4 ms·

Why should the government be shrinking when our population and the complexity of our society + economy is growing?

ibejoeb 3y ago
I was expecting to find that federal employment has grown faster than the US population, but it looks like that's not the case. Since 2000, the federal workforce seems to have grown about 14%, while the overall population increased by about 20%.
- mikeyouse 3y ago
  If you go back further it’s even more stark - there are 5% fewer Federal employees than there were when Clinton took office, overall population is up 30% and real GDP is up like 120%: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1cCLR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1cCLR
  - jonhohle 3y ago
    I wouldn’t imagine a government needs to scale proportionally to the population much like a business shouldn’t need to scale proportionally to its customer base. Most businesses should be able to handle twice as many customers with fewer than twice as many employees.
_heimdall 3y ago
You may be assuming there isn't a connection there. Could it be that our society and economy are growing more complex because the government continues to grow? More government agencies and employees create more rules. More rules almost certainly play into the growing complexity of both our society and economy. Population growth is nothing new, its only the last 60-80 years that we've really cranked up the size of our government.
- llamaimperative 3y ago
  I am absolutely confident that our society and economy aren’t growing more complex exclusively due to government growth. The whole virtue of capitalism is that it finds increasingly niche ways and outright novel ways to change the world, that’s by definition net new complexity. I’m comfortable attributing the vast majority of complexity growth to that. Not only is the population growing exponentially but one would reasonably expect the complexity of the overall economy would go up exponentially even with linear additions to the population (each new person is N new possible economic relations).
stronglikedan 3y ago
They should be minimal in their powers over the people and the bureaucratic waste they produce, but that doesn't mean they are shrinking. They can grow their administration workforce to accommodate the growing population and economy without adding new powers and while gaining efficiencies. Plus, the federal government should be very minimal, while not infringing on state's rights, which isn't the case any longer, unfortunately.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Sure, the disagreement stems from one’s presumption of what “minimal” means.
  - tastyfreeze 3y ago
    Minimal is defined in the Constitution. It explicitly says we give the federal government limited powers and no more.
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      One of those powers is to rely on interpretations of the Constitution by SCOTUS and to pick SCOTUS’s interpretation when it comes to conflict with an HN commentators’ interpretation. So this is still just putting the cart before the horse.
    - rtkwe 3y ago
      It defines a proscribed set of powers but doesn't say the use of those must be minimized. On top of all of that all the powers currently used have either been ruled constitutional, are untested extensions of tested uses of powers, or haven't been challenged/are currently being challenged, we can all have our own opinions about what the Constitution does and doesn't allow but within the system defined the only opinion that directly matters is the Supreme Court's. Everyone else's only gets filtered through their selection and ... optional shall we say extra-constitutional means? Ultimately my stance is the founders weren't perfect, their creation isn't some mystical perfect system handed down from on high [0] so we shouldn't weld ourselves into some imaginary form of what precisely they would or wouldn't want. They're dead it's our country now we have to live with it in a world they couldn't even imagine. Even the groups that do try to lay claim to the founders original vision are cherry picking their favorite version of the founders and their ideas. [0] Remember their first try at it, the Articles of Confederation fell apart in 4 years and the Constitution was a broad overreach of the mandate that the convention was even convened for.
ComputerGuru 3y ago
I can’t believe this argument is being made in good faith, but just in case: do you not realize that the number of laws need not scale with the size of the population? Especially when that growth is less than an order of magnitude?
- ethanbond 3y ago
  I said size of the government, not size of the code. Both were mentioned in GP's comment.

I was expecting to find that federal employment has grown faster than the US population, but it looks like that's not the case. Since 2000, the federal workforce seems to have grown about 14%, while the overall population increased by about 20%.

mikeyouse 3y ago
If you go back further it’s even more stark - there are 5% fewer Federal employees than there were when Clinton took office, overall population is up 30% and real GDP is up like 120%: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1cCLR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1cCLR
- jonhohle 3y ago
  I wouldn’t imagine a government needs to scale proportionally to the population much like a business shouldn’t need to scale proportionally to its customer base. Most businesses should be able to handle twice as many customers with fewer than twice as many employees.

_heimdall 3y ago

You may be assuming there isn't a connection there. Could it be that our society and economy are growing more complex because the government continues to grow? More government agencies and employees create more rules. More rules almost certainly play into the growing complexity of both our society and economy. Population growth is nothing new, its only the last 60-80 years that we've really cranked up the size of our government.

llamaimperative 3y ago
I am absolutely confident that our society and economy aren’t growing more complex exclusively due to government growth. The whole virtue of capitalism is that it finds increasingly niche ways and outright novel ways to change the world, that’s by definition net new complexity. I’m comfortable attributing the vast majority of complexity growth to that. Not only is the population growing exponentially but one would reasonably expect the complexity of the overall economy would go up exponentially even with linear additions to the population (each new person is N new possible economic relations).

stronglikedan 3y ago

They should be minimal in their powers over the people and the bureaucratic waste they produce, but that doesn't mean they are shrinking. They can grow their administration workforce to accommodate the growing population and economy without adding new powers and while gaining efficiencies. Plus, the federal government should be very minimal, while not infringing on state's rights, which isn't the case any longer, unfortunately.

ethanbond 3y ago
Sure, the disagreement stems from one’s presumption of what “minimal” means.
- tastyfreeze 3y ago
  Minimal is defined in the Constitution. It explicitly says we give the federal government limited powers and no more.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    One of those powers is to rely on interpretations of the Constitution by SCOTUS and to pick SCOTUS’s interpretation when it comes to conflict with an HN commentators’ interpretation. So this is still just putting the cart before the horse.
  - rtkwe 3y ago
    It defines a proscribed set of powers but doesn't say the use of those must be minimized. On top of all of that all the powers currently used have either been ruled constitutional, are untested extensions of tested uses of powers, or haven't been challenged/are currently being challenged, we can all have our own opinions about what the Constitution does and doesn't allow but within the system defined the only opinion that directly matters is the Supreme Court's. Everyone else's only gets filtered through their selection and ... optional shall we say extra-constitutional means? Ultimately my stance is the founders weren't perfect, their creation isn't some mystical perfect system handed down from on high [0] so we shouldn't weld ourselves into some imaginary form of what precisely they would or wouldn't want. They're dead it's our country now we have to live with it in a world they couldn't even imagine. Even the groups that do try to lay claim to the founders original vision are cherry picking their favorite version of the founders and their ideas. [0] Remember their first try at it, the Articles of Confederation fell apart in 4 years and the Constitution was a broad overreach of the mandate that the convention was even convened for.

ComputerGuru 3y ago

I can’t believe this argument is being made in good faith, but just in case: do you not realize that the number of laws need not scale with the size of the population? Especially when that growth is less than an order of magnitude?

ethanbond 3y ago
I said size of the government, not size of the code. Both were mentioned in GP's comment.