7 ms·

Balaji: The collapse in state capacity has not been priced in

46 points by xqcgrek2 5y ago

paulgb 5y ago
I think this is best understood in the context of Balaji's Network State idea: https://foresight.org/salon/balaji-s-srinivasan-the-network-state/ https://foresight.org/salon/balaji-s-srinivasan-the-network-... I don't know, but I'm kind of skeptical of this. I find with a lot of crypto folks, the line between predicting state collapse and rooting for state collapse gets kind of blurred. Similar to gold bugs: if your favorite asset would benefit from the downfall of state power, it seems you start to see signs of it everywhere that other people don't really see.
throwdecro 5y ago
> Highly public failure on high profile, must-win episodes like COVID & the Afghanistan exit indicates that the US government may fail on any nontrivial physical world endeavor. This seems like a non-sequitur. What would the underlying cause even be, a sudden outbreak of incompetence, in every area where the US government operates? I think there's potential for confirmation bias here because the US's "state capacity" was never that impressive in the first place. You can point to "power, water, fire, public health, public schools, public safety", see problems, and characterize it as a "collapse". But these areas were problematic long before the COVID-19 pandemic or US involvement in Afghanistan.
jger15 5y ago
Thought this response was apt: "Both covid and the taliban can be considered diffuse/decentralised problems the centralised state could not handle." https://twitter.com/BTC_Archive/status/1429126269929668619 https://twitter.com/BTC_Archive/status/1429126269929668619
- kccqzy 5y ago
  A powerful centralized state can certainly solve COVID. Look at how China handled it: a powerful central government commanding provincial governments on what to do, and force them to do it. In the United States it's plainly unconstitutional for the federal government to compel states to do things. (Well maybe the feds can withhold some funds, but it can't be too coercive when asking states to do things.) The United States is not a good example of a centralized state. Look at China instead.
bo1024 5y ago
I don't think this is a good fit for HN. It's just a couple tweets.
overeater 5y ago
The climatic question he's asking is, "What are the big physical world areas where we may see even more issues with state capacity?" I think the one that's been most underreported and affects all this is money management. This is pretty clear in wars, but also domestically. The federal and state government has been defrauded for a large portion of the money it has been spending on unemployment benefits and small business loans. It has an incentive to underreport these because it's hard to verify, and it makes them look bad, and they are the only ones with the accounting information. But we're slowly finding out that it's been trivially easy for foreign actors and low-tier criminals to each steal millions or hundreds of thousands from states and federal programs.
Ericson2314 5y ago
This is silly. The USD's prominence in world trade goes beyond what the US is doing, let alone with that US federal government is doing. And moribund governments have been demonstrated to old on for centuries. Unwinding a system where small states have worked hard to hoard US reserves for stability will take a while to happen. In other matters, the incompetence of the US is absolutely priced in already, like budgets for public transit :/. Also Afghanistan is a simmering 20 year old failure. The fact that the kleptocracy we propped up was completely unstable to stand on its own two feet is more reason to exit, not less. Yes, recognizing that fact rather than partaking in more fantasy land is stupid, but expected for our incompetent money-guzzling military who didn't want to leave, but couldn't face its own shame in arguing we had to leave more slowly because we had failed so miserably.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  afghanistan is unexpectedly bad optics, but imho the truth is nobody cares about afghanistan beyond appearances, sadly. But the COVID failure was much more important, visible and pretty stark. The US had ample time and warning from european countries to show some real leadership. They should have gone with what Australia did, and the rest of the developed world would follow their example. Instead it was a string of bad advice that makes one wonder what will happen in the next pandemic.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    Agreed re Afganistan But re COVID people were already forgetting how stupid we were simply because we bought more vaccines. Now the Delta paranoia is putting other things back in the spotlight, but I suspect that won't last either.
  - UncleOxidant 5y ago
    Agreed. Afghanistan is one of the few things at this point that pretty much everyone in the US agrees about: the need to get out. The bad optics will be forgotten in a month or so if not less. COVID, on the other hand is apocalyptic in the original greek sense of the word (revealing something that was hidden under the surface): It's revealed huge problems in the US not the least of which is an epistemic gap that seems unbridgeable.
mikewarot 5y ago
The working class seems to have figured this out, which is why they are demanding an increase in pay, as the fiction of loyalty to workers evaporated at the start of the plague. The investment class has milked the system for as much as I could, but now a major realignment is underway. I hope we can avoid repeating the horrors of the French revolution along the way.
- bilbo0s 5y ago
