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Why Governments Fail

petermcneeley 5y ago
I appreciate the honesty when it comes to the naming of this group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasion
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  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 https://twitter.com/Yascha_Mounk/status/1278707858188664832
  - petermcneeley 5y ago
    A quick glance at the contributing authors makes it obvious as to what one is being persuaded of.
  - the_benno 5y ago
    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.
    - kspacewalk2 5y ago
      Listen to the podcast and read some more articles on Persuasion. Mounk is not "monomaniacally focused on cancel culture". He's monomaniacally focused on defending liberalism from populism - there's a lot on his podcast about nativism, authoritarianism and the populist right (the whole damn podcast started as a way to explore how the populism of Trump, Orban etc can be defeated in the realm of ideas). And generally, I find him to be the most prepared interviewer with the most thoughtful questions that I ever encountered in podcasting.
      - the_benno 5y ago
        Thanks, I'll dig in some more. Perhaps I'm unfairly projecting onto Mounk and conflating his work with that of other "intellectual dark web" types and their fakakta cancel-culture takes. I haven't followed him closely since the flurry of discussion/debate when the project launched last summer.
varispeed 5y ago
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.
- jrwoodruff 5y ago
  >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.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    Media has perhaps the most competing firms of any nationwide industry. I don't understand this take, and I see it a lot. There are probably 20 relatively trustworthy outlets through which you can consume US news. That is a lot. Look at the competitive landscape in other industries. There are basically 4 tire companies, 4 or 5 home builders, 6 or so mobile handset manufacturers, 4 or 5 US based airlines... You get the picture. And all of those industries are still decently competitive.
  - varispeed 5y ago
    In places where press is licensed, it is not free - because they must report in a certain way to not lose license - it also includes being nice for whomever is currently on top. I've seen here in the UK where Russia Today reported a story that should have collapsed the government, but none of the other main stream media investigated the story until few months later where the party has concocted a plausible explanation why something happened. Between that RT was given a warning that they'll lose license for interference in UK affairs... Madness.
    - 5y ago
oddmiral 5y ago
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.
- lbriner 5y ago
  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?
  - virgil_disgr4ce 5y ago
    > 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
  - gen220 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.
giantg2 5y ago
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.
- lbriner 5y ago
  > 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?
- jonathannat 5y ago
  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-rate-select-countries-worldwide/ 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
slibhb 5y ago
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.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  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).
tut-urut-utut 5y ago
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 5y ago
  https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4975 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.
captaincurrie 5y ago
Why Governments Fail: The CIA overthrows them or the US destroys them.
tacocataco 5y ago
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 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
- jasonvorhe 5y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation!
throwaway823882 5y ago
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.
paulpauper 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    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.
    - lazide 5y ago
      I did some digging (not the parent poster) - here seems to be a decently thorough meta analysis of IFR and CFR from the swine flu outbreak. It appears to be clearly and dramatically less lethal to all age ranges than COVID [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/#!po=0.694444 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/#!po=0....], with the highest risk group (>64 yrs old), having a roughly 1% chance of death per symptomatic case, and children (lowest risk) roughly three orders of magnitude less risk (1 per 100,000 symptomatic cases vs 1 in 100 for elderly). Here is a more direct link to the graph [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/figure/F4/?report=objectonly https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/figure/...]. Covid is too new, and we’re too unclear on how widely it is spread to have solid CFR or IFR data at this point. NYC did a decent study post outbreak early last year however using antibody tests that is probably not complete junk. You can read one of the many studies here [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30769-6/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...]. The pertinent quote is probably - “ City. Our estimated infection-fatality risk for the two oldest age groups (65–74 and ≥75 years) was much higher than the younger age groups, with a cumulative estimated infection-fatality risk of 0·116% (0·0729–0·148) for those aged 25–44 years and 0·939% (0·729–1·19) for those aged 45–64 years versus 4·87% (3·37–6·89) for those aged 65–74 years and 14·2% (10·2–18·1) for those aged 75 years and older. In particular, weekly infection-fatality risk was estimated to be as high as 6·72% (5·52–8·01) for those aged 65–74 years and 19·1% (14·7–21·9) for those aged 75 years and older.”
paulpauper 5y ago
>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.
- gtyras2mrs 5y ago
  > 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 Is this really representative? What %-age of each age-cohort engage in speculation on WSB or play around with crypto? I'm just assuming as well here - but i think that WSB speculation is being done by a extreme minority with a lot of people just looking at them for entertainment. Is there any data you would be able to share?
- pradn 5y ago
  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.
- dillondoyle 5y ago
jl2718 5y ago
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.
paulpauper 5y ago
>. 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 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    > 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 5y ago
      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.
      - gtyras2mrs 5y ago
        I would say wealth inequality is comparable to rain in that regard, as it seems to be reinforcing itself. Wealth inequality leads to more wealth inequality as the rich are able to highly leverage their wealth to get richer? > In actuality what causes wealth inequality is corruption. wealth inequality -> corruption -> more wealth inequality and so on. I can't really say what is the root cause - but corruption IMO is a function of wealth inequality in action. Rich and powerful exerting influence to get more wealth and power.
fabbari 5y ago
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?
- neilwilson 5y ago
  Inequality is the water balloon argument - that for one side to go up, the other side has to go down. It's fixed amount thinking. Poverty is the water source argument - let's just have more water flow so that those that want to keep it in buckets can do so without affecting anybody's ability to drink. That's floating amount thinking. Money is a floating concept not a fixed one. The fixed amount is the amount of hours a person has in a day. Poverty is solved by distributing needs by hours and relegating money to the distribution of wants.
- ssivark 5y ago
  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.
- lordloki 5y ago
  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."
- dv_dt 5y ago
  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.
vagrantJin 5y ago
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.
drummer 5y ago
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.
spencerrodgers 5y ago
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.
Alkhwarizmi 5y ago
The title is most definitely a click bait. Nothing of this sort is addressed in this.

