Causes of Decline in US State Capacity
Bloomberg’s Noah Smith (who has a Ph.D. in Economics from U of Michigan) notes:
Ongoing Consequences of the Decline in State Capacity
How a Failure to Test Blinded the U.S. to Covid-19
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/us/testing-coronavirus-pandemic.html
Desperate for medical equipment, states find a beleaguered national stockpile
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/desperate-for-medical-equipment-states-encounter-a-beleaguered-national-stockpile/2020/03/28/1f4f9a0a-6f82-11ea-aa80-c2470c6b2034_story.html
The U.S. Tried to Build a New Fleet of Ventilators. The Mission Failed.
SIZE versus QUALITY of GOVERNMENT
BIG PICTURE VIEW
Bloomberg’s Noah Smith (who has a Ph.D. in Economics from U of Michigan) notes:
“But the U.S. made big moves toward centralization to
deal with the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II and the Cold War.
Those successful responses show that the U.S. has been capable of adapting to
the challenges of upheaval in the past. Recently, though, the U.S. has allowed
its civil service to shrink and its salaries to become less competitive with
the private sector, outsourcing many of the bureaucracy’s functions. …
It’s tempting to blame this on small-government
ideology, but the coronavirus failures also involved over-regulation by the
FDA. In general, fans of more government and less government seem unable to
prioritize high-quality, effective government — what my Bloomberg Opinion
colleague Tyler Cowen and his fellow economist Mark Koyama call state capacity”.
It’s easy to blame Trump for this fiasco. But there’s a much larger story.
It’s easy to blame Trump for this fiasco. But there’s a much larger story.
“It’s easy to blame Trump, and the president has been
inept from the start. But there is a much larger story behind this fiasco. The
United States is paying the price today for decades of defunding government,
politicizing independent agencies, fetishizing local control, and demeaning and
disparaging government workers and bureaucrats.
This was not always how it was. America has
historically prized limited but effective government. In Federalist 70,
Alexander Hamilton wrote, “A government ill executed, whatever it may be in
theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.” President Franklin D.
Roosevelt created the modern federal bureaucracy, which was strikingly lean and
efficient. In recent decades, as the scope of government has increased, the
bureaucracy has been starved and made increasingly dysfunctional.”Ongoing Consequences of the Decline in State Capacity
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/us/testing-coronavirus-pandemic.html
Desperate for medical equipment, states find a beleaguered national stockpile
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/desperate-for-medical-equipment-states-encounter-a-beleaguered-national-stockpile/2020/03/28/1f4f9a0a-6f82-11ea-aa80-c2470c6b2034_story.html
The U.S. Tried to Build a New Fleet of Ventilators. The Mission Failed.
“Thirteen years ago, a group of U.S. public health
officials came up with a plan to address what they regarded as one of the medical
system’s crucial vulnerabilities: a shortage of ventilators….
Money was budgeted. A federal contract was signed.
Work got underway.
And then things suddenly veered off course. A
multibillion-dollar maker of medical devices bought the small California
company that had been hired to design the new machines. The project ultimately
produced zero ventilators….
The stalled efforts to create a new class of cheap,
easy-to-use ventilators highlight the perils of outsourcing projects with
critical public-health implications to private companies; their focus on
maximizing profits is not always consistent with the government’s goal of
preparing for a future crisis”.
To address coronavirus-related shortages, companies
want the federal government to provide strategic guidance
SIZE versus QUALITY of GOVERNMENT
Quality of Government, Not Size, Is the Key to
Freedom and Prosperity
Rafael La Porta; Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes; Andrei
Shleifer and Robert Vishny, (1999), The Quality of Government, Journal
of Law, Economics, and Organization, 15, (1), 222-79
If You Want Bigger Government, Vote Republican
“… for decades, we've been told that a vote for the
GOP is a vote for "smaller
government." This is repeated both by Republicans, who say it like it's a
good thing, and by Democrats who still seem to think that the GOP is committed
to cutting grandma's safety net. If we look at federal spending, though, it's easy to
see that the myth of the budget-cutting Republican president is just that: a
myth.”
The political colour of fiscal responsibility
“The recent debt growth under the Trump administration
is remarkable, especially since it occurred during years of economic expansion.
The rhetoric of political debate might give the impression that this is an
unusual behaviour for a conservative government. For instance, in March 2011,
23 Republican Senators publicly urged President Obama to reduce the deficit to
protect future generations. The reality is quite different. Since the end of
WWII, Republican administrations have systematically been more prone to expand
debt, except during times of crisis. The Trump administration is continuing in
this tradition”.
BIG PICTURE VIEW
David Runciman on political timing and the pandemic
“Partisanship and the tribalism of our politics have
entrenched this division, particularly online. Rumour and suspicion abound”.