  A bet on a French style revolution in the US is as much of a fever dream at this point as a bet on a Chinese like resurgence in the US. It's looking like America will end on more of a sad note like Western Imperial Rome rather than the explosive end of Imperial France or awe inspiring resurgence of China. Hundreds of years slow, steady decline. Stewardship gripped by ineptitude and kleptocracy. Even its brightest citizens being wholly unequal to the task of building the physical and systemic structures, (or even fixing the existing structures), necessary to save itself. "Warlords" growing too wealthy on the body of the golden goose during the decline to ever allow its head to be chopped off. In the end no one even cared enough to chop the western roman emperor's head off. Odoacer just sent him away and said, "your services will no longer be needed". (Translation: All the money we could steal from your treasury is now gone. Go home.) I guess Romulus was still kind of young? So I suppose he could still use the whole, "I used to be emperor of Rome" thing to impress girls at parties maybe? In any case, that's the most likely end awaiting the US. Another possibility is a break, like the Western-Eastern Roman Empire split. In which case, the same sad slow decline style end would happen. Only it would probably happen in each of the multiple resultant political entities instead of happening in only one.
  - nindalf 5y ago
    What I fear most about the coming decades is people making tortured analogies between Rome and the US. It’s going to get real repetitive.
- nindalf 5y ago
  And it was only when they figured this out that they started asking for raises is it? And before that they were content to work for whatever wages were on offer? What a crock of nonsense. Workers always asked for more. What changed was leverage. Trust me, at some point in the future the leverage will be lost for whatever reason. People will still ask for raises but may or may not get them.
cblconfederate 5y ago
It is interesting to try to predict the next US failure. It might be Ukraine or if another former soviet republic joins the russian federation. But more likely it will be the inability of US capitalism to adapt to a remote world. Too much money invested in real estate and tied to bringing immigrants to the US. Too hard to milk cheap countries when workers aren't tied to US soil. I think US companies highly underestimate the impact of remote work, and that the rest of the world is, by necessity, already more adapted to it. Another will be the inability of US to create new culture. Hollywood is already stagnated since 15 years ago. Internet culture is too juvenile and hysterical to matter. As for the dollar, it will find real competition when the US bans cryptocoins. With the speculation and winner-picking out of the way, there is already a number of countries that can build their economies around it despite of (and to spite) the US (iran/russia venezuela et al)
- jimbob45 5y ago
  >But more likely it will be the inability of US capitalism to adapt to a remote world What are you basing this off of? American companies are going remote en masse and my anecdotal evidence suggests nearly every company made the transition to remote during the pandemic (and may have switched back afterwards). American companies are really good at adapting because they’re not legally required to tiptoe around workers’ rights like in England where unions reign supreme (not saying unions are a bad or a good thing). Also workers are tied to US soil by virtue of the incredibly expensive permits you need on each foreign worker that makes offshoring infeasible for all but the largest companies.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    I m basing it on the amount of people wanting to stay tied to the office / the bay area, and the dependence of the ecosystem to SV VC capital. > the incredibly expensive permits you need on each foreign worker yeah that is one disadvantage of being based in the US. Another is that even if they outsource, these workers aren't like the low-skill work that they outsourced in china in the past. In any case, it 's just speculation since we re speculating
yann2 5y ago
What are guys even upvoting? Failure is part of life. Ask your parents and grandparents what type of failures of the state they have survived.
amadeuspagel 5y ago
> Highly public failure on high profile, must-win episodes like COVID & the Afghanistan exit Lol. The Afghanistan exit is a "must-win episode"?
- megameter 5y ago
  For the demographic in the mindset of "America = good, whomever makes it look bad = evil"(which is going to be a big demographic within the US so long as it's a going concern, and applies to US allies to a lesser extent), the Afghanistan exit is a must-win.
omarhaneef 5y ago
Haven't all states constantly been "failing" at wars, diseases, natural disasters and the like? How is suffering in 2021 more of a threat to "the state" than public suffering in any other year?
caseyross 5y ago
The people who would most benefit from this being priced in - American working class & global poor - have no way to influence the "price" in any broad sense. Those who do have pricing influence are riding the wave for short-term gains (e.g. M&A), or washing their hands of the whole mess and leaving it for someone else to clean up (e.g. becoming NZ citizens).
Animats 5y ago
