ such stories. And even if one
| doesn 't use Facebook, other spaces are vulnerable to the same
| effects... Chasing Reddit karma involves posting stories that
| the majority will upvote, posting controversial-but-true
| content in many topic-specific fora will result in some form of
| moderation or loss of karma-equivalent, and so on.
|
| 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).
| mcculley wrote:
| Yes, the U.S. government failed.
|
| 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.
| slibhb wrote:
| I think this implies a historicist perspective. In other
| words, you tacitly demand that the government tell the future
| and act accordingly. Well obviously the government can't do
| that.
|
| 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.
| mcculley wrote:
| I do not demand that the government successfully predict
| the future. In March 2020, it was obvious what was
| happening in other countries. We were informed by the past
| and the present to determine how to respond.
| slibhb wrote:
| > While this would have cost a lot of money, it would
| have been less than the PPP and stimulus efforts.
|
| 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.
| mcculley wrote:
| It was obvious to me and many others. I posted on March
| 11, 2020 that we should get our shit together and test at
| scale, as South Korea and other countries with effective
| government were doing. I was not demanding supernatural
| prognostication, just competence.
|
| Now we pay the price.
| 8note wrote:
| It was obvious to the government what was happening.
|
| They got rich off it
| captaincurrie wrote:
| I'm a moron and I realized in March 2020 that testing at
| scale is the main pillar of any pandemic containment
| strategy.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > In other words, you tacitly demand that the government
| tell the future and act accordingly.
|
| 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.
| slibhb wrote:
| Doing nothing is a perfectly fine policy. In medicine
| they say "first, do no harm".
| mcculley wrote:
| This is the most contrived apology for incompetence that
| I have read. I am quite amazed.
|
| 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.
| slibhb wrote:
| I'm arguing for a distinction between _being wrong_ and
| _failure_. I don 't see anything from you (or the other
| poster) besides rhetoric. Apparently we should have "just
| known" that this virus was going to be a disaster. And
| evidence of this was "I knew" or "other countries knew".
| Great, and half of HN "knows" there is imminent
| hyperinflation.
|
| 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.
| mcculley wrote:
| "post-hoc silliness"? In March, we had seen what had
| happened in China and Italy already. We were watching how
| other countries were investing. We chose not to invest.
|
| 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.
| slibhb wrote:
| Not excused but forgiven.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "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._" italics for
| emphasis
|
| 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.
| yosito wrote:
| > 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?
|
| 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.
| slibhb wrote:
| It seems clear to me that "religions, cults, and political
| tribes" that enforce uniform behavior are by definition
| restricting freedom.
|
| 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.
| yosito wrote:
| Plato's famous works were about this. One of his ideas was
| to create the perfect state in which good behavior didn't
| have to be enforced by laws, by instilling people with an
| internal sense of morality that they willingly want to
| follow. Early Judeo-Christian societies were built around
| this idea. If people are doing what they want to do, and
| that aligns with what society needs them to do, then their
| freedom doesn't have to be restricted.
| slibhb wrote:
| Yes, The Republic, and Plato's last dialogue is called
| Laws and it describes a state governed by laws. Judeo-
| Christian societies were and are based on deontology i.e.
| the ten commandments.
|
| 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.
| mcculley wrote:
| This is a false dichotomy. We don't have only U.S. apathy
| and East Asian collectivism as our choices. We could invest
| in public health infrastructure. We won't, but that is
| another topic.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I don't understand the whole "freedom" argument against basic
| public health and safety guidance. Almost everyone wears
| their seatbelt in a car and doesn't complain about how their
| freedoms are being taken away in the name of safety. So why
| is this not the same with masks and distancing? Why is it
| that people think refusing to wear a mask transforms them
| into Braveheart, fighting for freedom against oppression?
| Sensible precautions against an airborne deadly pandemic are
| not attacks on self determination.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > Why is it that people think refusing to wear a mask
| transforms them into Braveheart, fighting for freedom
| against oppression?
|
| 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.
| shuntress wrote:
| >Why is it that people think refusing to wear a mask
| transforms them into Braveheart
|
| Because that was the message in the echo chamber they
| didn't know they were in.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Because masks were promoted as protecting others, not the
| wearer. This didn't recognize that people put their own
| needs ahead of others. Seat belts can protect _me_ in an
| accident. So I wear them. With masks, (especially if I am
| young and not at much risk) I think "if someone is afraid
| of the virus, they can just stay home, why do I need to
| change what I do?"
| ModernMech wrote:
| It's just because masks are new. People had the same
| negative reaction to seatbelts when they were first
| introduced, citing inane things like "it might wrinkle my
| shirt" as a reason not to wear them.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/seatbelt-car-habit-
| obligatio...