I appreciate the honesty when it comes to the naming of this group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasion

kspacewalk2 5y ago
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 https://twitter.com/Yascha_Mounk/status/1278707858188664832
- petermcneeley 5y ago
  A quick glance at the contributing authors makes it obvious as to what one is being persuaded of.
- the_benno 5y ago
  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.
  - kspacewalk2 5y ago
    Listen to the podcast and read some more articles on Persuasion. Mounk is not "monomaniacally focused on cancel culture". He's monomaniacally focused on defending liberalism from populism - there's a lot on his podcast about nativism, authoritarianism and the populist right (the whole damn podcast started as a way to explore how the populism of Trump, Orban etc can be defeated in the realm of ideas). And generally, I find him to be the most prepared interviewer with the most thoughtful questions that I ever encountered in podcasting.
    - the_benno 5y ago
      Thanks, I'll dig in some more. Perhaps I'm unfairly projecting onto Mounk and conflating his work with that of other "intellectual dark web" types and their fakakta cancel-culture takes. I haven't followed him closely since the flurry of discussion/debate when the project launched last summer.

varispeed 5y ago

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.

jrwoodruff 5y ago
>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.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  Media has perhaps the most competing firms of any nationwide industry. I don't understand this take, and I see it a lot. There are probably 20 relatively trustworthy outlets through which you can consume US news. That is a lot. Look at the competitive landscape in other industries. There are basically 4 tire companies, 4 or 5 home builders, 6 or so mobile handset manufacturers, 4 or 5 US based airlines... You get the picture. And all of those industries are still decently competitive.
- varispeed 5y ago
  In places where press is licensed, it is not free - because they must report in a certain way to not lose license - it also includes being nice for whomever is currently on top. I've seen here in the UK where Russia Today reported a story that should have collapsed the government, but none of the other main stream media investigated the story until few months later where the party has concocted a plausible explanation why something happened. Between that RT was given a warning that they'll lose license for interference in UK affairs... Madness.
  - 5y ago

oddmiral 5y ago

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.