This is a real issue, but not a governmental one. There are now shortages in many areas, and they persist for longer periods. There's been an aluminum shortage for a year now. “It was the confluence of a concentrated industry, a sudden spike in demand, and then difficulty importing cans that resulted in a shortage.”[1] There's a semiconductor shortage, and it may last for years.[2] There's a steel shortage.[3] That cascades through the rest of manufacturing. Almost all manufactured products need steel, aluminum, or semiconductors. Lots of reasons. Those areas are over-concentrated, with a small number of companies. Companies cut way back at the beginning of the epidemic. They assumed that they could lay off workers and not have trouble getting them back later. Too much dependence on imports made this a worldwide problem. There's a shipping capacity shortage, too, which broke supply chains. There's a more general problem. A free market minimizes some costs at the expense of supply and price stability. Think about that. [1] https://www.wbay.com/2020/09/16/national-aluminum-shortage-hits-manufacturers-distributors https://www.wbay.com/2020/09/16/national-aluminum-shortage-h... [2] https://www.barrons.com/articles/chip-shortage-auto-stocks-51629133890 https://www.barrons.com/articles/chip-shortage-auto-stocks-5... [3] https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/06/investing/steel-shortage-stocks-bubble/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/06/investing/steel-shortage-stoc...
- guerrilla 5y ago
  > This is a real issue, but not a governmental one. That's not even moving the goal post, that's just changing the entire subject. "This" isn't real, since "this", he claims without any evidence, is specifically a failure of state capacity. [1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capacity
fridif 5y ago
We need more robots and simplified production methods for households. It is clear that we cannot always trust entities, private or public, to deliver the things we would like to pay for. Therefore, it is time for humans to once again grow their own food, make their own furniture, and having a fleet of robots that can do this autonomously would be great. Like Roomba but better.
- throwanem 5y ago
  How do you build robots without steel, aluminium, and silicon?
  - beamatronic 5y ago
    Scour the landfills
    - fridif 5y ago
      In a post-apocalyptic world yes, but fortunately raspis are still in stock now. To the victor the spoils!
  - fridif 5y ago
    That is why you need to get your hands on them now while supplies last. I'm still using my 13 year old think pad for things. Whether or not a global reduction in available services is coming, it might be wise to stock up some things now that will become scarce in the future.
    - ryan93 5y ago
      You are using your 13 year old thinkpad as an excuse to start a conversation at parties. Not out of necessity
      - fridif 5y ago
        I also have a brand new M1 Macbook. But when the supply of laptops dry up, I'll sell you my thinkpad for a fair price if you need one...
eunos 5y ago
Reaganism (and Neoliberal) gutted state capacity and even the concept of state capacity were aligned with tyranny and authoritarianism, at least from what I found on twitter/reddit. So this is unexpected.
- pjscott 5y ago
  If this were the cause then you would expect blue states to have better-functioning government agencies than red states, but as far as I can tell they don't.
  - eunos 5y ago
    The blue team adopts Neoliberalism (3rd way Democrat) since Bill Clinton.
rdtwo 5y ago
What’s not priced in is that shock buffer has been used up during pandemic 1.0 during 2.0 there is no more travel left on the piston and recovery hasn’t really happened much so additional problems will cause significant pain
ctvo 5y ago
People have been citing the failing of US state capacity for decades. This isn’t the first prolonged conflict in a foreign land we’ve wasted lives, money, and time on. We haven’t had a balanced budget, our public projects are delayed and 2-3x over the estimate, the US military has been inept in most conflicts, federal agencies have failed to regulate the powerful and connected. But the machine marches on, because everywhere else the problems are equal or worse at US scale. China hides its domestic issues much better giving this illusion that the US is crumbling. The hints we get when Jack Ma disappears from public life or the party now speaks of income inequality should tell you under the surface there’s turmoil.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  > People have been citing the failing of US state capacity for decades. This isn’t the first prolonged conflict in a foreign land we’ve wasted lives, money, and time on. Yes. Ever since we deurbanized (suburbanized) and kneecapped our fledgling administrative state we've been incompetent. > Our public projects are delayed and 2-3x over the estimate, the US military has been inept in most conflicts, federal agencies have failed to regulate the powerful and connected. Yup. > We haven’t had a balanced budget Please don't drag that into it. The way we run our fiat currency means there is nearly net 0 dollar. Every surplus is someone else's deficit. > But the machine marches on, because everywhere else the problems are equal or worse at US scale. Nope > China hides its domestic issues much better giving this illusion that the US is crumbling. China certianly has issues, but also has somewhat better state capacity than us. Yes people fear-think China has the best state capacity and that is not true. > The hints we get when Jack Ma disappears from public life or the party now speaks of income inequality should tell you under the surface there’s turmoil. Dissapearing Jack Ma is not an indicator of failure, even if you personally don't like it. Income inequality is objectively more worrisome, as it prevents domestic demand, but things including the former (hah!) can be employed to manage the latter.
  - nomoreplease 5y ago
    Your arguments against the balanced budget don’t convince me. Have you looked at the federal, state, and local debts lately? It is mind boggling

