Why are we badly governed?

I offer two reasons

Simon Cooke writes,

The US public, including lots who are going to vote Democrat, believe that their country is badly governed. Had it, in their view, been better governed since 2021 then it is unlikely that Donald Trump would be a whisker away from getting elected president.

And, by the standards of the west, America is a long way from being the worst governed nation. If we look at France, Germany, Canada and the UK we see the same picture of the general public looking on in abject horror as politicians, public sector leaders, media ‘experts’, NGOs and academics make an absolute mess of government. In the UK the public, without a great deal of eagerness, dumped a sleaze-ridden, inadequate, petty and divided Tory party for what now appears to be a sleaze-ridden, inadequate, petty and divided Labour Party. For all the grand words and talk of mission, nobody is remotely interested in governing better, just in blaming the other side for any and every problem.

Part of the problem is that government elites are not aligned with the public on some issues. If the public wants to stop illegal immigration and you don’t, then you are going to be unpopular.

But I want to articulate two reasons for government failure. One is that without the profit incentive, government selects for the wrong behavior in managers. The second reason is that government tries to do too much. As a sprawling enterprise, government is bound to be clumsy.

Getting what you select for

One of my aphorisms is that an organization gets what it selects for. Successful firms select for people who can manage the business so that it meets customer needs.

Government and non-profits do not select for managers with the ability to deliver results. They select for people who are good at playing the game of status and power within an organization.

Businesses also suffer adversely from managers who are playing status games and fighting internal power struggles. But in a profit-and-loss economy, the companies that survive are ones where the executives minimize organizational rot and promote the managers who behave more constructively. As Lorenzo Warby put it recently,

It is not that corporate bureaucracies are inherently more functional—more efficient and efficacious—than those of non-profits or states. (The classic “bean-counter” mistake is to confuse efficiency with efficacy and cost with both.) Rather, the selection pressures against inefficiency and lack of efficacy are relatively stronger on private firms.

He adds,

As for the selection pressures on non-profits, they can easily be (socially) perverse. A solved problem puts them out of business, unless they can find another problem.

The agencies and non-profits that exist to address homelessness would be in trouble if the problem actually went away.

Policy jobs vs. management jobs

Remember my impression of the attendees at the National Conservative conference? They thought that they belonged in the halls of power in DC, and I thought that they could not function outside of academia. These kids with their Master’s Degrees in Public Policy or their law degrees would never be given an important position within a profit-seeking firm. Only a non-profit or a government agency would take them without first requiring some seasoning in low-level operational roles.

When you are running for office, what do you look for in an aide? Somebody who can help you with communication and image management. Somebody who can be part of a small support staff. Somebody who can provide high-level policy proposals.

Then you win office, and you put those same people in positions of power. And guess what? They know nothing about leadership within an organization. They know nothing about how large institutions function. They know nothing about the problems of execution. They know nothing about how to build a complex computer application to support ObamaCare.

Limited Government = Better Government

This year, Apple canceled a project to build a car. Evidently, the company decided that this was not a business it could profitably enter.

Also this year, Apple came out with the Vision Pro, a headset featuring Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. It was a remarkable technical achievement, but so far I do not think that anyone has figured out useful things to do with it. As long as Apple believes that compelling applications will come around, it will keep up the project. But not otherwise.

No business tries to do everything. A corporation is lucky if it can do a few things well. Every business puts a clear boundary on what it will do and what it will not do. Corporations ruthlessly shut down poorly performing units and unsuccessful initiatives. They carefully choose which new initiatives to undertake.

There seems to be no limiting principle on what the government will try to do. And almost never does government back out of an activity once it gets in.

If running an organization without limiting principles and never shutting down a unit were a good way to be effective, we would not observe millions of separate businesses. Instead, one big firm would manufacture everything, market everything, handle the distribution of everything, and provide every service.

Such an all-purpose enterprise would obviously be unmanageable. Why should we expect government to be successful with such broad scope?

substacks referenced above:

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Social analysis consilient with biology

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We are badly governed. This is why Donald Trump might win next month.