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| Is it a problem when a government fails? Is it an ultimate goal
| to have "good" government that doesn't fail? What if "failed"
| government is sometimes a feature and not a bug?
|
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4975
|
| > 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.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| Eh. Not be disrespectful of the talk but the US excelled in the
| one thing it excels at more than most. Money. Raising enough
| money to buy vaccines en-masse. That was to be expected. The
| parts that didn't need money, ie closing down key sectors of
| public life, restricting freedoms of civilians in state of
| crisis, wearing masks, social distancing led to one of the most
| atrocious response to a pandemic this side of the past century.
| Even Central African ebola outbreaks are generally well contained
| (Reasonably) and those governments really don't have the money to
| invest in science and medicine as the US. Other than that tid bit
| I disagree with, the talk really doesnt talk about state-craft
| how I imagined they would, more focused on specific examples and
| instances. Trees in the forest if you will but a great talk to
| listen to while doing some work!
|
| Really enjoyed it.
| varispeed wrote:
| The problem is that nobody cares about corruption, or the so-
| called "lobbying". Big companies get their way at the expense of
| regular citizens meanwhile police and other agencies are busy
| enforcing big pharma monopoly on drugs. Most governments run
| until they are exposed and people are mad enough to march on the
| streets, or they simply run out of "their" monopoly money. To
| improve that we need a ruthless agency that will remove
| corruption from politics once and for all.
| naravara wrote:
| This misses the actual mechanism by which political corruption
| works. Lobbying is merely any person going in to press their
| interests with their representatives. Where large, monied
| interests rig the game is because they run election campaigns
| and implant narratives in the media.
|
| 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.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > weaponizing regular citizens into voting in their
| interests. It's marketing and mass manipulation
|
| 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.
| ..
| billytetrud wrote:
| I think there is a lot more quid pro quo than you think.
| Lobbiests are NOT usually just regular people. They're
| usually paid agents.
| imtringued wrote:
| I think he made a distinction between lobbying which anyone
| can do and a lobbyist which is a career whose sole goal is
| to do nothing but lobbying.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah - I basically agree with this framing.
|
| I think Lessig's talk is the best summary of this: https://ww
| w.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.
| tacocataco wrote:
| I must have watched a different ted talk he did on the same
| subject. I think it was called "the green primary"
| User23 wrote:
| Put more simply, lobbyists are just the bag men. They
| facilitate payoffs that are laundered through junkets, book
| deal advances, insider trading opportunities, and who knows
| what else. The lobbying firms certainly have little or no
| idea why the proposed bill they are selling was crafted.
|
| 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.
| naravara wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| User23 wrote:
| That's more strong evidence that the system really
| doesn't work as advertised. If it did then the people
| that supposedly have the power of the purse and control
| trillions of dollars in spending might vote themselves
| enough budget to do their jobs.
| salawat wrote:
| They certainly voted themselves out of the legislative
| work of actually understanding technology.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Asse
| ssm...
| loki49152 wrote:
| Lobbying is a form of self-defense against the real corruption
| - a government that has assigned itself the power to interfere
| in our day-to-day lives. Most people today take it for granted
| that "regulations" must exist because they solve some actual
| problem.
|
| 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).
| simonh wrote:
| Just for clarity, it seems that when you say regulations,
| you're really talking about laws.
| salawat wrote:
| Specifically of the Administrative form (read: delegated to
| the executive in their definition by Congress)
|
| 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.
| jrwoodruff wrote:
| >a ruthless agency that will remove corruption from politics
| once and for all.
|
| 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.
| sbacic wrote:
| There's a funny joke about that.
|
| "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.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I think you're missing the other half of the problem, which
| is that people actively seek out "journalism" that confirms
| their world view, regardless of whether it is true.
|
| 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.
| billytetrud wrote:
| This is only a problem for hype-based ad funded news. Our
| news is so bad today because it's ad funded, instead of
| subscription based. With a subscription, you read a source
| you trust and that source has an incentive to keep you
| trusting it by giving you interesting information.
|
| 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.
| pietrrrek wrote:
| One could argue that subscription based news orgs are
| incentivesed to provide you news which would ensure that
| you stay subscribed. For some people these news would
| have to be factual, but, for IMO most people news which
| are either not fully factual, or omit some information
| would be "preferred" as long as they (the news) conform
| to the opinion of the subscriber.
| billytetrud wrote:
| People have their biases, and people like to be
| validated. I agree. I just don't believe that people
| satisfying their biases would have much of a market in
| primarily subscriber-oriented news. Even todays
| subscription news is driven by clicks and shares in a
| misguided effort to compete with free news.