46 points by xqcgrek2 5y ago

I think this is best understood in the context of Balaji's Network State idea: https://foresight.org/salon/balaji-s-srinivasan-the-network-state/ https://foresight.org/salon/balaji-s-srinivasan-the-network-... I don't know, but I'm kind of skeptical of this. I find with a lot of crypto folks, the line between predicting state collapse and rooting for state collapse gets kind of blurred. Similar to gold bugs: if your favorite asset would benefit from the downfall of state power, it seems you start to see signs of it everywhere that other people don't really see.

throwdecro 5y ago

> Highly public failure on high profile, must-win episodes like COVID & the Afghanistan exit indicates that the US government may fail on any nontrivial physical world endeavor. This seems like a non-sequitur. What would the underlying cause even be, a sudden outbreak of incompetence, in every area where the US government operates? I think there's potential for confirmation bias here because the US's "state capacity" was never that impressive in the first place. You can point to "power, water, fire, public health, public schools, public safety", see problems, and characterize it as a "collapse". But these areas were problematic long before the COVID-19 pandemic or US involvement in Afghanistan.

jger15 5y ago

Thought this response was apt: "Both covid and the taliban can be considered diffuse/decentralised problems the centralised state could not handle." https://twitter.com/BTC_Archive/status/1429126269929668619 https://twitter.com/BTC_Archive/status/1429126269929668619

kccqzy 5y ago
A powerful centralized state can certainly solve COVID. Look at how China handled it: a powerful central government commanding provincial governments on what to do, and force them to do it. In the United States it's plainly unconstitutional for the federal government to compel states to do things. (Well maybe the feds can withhold some funds, but it can't be too coercive when asking states to do things.) The United States is not a good example of a centralized state. Look at China instead.

bo1024 5y ago

I don't think this is a good fit for HN. It's just a couple tweets.

overeater 5y ago

The climatic question he's asking is, "What are the big physical world areas where we may see even more issues with state capacity?" I think the one that's been most underreported and affects all this is money management. This is pretty clear in wars, but also domestically. The federal and state government has been defrauded for a large portion of the money it has been spending on unemployment benefits and small business loans. It has an incentive to underreport these because it's hard to verify, and it makes them look bad, and they are the only ones with the accounting information. But we're slowly finding out that it's been trivially easy for foreign actors and low-tier criminals to each steal millions or hundreds of thousands from states and federal programs.

