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This is probably the greatest argument for big government. If we were to eliminate the supervision of the establishment over the safety and security of everyday

• digi_owl 8y ago
  I seem to recall running into a claim that the original idea of the republicans was that the government would be a check against coercion, be it physical, emotional, economic, or otherwise.
  • yosito 8y ago
    Seems the current Republican establishment is the exact opposite of that ideal.
    • ythn 8y ago
      Libertarians are the new advocates for small government. Libertarians = Arch Linux (lean, mean, minimal) Everybody else = Windows or Mac (i.e. huge operating system that tries to protect users from everything under the sun)
      • xd2024 8y ago
        snap Yep, this is going in my cringe compilation.
        • pretendscholar 8y ago
          Keep /pol/ memes on /pol/.
      • Facemelters 8y ago
        This is what happens when engineers receive very little formal liberal arts education. Cringe.
        • dqpb 8y ago
          My experience with liberal arts education is that it teaches you how to talk and what to say, but not how to think.
          • Zimahl 8y ago
            That's the anti-college talking point that republicans like to preach to the uneducated masses. It's absolutely designed to devalue what is actually being taught in higher education, allow for the easy dismissal of soft sciences. And once you can dismiss soft sciences, you can certainly dismiss the hard sciences with guilt by association. I earned my CS degree from a liberal arts college and took my share of liberal arts classes. But the name doesn't directly infer a political slant - there isn't an indoctrination that the right would like to say happens. Certainly some departments will have slants to them (women's studies, african american studies, etc.) but that doesn't mean that the scientific method gets forgotten at the door. Research still gets done and still gets reviewed. Certainly moreso than what happens on Fox News.
            • frockington 8y ago
              Majoring in a soft science is one of the least helpful things a human can do to themselves and society. As an engineer, sitting in on the required liberal arts classes felt like a seminar on group think and what aboutism
              • megaman22 8y ago
                It's not so bad if you stick to some of the harder, or at least more rigidly defined liberal arts areas. Philosophy, Classics, and History (if you pick your way carefully) can be among the less squishy. If you go back to things that are at least 100, 150 years old, but not so far back that written records no longer exist, you can avoid most of the worst excesses of critical theory and similar politicized stances.
• gbacon 8y ago
  Politicians and civil servants are subject to behavioral concerns too. Who will watch the watchmen?
  • WilliamEdward 8y ago
    it doesn't have to be an endless hierarchy of people looking over one another. For example, we could watch the people that watch us.
    • peacetreefrog 8y ago
      Even if we're all watching each other, we still all have our own incentives and not so obvious irrationalities.
      • aalleavitch 8y ago
        Then the problem becomes identifying and accounting for these incentives and irrationalities.
        • dqpb 8y ago
          We don't even have a handle on what constitutes rational incentives/behavior, let alone irrational ones.
        • loa-in-backup 8y ago
          We solved these kind of problems: electronic systems in space have multiple redundancies, where the result returned by most of them is picked as input to other systems. This ensures that one system's quirks are kept in check
    • hanshan 8y ago
      >we could watch the people that watch us. If this were possible, there would be no authority
      • 8y ago
• throwaway37585 8y ago
  What makes you think government is immune to these concerns? If anything, they can be more susceptible to certain kinds of adverse effects.
  • acjohnson55 8y ago
    I agree with both you and the original poster. It's really important to have a culture of government accountability and iterative improvement. This has proven difficult in practice, as a sense of continuity and tradition is a hallmark of stable governments. But I think it's important to keep working toward that goal.
• bigpicture 8y ago
  I don't think economists agree with the concept of Big Government. Here's an entertaining back and forth between Thaler and Gene Fama about the efficient market theory [1]: > Q: So policy makers should use bubbles as a way to step in? > Thaler: Yes, but very gently. It’s not like I think policy makers know what’s going to happen, but if they see what looks disturbing, they can lean against the wind a little bit. That’s as far as I would go. We both agree that markets, good or bad, are the best thing we’ve got going. Nobody has devised a way of allocating resources that’s better. > Fama: We disagree about whether policy makers are likely to get it right, though. On balance, I think they are likely to cause more harm than good. [1] http://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2016/video/are-markets-efficient http://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2016/video/are-mark...
