You know I’m in unabashed patriot. I love working internationally. People are great. And I also dislike western chauvinism, But I spent 22 years in the military working with the greatest people that we have. The real reason why the Russian military sucks because they don’t have the same sort of professional and listed core that the United States has. It’s not technology. It’s not those damn generals you see on CNN or Fox News. Those guys are over fucking rated. It’s 25 year old kids named Paul, supervising 19 and 18 year old kids name Susan and Jim, while they fix multi million dollar aircraft and perform in ways that would blow your mind.
But it’s not just that. Now I spent 2/3 of the year traveling all over north in South America. But mainly in the United States. I Watch blue-collar workers come together from all over the country, I watch them disassemble, inspect, and repair giant gas turbines, so that you can charge your iPhone. This working class magic is repeated at water plants, nuclear plants, bridges, at places like factories all over the country every day. We’re talking skilled manual labor, 12 hour shifts. Months away from their family.
So heck yeah, the United States has unused capacity. Yes we are a big dysfunctional family made up of dumb ass liberals with dumbass conservatives. And we muddle along. But at the end of the day, no one gets it done like us.
Nice! One genuine missing capacity: we're not good at forcing outdated institutions to reform.
The CDC was designed for malaria alleviation, not pandemic prevention, and so it does that badly. The FDA was designed to be suspicious of new Big Pharma drugs, not helpful in nonprofit investigations of existing generics, and so it does that badly. California's PG&E was designed for power line maintenance in a low-wildfire environment, not our current hot one, and so it does that badly.
What does it take to fix a broken institution? The American armed forces were turned around by the Goldwater-Nichols reforms, but that happened only after serial disappointments in Vietnam, the Iran hostage rescue and Grenada.
Is there any way to fix our outdated institutions, short of waiting for a whole decade of disasters to convince people into actions?
It's not that our institutions are bad at their original jobs. It's that often enough, we need them now to do something new.
America's biggest problem is the structure of our political institutions. There are several flaws I'd like to point out:
1. The biggest and most important: we are constantly on campaign. The House of Representatives should be the world's bastion of democracy, and its a broken land of partisanship which worries about elections every two years. The second a congressman is elected they must immediately start raising funds and campaigning for their next round. To make matters worse: politicians choose their constituents, which is not good.
Much of this is a problem because of political parties became sclerotic. But I do not think our political parties are fixable: they have done too good a job capturing the House and maximizing their political outcomes by, perversely, accomplishing less and outsourcing their job to the president (who is elected every four years).
These are mistakes, but fixable ones. A few suggestions: A) elect the House simultaneously with the president, or soon after (like France), B) make the terms four years not two, and C) either permanently fix districts or move to proportional representation. This gives the elected party four years in control, and will likely result with the president's party in control of the House for the president's full term.
2. The Senate suffers from fewer problems than the House, but we do suffer an issue of imbalance. The Senate skews towards one political party, and this will not be solved anytime soon by party choices. There are fewer available fixes, but my suggestion is: A) move to a system where every candidate must receive 50% of the vote plus one, and B) admit Puerto Rico as a state
As a Houston native who's moved back, I loved taking my kids to NASA (haven't been since the pandemic), which is where my parents took me all the time growing up. It's also been a destination of choice when my friends have visited from out of town.
The one thing that struck me the last times I've been (in the context of "All the News") is the question of "are we capable of building a NASA today?" I'm not just talking about the technology of rockets and space travel, but the iconically, global recognized institution of NASA that has inspired everyone from the around the world for decades. Are we still the kind of country that can dream on a scale that big, shape policy, harness a bunch of private-public sector relationships, etc, etc to pull that off?
I feel like the answer is no. And everyone that I ask has also said they don't think so either. I'm not even sure if people are interested in that sort of thing.
So sure, these things you've mentioned are great and they are significant accomplishments, but they seem to me to be more baseline accomplishments that you've written them as. For example, mRNA vaccines were already in development, we threw money and resources at it, sped up the timeline, and did some gaming with FDA emergency approval process. Manufacturing and administering at scale are still solved challenges even with any nuance Covid introduced. Significant accomplishment yes, but it's hardly a sign that things are truly great. But I'm sure folks will disagree on that.
The bigger question I have, and I think is more representative of if we're a state in decline or in some other phase, is are we a country that can still dream big and make big, new shit happen?
Also fwiw, a lot of Houstonians are still suffering from a lack of aid money, though that's less a federal problem and more a (very shitty) local political problem.