Ericson2314 5y ago

This is silly. The USD's prominence in world trade goes beyond what the US is doing, let alone with that US federal government is doing. And moribund governments have been demonstrated to old on for centuries. Unwinding a system where small states have worked hard to hoard US reserves for stability will take a while to happen. In other matters, the incompetence of the US is absolutely priced in already, like budgets for public transit :/. Also Afghanistan is a simmering 20 year old failure. The fact that the kleptocracy we propped up was completely unstable to stand on its own two feet is more reason to exit, not less. Yes, recognizing that fact rather than partaking in more fantasy land is stupid, but expected for our incompetent money-guzzling military who didn't want to leave, but couldn't face its own shame in arguing we had to leave more slowly because we had failed so miserably.

cblconfederate 5y ago
afghanistan is unexpectedly bad optics, but imho the truth is nobody cares about afghanistan beyond appearances, sadly. But the COVID failure was much more important, visible and pretty stark. The US had ample time and warning from european countries to show some real leadership. They should have gone with what Australia did, and the rest of the developed world would follow their example. Instead it was a string of bad advice that makes one wonder what will happen in the next pandemic.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Agreed re Afganistan But re COVID people were already forgetting how stupid we were simply because we bought more vaccines. Now the Delta paranoia is putting other things back in the spotlight, but I suspect that won't last either.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  Agreed. Afghanistan is one of the few things at this point that pretty much everyone in the US agrees about: the need to get out. The bad optics will be forgotten in a month or so if not less. COVID, on the other hand is apocalyptic in the original greek sense of the word (revealing something that was hidden under the surface): It's revealed huge problems in the US not the least of which is an epistemic gap that seems unbridgeable.

mikewarot 5y ago

The working class seems to have figured this out, which is why they are demanding an increase in pay, as the fiction of loyalty to workers evaporated at the start of the plague. The investment class has milked the system for as much as I could, but now a major realignment is underway. I hope we can avoid repeating the horrors of the French revolution along the way.

bilbo0s 5y ago
A bet on a French style revolution in the US is as much of a fever dream at this point as a bet on a Chinese like resurgence in the US. It's looking like America will end on more of a sad note like Western Imperial Rome rather than the explosive end of Imperial France or awe inspiring resurgence of China. Hundreds of years slow, steady decline. Stewardship gripped by ineptitude and kleptocracy. Even its brightest citizens being wholly unequal to the task of building the physical and systemic structures, (or even fixing the existing structures), necessary to save itself. "Warlords" growing too wealthy on the body of the golden goose during the decline to ever allow its head to be chopped off. In the end no one even cared enough to chop the western roman emperor's head off. Odoacer just sent him away and said, "your services will no longer be needed". (Translation: All the money we could steal from your treasury is now gone. Go home.) I guess Romulus was still kind of young? So I suppose he could still use the whole, "I used to be emperor of Rome" thing to impress girls at parties maybe? In any case, that's the most likely end awaiting the US. Another possibility is a break, like the Western-Eastern Roman Empire split. In which case, the same sad slow decline style end would happen. Only it would probably happen in each of the multiple resultant political entities instead of happening in only one.
- nindalf 5y ago
  What I fear most about the coming decades is people making tortured analogies between Rome and the US. It’s going to get real repetitive.
nindalf 5y ago
And it was only when they figured this out that they started asking for raises is it? And before that they were content to work for whatever wages were on offer? What a crock of nonsense. Workers always asked for more. What changed was leverage. Trust me, at some point in the future the leverage will be lost for whatever reason. People will still ask for raises but may or may not get them.