  • ppeetteerr 8y ago
    Economists rarely have a good solution to societal problems. They have good solutions for facilitating trade but offer nothing with respect to social norms, nationalistic sentiment, etc. We all agree that economists are good at maximizing resource allocation. Sysops are good at maximizing hardware allocation but we should let them dictate national policy :) Politics is about taking all of the science and all of the human components of administrating a country and merge them into an ideal outcome. Economics is just one part of a bigger picture.
    • dqpb 8y ago
      I disagree that economists are good at maximizing resource allocation as they largely ignore externalities.
      • realitygrill 8y ago
        but economists invented the term "externalities" and the analysis of such..
        • ItsMe000001 8y ago
          How good are they, especially with dealing with the unknown unknowns to quote a famous contemporary American philosopher (/s)? Even for the known unknowns, they have to make assumptions to start somewhere. Yes, they create a lot of models for all kinds of stuff, and I'm sure all those models work out well. I must say though that I have doubts about the parent's "they largely ignore externalities", I think that is too negative a claim.
• rvern 8y ago
  No, this is one of the greatest arguments for small government or no government. People are more rational when the cost to them of being irrational is larger. Voting for good policies is a public good. When a voter is one among three hundred millions of citizens, only 1/300,000,000 (on average) of the benefits of the vote befall the individual voter. This gigantic externality means that the democratic market will severely underproduce votes for good policies. Simultaneously, social desirability bias means that voters have a strong incentive to believe in policies that are harmful to them but that make them look good to other people. Since the cost to them of being wrong about politics is so small and the benefit large, voters have gravely irrational beliefs. This conclusion is consistent with the results from social science that show that voters are ignorant about politics and with the widespread agreement with protectionist tariffs, price controls, restrictions on immigration, and many other policies that cause great economic harm.
  • jknz 8y ago
    > Voting for good policies is a public good. When a voter is one among three hundred millions of citizens, only 1/300,000,000 (on average) of the benefits of the vote befall the individual voter. Typically, voting results are highly skewed towards 50/50, say in most elections in democratic regimes with fair elections. This was the case for Brexit or the popular vote in the US 2016 election for instance. For an election whose expected result is close to 50/50, each voter is highly influential; intuitively, if all but one voter are decided and produce a 50/50 draw, the last undecided voter has complete power. Since a lot of fair elections are approximately 50/50, undecided voters have far better influence than 1/300,000,000 for a population of 300,000,000. In an approximately 50/50 election with few undecided voters, it is quite cheap to swing the results by bombarding the few undecided voters with ads. Mathematicians use this concept coined "influence" of a variable, or "influence function" to analyze properties of random boolean functions in percolation for instance.
    • StanislavPetrov 8y ago
      One of many reasons that offering false, contrived, binary choices in a world defined by its complexity is always a losing proposition.
• JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > This is probably the greatest argument for big government The article talks about institutional inertia. The advantage of a market economy is your Blockbusters get replaced by Netflix. Imagine if film renting were a public agency. It would be much harder to disrupt. Governments are, by design, immortal. A crucial design decision is choosing what, in our society, we want to be immortal and what we want to be replaceable.
  • Retric 8y ago
    Netflix is still mailing out DVD's and library's have both computers and books. Which is very telling, most often new methods supplement existing systems not simply replace them. The real transition has been cheaper shipping costs replacing the need for local retail and that's been spreading across the economy for decades. Further governments are often first adapters. Many legacy government IT systems exist, but as they generally work and cost less to maintain than replace. Really the advantage of free markets is information exchange and diminishing returns not simply building large scale systems. Consider, some cars come with built in refrigerators yet we ended up with roadside stores selling cold beverages. That's the kind of tradeoff markets are great for identifying.
  • frockington 8y ago
    The "immortal" term and Blockbuster are great concreate examples. I will have to keep those in mind as it accurately portrays some of the pros and cons of government
  • ppeetteerr 8y ago
    There is a difference between immortal and slow to change. I don't think people want government to fail fast and be replaced with another government in the span of two years.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • notahacker 8y ago
    The elected component of the government sector in a properly functioning democracy is far more mortal than large corporations and newly elected Cabinets generally more zealous about reforming (for better or worse) the way agencies and services are run than newly appointed corporate board members. Sure, some services are prioritised more than others; no government is going to get voted out of office solely for running the nationalised film rental agency into the ground, but the main reason for the institutional inertia is the same scale, complexity and principal/agent problems large corporations also suffer from.