I guess I’m unconvinced by your argument “if the Republicans had just worn masks, we would have defeated COVID!” If you limit yourself to the pre-vaccine period, you don’t see much difference in death rates between red and blue states, between the US and Europe, or between strong and weak lockdown policies. The countries that did really well in the early pandemic are those that (1) started their response early enough to actually stop it before it got out of control (2) had widespread testing up and running as early as possible (thanks a lot CDC!!) (3) quarantined everyone coming into the country and (4) were thus able to keep numbers low enough that contact tracing was still feasible. I don’t think we have evidence of countries succeeding in controlling the virus purely through the kinds of lockdowns advocates wanted, in part because the kinds of family gatherings that spread the virus in winter 2021 are difficult to legislate against.
Ex intel guy here. Our intel system is intentionally built with redundancy - 16 agencies in the IC. With that, you can find differing perspectives on many issues. Raw intel is a mess, especially HUMINT and single-source info.
I think the characterization of the Bush admin is a bit unfair. Post-9/11 was a scary time and people were very fearful about future attacks from the Islamic world. Having an actor with a demonstrated past history of chemical weapons usage (and nuclear weapons development) was seen as too big of a threat.
We should keep our minds open to the possibility that it was not our improvement in intel but instead a breakdown in Russia that has led to high level people in various areas of the Russian government apparatus to try and prevent what is going on. Essentially telling us the Russian plans whether they were attempts on Zelensky’s life or battle strategy. Telling the world was a great strategy but I wonder what we are not being told. It seems highly likely that tactical nukes have been moved into Ukraine (probably sheltered by the nuke plants). The poor performance of the conscript army might also be designed to preserve the professional soldiers and weapons for later.
We are a divided nation, and I don't see any quick fixes. Monied interests fund these divisions so no meaningful changes can take place and endanger their profits. The B.S. issues of abortion, CRT, anti-vax, etc., are smoke screens paid for by monied interests that don't want any changes to the existing structures. Follow the money - who benefits when the government can't negotiate drug prices, when we can't build railroads to reduce automobile usage, and who benefits when we can't use greener energy to combat global warming? All of these issues have powerful monied interests behind the campaigns to stop us from addressing these problems. Until we can fully disclose who donates money, to what Congresspeople, and who pays what lobbyists to block what legislation, we will be forever in the dark and controlled by interests that were not elected.
This an important, valid and cogent analysis, but it needs a major footnote: The covid-19 pandemic objectively revealed that two major factors are impairing USA "state capacity." With 1,000,000+ dead Americans from the pandemic in the past 2+ years, we have lived through the greatest failure in democratic state capacity EVER. As the disparities in covid-19 statistics show governance
and fundamental protection and security of its citizens is hobbled by racism and neoliberal 'free market' corporatism.
The racism is reflected in the terrible illness and death burden experienced by minority and poor citizens. The corporatism is reflected in the instability caused by national income and wealth inequalities, the massive failure of the "market model" of commercial health care, and state incapacity to deal with global warming effectively. Divisive values issues (abortion, gay rights, masking, vaccines) which do impair state capacity can be seen as smoke screens fired up by corporate and political interests (see "stealing an election") to protect their wealth and power from republican democracy. Such considerations lead me to believe we do live in a banana republic in spite of our residual effective state capacities.
There's "fundamental inability to muster effective government provision of goods and services in a given area", an issue which could be caused by a lack of rule of law, lack of the ability to enforce taxes, or a government decision-making structure that is extremely prone to ineffectiveness. Of these, the US only plausibly suffers from the latter, which is the source of critiques of the two-party system, the structure of the Senate, House, executive branch, courts, etc. But I agree that none of these issues are truly damning for the US's ability to achieve the quoted goal.
However, I do think that a chronic failure to utilize the capacity to provide more public goods and services at a higher quality suggests that some aspect of the incentives existing in our system of government may be awry. Pretty much everyone with a basic understanding of the concept of economic externalities can point to several situations in which the US utterly fails to subsidize or tax correctly (subsidies for bovine agriculture and fossil fuels, lack of sufficient subsidies for clean energy or sustainable agriculture, the list goes on). Based on the assumption that these things have been evidently good for a long while, and the assumption that the majority of the US public is likely to come around to those views reasonably quickly given a good debate environment, if they do not agree already, it becomes necessary to make meta-critiques of the government or at the very least political culture in the US. In this post you put most of the weight on the latter critique, but I would perhaps argue that the state could go a long ways to fostering a healthy culture of civic participation, improving voting accessibility by making election day a holiday, automatically registering voters, and making government IDs free (or the first one or two free, to disincentivize carelessness, if necessary) as a bare minimum.