cblconfederate 5y ago

It is interesting to try to predict the next US failure. It might be Ukraine or if another former soviet republic joins the russian federation. But more likely it will be the inability of US capitalism to adapt to a remote world. Too much money invested in real estate and tied to bringing immigrants to the US. Too hard to milk cheap countries when workers aren't tied to US soil. I think US companies highly underestimate the impact of remote work, and that the rest of the world is, by necessity, already more adapted to it. Another will be the inability of US to create new culture. Hollywood is already stagnated since 15 years ago. Internet culture is too juvenile and hysterical to matter. As for the dollar, it will find real competition when the US bans cryptocoins. With the speculation and winner-picking out of the way, there is already a number of countries that can build their economies around it despite of (and to spite) the US (iran/russia venezuela et al)

jimbob45 5y ago
>But more likely it will be the inability of US capitalism to adapt to a remote world What are you basing this off of? American companies are going remote en masse and my anecdotal evidence suggests nearly every company made the transition to remote during the pandemic (and may have switched back afterwards). American companies are really good at adapting because they’re not legally required to tiptoe around workers’ rights like in England where unions reign supreme (not saying unions are a bad or a good thing). Also workers are tied to US soil by virtue of the incredibly expensive permits you need on each foreign worker that makes offshoring infeasible for all but the largest companies.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  I m basing it on the amount of people wanting to stay tied to the office / the bay area, and the dependence of the ecosystem to SV VC capital. > the incredibly expensive permits you need on each foreign worker yeah that is one disadvantage of being based in the US. Another is that even if they outsource, these workers aren't like the low-skill work that they outsourced in china in the past. In any case, it 's just speculation since we re speculating

yann2 5y ago

What are guys even upvoting? Failure is part of life. Ask your parents and grandparents what type of failures of the state they have survived.

amadeuspagel 5y ago

> Highly public failure on high profile, must-win episodes like COVID & the Afghanistan exit Lol. The Afghanistan exit is a "must-win episode"?

megameter 5y ago
For the demographic in the mindset of "America = good, whomever makes it look bad = evil"(which is going to be a big demographic within the US so long as it's a going concern, and applies to US allies to a lesser extent), the Afghanistan exit is a must-win.

omarhaneef 5y ago

Haven't all states constantly been "failing" at wars, diseases, natural disasters and the like? How is suffering in 2021 more of a threat to "the state" than public suffering in any other year?

caseyross 5y ago

The people who would most benefit from this being priced in - American working class & global poor - have no way to influence the "price" in any broad sense. Those who do have pricing influence are riding the wave for short-term gains (e.g. M&A), or washing their hands of the whole mess and leaving it for someone else to clean up (e.g. becoming NZ citizens).

Animats 5y ago

This is a real issue, but not a governmental one. There are now shortages in many areas, and they persist for longer periods. There's been an aluminum shortage for a year now. “It was the confluence of a concentrated industry, a sudden spike in demand, and then difficulty importing cans that resulted in a shortage.”[1] There's a semiconductor shortage, and it may last for years.[2] There's a steel shortage.[3] That cascades through the rest of manufacturing. Almost all manufactured products need steel, aluminum, or semiconductors. Lots of reasons. Those areas are over-concentrated, with a small number of companies. Companies cut way back at the beginning of the epidemic. They assumed that they could lay off workers and not have trouble getting them back later. Too much dependence on imports made this a worldwide problem. There's a shipping capacity shortage, too, which broke supply chains. There's a more general problem. A free market minimizes some costs at the expense of supply and price stability. Think about that. [1] https://www.wbay.com/2020/09/16/national-aluminum-shortage-hits-manufacturers-distributors https://www.wbay.com/2020/09/16/national-aluminum-shortage-h... [2] https://www.barrons.com/articles/chip-shortage-auto-stocks-51629133890 https://www.barrons.com/articles/chip-shortage-auto-stocks-5... [3] https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/06/investing/steel-shortage-stocks-bubble/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/06/investing/steel-shortage-stoc...