| haecceity wrote:
| It's not a problem! Maybe it is a problem but China is even
| more corrupt!! They're gonna fall apart any day now! We don't
| have to be worry about ourselves look at China!!!
| paulpauper wrote:
| If otherwise young, healthy ppl were dropping dead in droves
| because of this, then I think there would have been more more
| mobilization, cooperation, and compliance, but the later data
| showed Covid only being slightly more deadly than the flu for
| young and middle-aged people instead of 40x as deadly as
| originally feared.So the urgency and concern began to dissipate
| by mid-2020 when the studies came about affirming a much lower
| IFR than originally feared. Second, many of these European
| counties, which early on seemed to have contained the virus owing
| to superior policy decisions and praised by the media while Trump
| was heavily criticized, had major second, third and even forth
| wages by late 2020 and 2021. This show the difficulty of
| ascribing blame either way due to the inherent unpredictability
| and virulence of Covid.
| watwut wrote:
| > Covid only being slightly more deadly than the flu for young
| and middle-aged people
|
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Do you have the numbers? I would specifically be interested
| in the 09 swine flu, which is one of the strains which
| affected younger people more than normal.
| oddmiral wrote:
| Every organisation has 3 major stages: newborn, mature, and old.
| When competition is present, old organizations are eaten by
| newborn organizations. Government is monopoly, so no competition,
| thus old organization must die first.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > old organizations are eaten by newborn organizations
|
| 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.
| TrispusAttucks wrote:
| I have to agree.
|
| 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...
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| This doesn't seem in agreement with the parent comment, and
| is a much better analogy than a mere 'government as something
| that will eventually die'.
|
| 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.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail.
| nslice wrote:
| Yes I agree. It's difficult to switch to a new code base
| (government) because the legacy system (current government)
| also has authority (most citizens recognize government with
| the most enforcement), incentive (lawmakers want to keep
| their power), and power (military) to keep itself there
| indefinitely.
| lbriner wrote:
| Are you saying that we should have competitive governments?
| Interesting idea!
|
| 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?
| gen220 wrote:
| This is what federalism is!
|
| (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.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I can't help but wonder how the American political system
| would look if an amendment passed which gave the individual
| states the ability to decide for themselves:
|
| 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| You'd have drug and gun smuggling between states, and
| abortion tourism between states.
| gen220 wrote:
| This was tried with Slavery, it was very popular with the
| two political parties, and it led to a civil war, whose
| conclusion was: no, states do not get to decide on
| slavery, and additionally they do not get to secede if
| they disagree with the federal government.
|
| 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.
| oddmiral wrote:
| Some form of competition is nice to have. For example, it's
| better to have a parliament than a dictator, because parties
| will compete with each other to fit people needs (or oligarch
| needs, if democracy is broken).
|
| 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.
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| > Are you saying that we should have competitive governments?
|
| If you have multiple different policies (i.e. laws) with no
| clear indication of what is legal/illegal, you have neither
| law nor government
| paulpauper wrote:
| >. I'm just saying the observed increase in wealth inequality in
| these nations goes away when you abstract from land. So capital
| is not the problem. Let's deregulate building.
|
| 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.
| billytetrud wrote:
| > Wealth inequality arises from capital concentration
|
| 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.
| anikan_vader wrote:
| > What you're saying is that rain causes rain.
|
| 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.
| billytetrud wrote:
| Well, that's interesting to know. I still wouldn't say rain
| causes rain. Rain may be self-reinforcing, but there is
| generally some other far more significant catalyst.
| Regardless, I hope you got my point.
| giantg2 wrote:
| There's a lot in here. I was going to make some quotes and
| comment about some of this, but it's a pretty diverse set of
| topics.
|
| 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.
| jonathannat wrote:
| The discussion is a bit all over the place. The main points are
| that EU failed vaccination, and US failed covid testing
| (Statista disagrees https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104645
| /covid19-testing-...) , as well as having a decline of
| innovation and movement (disagrees here, people moved
| everywhere during covid, and US came up with tons of effective
| vaccines)
|
| 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
| fossuser wrote:
| > "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_...
| jonathannat wrote:
| > They're even here downvoting you
|
| Nah, if I had to guess, it's some of those patriotic
| Mainland Chinese living in beautiful democratic countries
| like US and Canada.
| imtringued wrote:
| > Ballooning debt
|
| 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.
| hungryhobo wrote:
| > Came up with a 50% effective vaccine sinovac, and forces
| its citizens to take it
|
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| The Indian government hasn't gotten a pass, they are being
| widely criticized in international news and social media.