• DesiLurker 8y ago
  My preferred solution for governance problems is basically to have smaller governing units (nations/states/districts). this gives people better representation and is pretty effective in managing the 'tyranny of the majority'. considering the environment in US today the majority is essentially 51%. Now if one considers how bi-polar favorite policies for each side has become, it (mandate) is nowhere near enough to justify forcing their views on the other 49%. The subtle mechanism behind most problems in public policy today is collapsing of decision tree into just one yes or no answer (red/blue) that IMO is killing the nuanced policy development (or more accurately used by politicians to do whatever half-aed measures they can come up with). having smaller units also help with even more meta-manipulations like gerrymandering so prevalent in US. if we want to hold congress accountable for their constituents this is pretty much the only sustainable path to it. Until this happens IMHO most good policies will continue to be lost in poor/unimaginative implementation. ref: https://mises.org/wire/us-should-have-10000-members-congress https://mises.org/wire/us-should-have-10000-members-congress
  • kzrdude 8y ago
    It's a very popular theory that smaller polities have better governance. Picking single examples would maybe not capture it but I'd think of NZ vs Aus, Ireland vs UK, Switzerland vs France, or even Canada vs USA. (All pairs picked to have similar location in the world, but I guess you want to say the (former) empires of USA, France and the UK put them in entirely separate categories..)
    • exolymph 8y ago
      Not necessarily "better" governance, because that's very dependent on what "better" means to you. I think you can make a strong argument that federalism results in governance more closely matching the will of the people — to the extent that the will of the people can be captured by representative democracy.
  • Magmatic 8y ago
    We could also collapse the yes/no questions with better voting systems, something not first pass the post. While local government is totally necessary, I don't think we can afford to not have big government. If wind currents made air pollution a non-issue in say, Ontario because wind currents blew it all down to Nebraska, how would we deal with that? Many of our most pressing societal problems live at the interstate or international level and need a corresponding governing body.
• StanislavPetrov 8y ago
  >it would be very time consuming to handle every single aspect of it. Life is complicated. It is time consuming to become an knowledgeable, aware person capable of contributing intelligently to society. It is also absolutely necessary if we want to have a self-governed society worth living in. You can't have a worthwhile government - let alone a big government - governed by the will of the masses when the masses are largely ignorant and unable to offer informed consent due to lack of understanding.
  • ppeetteerr 8y ago
    That is where domain experts come in. It would be impossible for me, as an individual, to understand the repercussions of tax credits on the solar energy industry. I vote instead for competent people who I believe are best positioned to find the right people to answer these questions on my behalf.
    • StanislavPetrov 8y ago
      If you don't have a general understanding, how can you decide who is competent? Staying informed and aware is hard, but necessary, work. Our reliance on pundits to recommend "experts" in the information age has led to our current society - where the overwhelming majority of voters are pushed, pulled, and manipulated by various government and corporate interests. I would contend that in order to judge who is competent to lead we as a people have to work harder to have a far better grasp of all the issues. We have fallen short in this way and we are suffering the consequences, on every level of government.
• c3534l 8y ago
  Centralized systems can only handle so much complexity before the collapse. You can only handle the kind of society we have today through a distributed, decentralized model. The complexity of modern society is emergent, not the result of central planners. This is a foundational finding of economics and one of the primary reasons why communist dictatorships tend to fail to function.
• ci5er 8y ago
  And that right there is the reason that technocrats are dumber than they think.
• tvanantwerp 8y ago
  I don't think this follows at all. True, I probably don't want zero health and safety regulations. But government--an institution notorious for both pervasiveness and inertia--can get things wrong just like individuals and market institutions. And when the government does it, it does it at massive scale and for a very long time. Thaler's "libertarian paternalism" is not about controlling choices, but making better choices easier to make while allowing people to still choose something else. Big government in practice is typically about picking an option and not allowing anything else. And if that one chosen option turns out to be wrong, it will take ages to undo it as the now-vested interests who manage to benefit lobby to keep the status quo.