guerrilla 5y ago
> This is a real issue, but not a governmental one. That's not even moving the goal post, that's just changing the entire subject. "This" isn't real, since "this", he claims without any evidence, is specifically a failure of state capacity. [1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capacity

fridif 5y ago

We need more robots and simplified production methods for households. It is clear that we cannot always trust entities, private or public, to deliver the things we would like to pay for. Therefore, it is time for humans to once again grow their own food, make their own furniture, and having a fleet of robots that can do this autonomously would be great. Like Roomba but better.

throwanem 5y ago
How do you build robots without steel, aluminium, and silicon?
- beamatronic 5y ago
  Scour the landfills
  - fridif 5y ago
    In a post-apocalyptic world yes, but fortunately raspis are still in stock now. To the victor the spoils!
- fridif 5y ago
  That is why you need to get your hands on them now while supplies last. I'm still using my 13 year old think pad for things. Whether or not a global reduction in available services is coming, it might be wise to stock up some things now that will become scarce in the future.
  - ryan93 5y ago
    You are using your 13 year old thinkpad as an excuse to start a conversation at parties. Not out of necessity
    - fridif 5y ago
      I also have a brand new M1 Macbook. But when the supply of laptops dry up, I'll sell you my thinkpad for a fair price if you need one...

eunos 5y ago

Reaganism (and Neoliberal) gutted state capacity and even the concept of state capacity were aligned with tyranny and authoritarianism, at least from what I found on twitter/reddit. So this is unexpected.

pjscott 5y ago
If this were the cause then you would expect blue states to have better-functioning government agencies than red states, but as far as I can tell they don't.
- eunos 5y ago
  The blue team adopts Neoliberalism (3rd way Democrat) since Bill Clinton.

rdtwo 5y ago

What’s not priced in is that shock buffer has been used up during pandemic 1.0 during 2.0 there is no more travel left on the piston and recovery hasn’t really happened much so additional problems will cause significant pain

ctvo 5y ago

People have been citing the failing of US state capacity for decades. This isn’t the first prolonged conflict in a foreign land we’ve wasted lives, money, and time on. We haven’t had a balanced budget, our public projects are delayed and 2-3x over the estimate, the US military has been inept in most conflicts, federal agencies have failed to regulate the powerful and connected. But the machine marches on, because everywhere else the problems are equal or worse at US scale. China hides its domestic issues much better giving this illusion that the US is crumbling. The hints we get when Jack Ma disappears from public life or the party now speaks of income inequality should tell you under the surface there’s turmoil.

Ericson2314 5y ago
> People have been citing the failing of US state capacity for decades. This isn’t the first prolonged conflict in a foreign land we’ve wasted lives, money, and time on. Yes. Ever since we deurbanized (suburbanized) and kneecapped our fledgling administrative state we've been incompetent. > Our public projects are delayed and 2-3x over the estimate, the US military has been inept in most conflicts, federal agencies have failed to regulate the powerful and connected. Yup. > We haven’t had a balanced budget Please don't drag that into it. The way we run our fiat currency means there is nearly net 0 dollar. Every surplus is someone else's deficit. > But the machine marches on, because everywhere else the problems are equal or worse at US scale. Nope > China hides its domestic issues much better giving this illusion that the US is crumbling. China certianly has issues, but also has somewhat better state capacity than us. Yes people fear-think China has the best state capacity and that is not true. > The hints we get when Jack Ma disappears from public life or the party now speaks of income inequality should tell you under the surface there’s turmoil. Dissapearing Jack Ma is not an indicator of failure, even if you personally don't like it. Income inequality is objectively more worrisome, as it prevents domestic demand, but things including the former (hah!) can be employed to manage the latter.
- nomoreplease 5y ago
  Your arguments against the balanced budget don’t convince me. Have you looked at the federal, state, and local debts lately? It is mind boggling