lbriner 5y ago
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?
- virgil_disgr4ce 5y ago
  > 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
- gen220 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.

giantg2 5y ago

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.

lbriner 5y ago
> 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?
jonathannat 5y ago
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-rate-select-countries-worldwide/ 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

slibhb 5y ago

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.

shadowgovt 5y ago
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).

tut-urut-utut 5y ago

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 5y ago
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4975 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.

captaincurrie 5y ago

Why Governments Fail: The CIA overthrows them or the US destroys them.

tacocataco 5y ago

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 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

jasonvorhe 5y ago
Thanks for the recommendation!

throwaway823882 5y ago

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.

paulpauper 5y ago

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 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  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.
  - lazide 5y ago
    I did some digging (not the parent poster) - here seems to be a decently thorough meta analysis of IFR and CFR from the swine flu outbreak. It appears to be clearly and dramatically less lethal to all age ranges than COVID [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/#!po=0.694444 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/#!po=0....], with the highest risk group (>64 yrs old), having a roughly 1% chance of death per symptomatic case, and children (lowest risk) roughly three orders of magnitude less risk (1 per 100,000 symptomatic cases vs 1 in 100 for elderly). Here is a more direct link to the graph [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/figure/F4/?report=objectonly https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/figure/...]. Covid is too new, and we’re too unclear on how widely it is spread to have solid CFR or IFR data at this point. NYC did a decent study post outbreak early last year however using antibody tests that is probably not complete junk. You can read one of the many studies here [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30769-6/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...]. The pertinent quote is probably - “ City. Our estimated infection-fatality risk for the two oldest age groups (65–74 and ≥75 years) was much higher than the younger age groups, with a cumulative estimated infection-fatality risk of 0·116% (0·0729–0·148) for those aged 25–44 years and 0·939% (0·729–1·19) for those aged 45–64 years versus 4·87% (3·37–6·89) for those aged 65–74 years and 14·2% (10·2–18·1) for those aged 75 years and older. In particular, weekly infection-fatality risk was estimated to be as high as 6·72% (5·52–8·01) for those aged 65–74 years and 19·1% (14·7–21·9) for those aged 75 years and older.”

paulpauper 5y ago

>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.

gtyras2mrs 5y ago
> 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 Is this really representative? What %-age of each age-cohort engage in speculation on WSB or play around with crypto? I'm just assuming as well here - but i think that WSB speculation is being done by a extreme minority with a lot of people just looking at them for entertainment. Is there any data you would be able to share?
pradn 5y ago
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.
dillondoyle 5y ago

jl2718 5y ago

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.

paulpauper 5y ago

>. 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 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    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.
    - gtyras2mrs 5y ago
      I would say wealth inequality is comparable to rain in that regard, as it seems to be reinforcing itself. Wealth inequality leads to more wealth inequality as the rich are able to highly leverage their wealth to get richer? > In actuality what causes wealth inequality is corruption. wealth inequality -> corruption -> more wealth inequality and so on. I can't really say what is the root cause - but corruption IMO is a function of wealth inequality in action. Rich and powerful exerting influence to get more wealth and power.

fabbari 5y ago

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?

neilwilson 5y ago
Inequality is the water balloon argument - that for one side to go up, the other side has to go down. It's fixed amount thinking. Poverty is the water source argument - let's just have more water flow so that those that want to keep it in buckets can do so without affecting anybody's ability to drink. That's floating amount thinking. Money is a floating concept not a fixed one. The fixed amount is the amount of hours a person has in a day. Poverty is solved by distributing needs by hours and relegating money to the distribution of wants.
ssivark 5y ago
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.
lordloki 5y ago
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."
dv_dt 5y ago
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.

vagrantJin 5y ago

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.

drummer 5y ago

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.

spencerrodgers 5y ago

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.

Alkhwarizmi 5y ago

The title is most definitely a click bait. Nothing of this sort is addressed in this.