Love this! I think we need to learn to talk to each other in a new way, a way that recognizes what is underneath our differences. I wrote a book about it! Persuade, Don't Preach
You know I’m in unabashed patriot. I love working internationally. People are great. And I also dislike western chauvinism, But I spent 22 years in the military working with the greatest people that we have. The real reason why the Russian military sucks because they don’t have the same sort of professional and listed core that the United States has. It’s not technology. It’s not those damn generals you see on CNN or Fox News. Those guys are over fucking rated. It’s 25 year old kids named Paul, supervising 19 and 18 year old kids name Susan and Jim, while they fix multi million dollar aircraft and perform in ways that would blow your mind.
But it’s not just that. Now I spent 2/3 of the year traveling all over north in South America. But mainly in the United States. I Watch blue-collar workers come together from all over the country, I watch them disassemble, inspect, and repair giant gas turbines, so that you can charge your iPhone. This working class magic is repeated at water plants, nuclear plants, bridges, at places like factories all over the country every day. We’re talking skilled manual labor, 12 hour shifts. Months away from their family.
So heck yeah, the United States has unused capacity. Yes we are a big dysfunctional family made up of dumb ass liberals with dumbass conservatives. And we muddle along. But at the end of the day, no one gets it done like us.
Ukraine will win.
Nice! One genuine missing capacity: we're not good at forcing outdated institutions to reform.
The CDC was designed for malaria alleviation, not pandemic prevention, and so it does that badly. The FDA was designed to be suspicious of new Big Pharma drugs, not helpful in nonprofit investigations of existing generics, and so it does that badly. California's PG&E was designed for power line maintenance in a low-wildfire environment, not our current hot one, and so it does that badly.
What does it take to fix a broken institution? The American armed forces were turned around by the Goldwater-Nichols reforms, but that happened only after serial disappointments in Vietnam, the Iran hostage rescue and Grenada.
Is there any way to fix our outdated institutions, short of waiting for a whole decade of disasters to convince people into actions?
It's not that our institutions are bad at their original jobs. It's that often enough, we need them now to do something new.
America's biggest problem is the structure of our political institutions. There are several flaws I'd like to point out:
1. The biggest and most important: we are constantly on campaign. The House of Representatives should be the world's bastion of democracy, and its a broken land of partisanship which worries about elections every two years. The second a congressman is elected they must immediately start raising funds and campaigning for their next round. To make matters worse: politicians choose their constituents, which is not good.
Much of this is a problem because of political parties became sclerotic. But I do not think our political parties are fixable: they have done too good a job capturing the House and maximizing their political outcomes by, perversely, accomplishing less and outsourcing their job to the president (who is elected every four years).
These are mistakes, but fixable ones. A few suggestions: A) elect the House simultaneously with the president, or soon after (like France), B) make the terms four years not two, and C) either permanently fix districts or move to proportional representation. This gives the elected party four years in control, and will likely result with the president's party in control of the House for the president's full term.
2. The Senate suffers from fewer problems than the House, but we do suffer an issue of imbalance. The Senate skews towards one political party, and this will not be solved anytime soon by party choices. There are fewer available fixes, but my suggestion is: A) move to a system where every candidate must receive 50% of the vote plus one, and B) admit Puerto Rico as a state
Just my 2 cents.
As a Houston native who's moved back, I loved taking my kids to NASA (haven't been since the pandemic), which is where my parents took me all the time growing up. It's also been a destination of choice when my friends have visited from out of town.
The one thing that struck me the last times I've been (in the context of "All the News") is the question of "are we capable of building a NASA today?" I'm not just talking about the technology of rockets and space travel, but the iconically, global recognized institution of NASA that has inspired everyone from the around the world for decades. Are we still the kind of country that can dream on a scale that big, shape policy, harness a bunch of private-public sector relationships, etc, etc to pull that off?
I feel like the answer is no. And everyone that I ask has also said they don't think so either. I'm not even sure if people are interested in that sort of thing.