| But there are significant difference in degree. China
| clearly is far worse on censorship and punishes dissent
| more harshly.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| People have been predicting China's government to fail since
| 1948. If Mao couldn't do it with his disastrous communist
| nonsense it's going to take a lot. The CCP has cleverly
| pivoted to Chinese nationalism (the wolf warrior diplomacy is
| for internal consumption).
|
| I think it would be best to have a backup plan for what
| happens if China doesn't implode.
| lbriner wrote:
| > I didn't see a solid definition on how a failing government
| is defined
|
| 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?
| paulpauper wrote:
| >Cowen: There's been a decline in entrepreneurship, a decline in
| the rate of innovation, a decline in people moving across the
| country. People are bringing up their children in highly paranoid
| ways. Just general risk aversion is going up quite strongly.
|
| 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.
| billytetrud wrote:
| People have gotten poorer in the last 40 years in the US.
| Quality of everything has gone down, the most expensive things
| in life (housing, health care, transportation) have all gotten
| more expensive in comparison to incomes and more difficult.
|
| 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.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| Still need money to own stock. Huge % of Americans are food
| insecure let alone able to put money into Robinhood.
|
| 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...
| pradn wrote:
| The crypto/wallstreetbets world shows there is some extreme
| risk-taking at the margins. But this is not the sort that's
| important, I think. The rate of entrepreneurship is declining
| in the US, perhaps due to higher corporate concentration or the
| cost of not having regular benefits (healthcare primarily). The
| effect of such a decline is much more pronounced when
| multiplied by the hundreds of thousands of communities that
| small businesses like restaurants impact.
| spencerrodgers wrote:
| Out of all the comments here, I'm glad to see so many bring up
| the one and only reason any governments ever fail on their own -
| corruption.
|
| 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.
| tacocataco wrote:
| CGP Grey's "Rules for rulers" is worth a watch. (like everything
| he posts, favorite YouTuber by far)
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation!
| captaincurrie wrote:
| Why Governments Fail: The CIA overthrows them or the US destroys
| them.
| jl2718 wrote:
| These are all reasons why governments fail to do anything useful.
| But we have numerous modern examples of dysfunctional
| kleptocracies persisting for generations. Governments fail, as
| in, stop functioning entirely, for only one reason: they go
| broke. If the money keeps flowing, they don't care about any of
| this stuff. Sure, go ahead and vote. If that had worked in those
| countries, they wouldn't have become dysfunctional kleptocracies
| in the first place. Just watch; they'll all go broke before even
| considering reform, and then only in exchange for more money.
| drummer wrote:
| Persuasion is mind manipulation. It seems like the intentions of
| this group are good, but you know what they say about the road to
| hell. In any case, governments fail because they are founded on
| corruption, that is, the belief in authority outside of the
| individual. Which is basically slavery. Such a corrupt system
| that goes against the universal right to life will always fail.
| fabbari wrote:
| Something about the statement 'So inequality is not the problem,
| poverty is the problem' is wrong. I can't quite put my finger on
| it -- it sounds along the lines of 'So falling from the 20th
| floor is not the problem, hitting the sidewalk is the problem'.
|
| Can someone explain me to myself?
| ls612 wrote:
| You implicitly (and are not alone in this) place negative value
| on the "wrong people" or even on other people in general having
| more, even if you are no worse off. It stems from the human
| brain being very perceptive of hierarchy and wanting to move up
| the totem pole by any means necessary.
| lordloki wrote:
| I don't think that's a good analogy for the statement given. I
| think a better analogy would be "the difference between your
| floor and the top floor isn't the problem, falling out the
| window is the problem."
| ssivark wrote:
| Nice analogy. I think that Tyler Cowen statement is a symptom
| of Procrustean thinking from someone who starts reasoning not
| with an understanding of how humans _are_ , but starts
| _"logically"_ from the principles of economics and how humans
| _ought to be_ per the economics rule book.
|
| 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.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Inequality as some level of uneven distribution is not a
| problem iff that distribution keeps the lowest percentile above
| poverty. In the real world this doesn't happen, because not
| only is the distribution not bounded for minimal fairness, it
| has been shifting by those who have capital to further push
| value upwards - so it's a problem that never self corrects.
|
| 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.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| I appreciate the honesty when it comes to the naming of this
| group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasion
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| Here's the rationale[0] for the naming of the group:
|
| >"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
| the_benno wrote:
| Personally, I'm a little less convinced of the 1st bullet
| point.
|
| 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.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| A quick glance at the contributing authors makes it obvious
| as to what one is being persuaded of.
| throwaway823882 wrote:
| Clickbait title is clickbait. Not a single mention of why
| government fails from the past 5,000 years of history. The entire
| discussion is US-centric. And they don't conclude why governments
| fail.
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