So sure, these things you've mentioned are great and they are significant accomplishments, but they seem to me to be more baseline accomplishments that you've written them as. For example, mRNA vaccines were already in development, we threw money and resources at it, sped up the timeline, and did some gaming with FDA emergency approval process. Manufacturing and administering at scale are still solved challenges even with any nuance Covid introduced. Significant accomplishment yes, but it's hardly a sign that things are truly great. But I'm sure folks will disagree on that.
The bigger question I have, and I think is more representative of if we're a state in decline or in some other phase, is are we a country that can still dream big and make big, new shit happen?
Also fwiw, a lot of Houstonians are still suffering from a lack of aid money, though that's less a federal problem and more a (very shitty) local political problem.
I guess I’m unconvinced by your argument “if the Republicans had just worn masks, we would have defeated COVID!” If you limit yourself to the pre-vaccine period, you don’t see much difference in death rates between red and blue states, between the US and Europe, or between strong and weak lockdown policies. The countries that did really well in the early pandemic are those that (1) started their response early enough to actually stop it before it got out of control (2) had widespread testing up and running as early as possible (thanks a lot CDC!!) (3) quarantined everyone coming into the country and (4) were thus able to keep numbers low enough that contact tracing was still feasible. I don’t think we have evidence of countries succeeding in controlling the virus purely through the kinds of lockdowns advocates wanted, in part because the kinds of family gatherings that spread the virus in winter 2021 are difficult to legislate against.
Ex intel guy here. Our intel system is intentionally built with redundancy - 16 agencies in the IC. With that, you can find differing perspectives on many issues. Raw intel is a mess, especially HUMINT and single-source info.
I think the characterization of the Bush admin is a bit unfair. Post-9/11 was a scary time and people were very fearful about future attacks from the Islamic world. Having an actor with a demonstrated past history of chemical weapons usage (and nuclear weapons development) was seen as too big of a threat.
We were wrong, but intel is often wrong.
We should keep our minds open to the possibility that it was not our improvement in intel but instead a breakdown in Russia that has led to high level people in various areas of the Russian government apparatus to try and prevent what is going on. Essentially telling us the Russian plans whether they were attempts on Zelensky’s life or battle strategy. Telling the world was a great strategy but I wonder what we are not being told. It seems highly likely that tactical nukes have been moved into Ukraine (probably sheltered by the nuke plants). The poor performance of the conscript army might also be designed to preserve the professional soldiers and weapons for later.
We are a divided nation, and I don't see any quick fixes. Monied interests fund these divisions so no meaningful changes can take place and endanger their profits. The B.S. issues of abortion, CRT, anti-vax, etc., are smoke screens paid for by monied interests that don't want any changes to the existing structures. Follow the money - who benefits when the government can't negotiate drug prices, when we can't build railroads to reduce automobile usage, and who benefits when we can't use greener energy to combat global warming? All of these issues have powerful monied interests behind the campaigns to stop us from addressing these problems. Until we can fully disclose who donates money, to what Congresspeople, and who pays what lobbyists to block what legislation, we will be forever in the dark and controlled by interests that were not elected.
This an important, valid and cogent analysis, but it needs a major footnote: The covid-19 pandemic objectively revealed that two major factors are impairing USA "state capacity." With 1,000,000+ dead Americans from the pandemic in the past 2+ years, we have lived through the greatest failure in democratic state capacity EVER. As the disparities in covid-19 statistics show governance
and fundamental protection and security of its citizens is hobbled by racism and neoliberal 'free market' corporatism.
The racism is reflected in the terrible illness and death burden experienced by minority and poor citizens. The corporatism is reflected in the instability caused by national income and wealth inequalities, the massive failure of the "market model" of commercial health care, and state incapacity to deal with global warming effectively. Divisive values issues (abortion, gay rights, masking, vaccines) which do impair state capacity can be seen as smoke screens fired up by corporate and political interests (see "stealing an election") to protect their wealth and power from republican democracy. Such considerations lead me to believe we do live in a banana republic in spite of our residual effective state capacities.
There's "fundamental inability to muster effective government provision of goods and services in a given area", an issue which could be caused by a lack of rule of law, lack of the ability to enforce taxes, or a government decision-making structure that is extremely prone to ineffectiveness. Of these, the US only plausibly suffers from the latter, which is the source of critiques of the two-party system, the structure of the Senate, House, executive branch, courts, etc. But I agree that none of these issues are truly damning for the US's ability to achieve the quoted goal.
However, I do think that a chronic failure to utilize the capacity to provide more public goods and services at a higher quality suggests that some aspect of the incentives existing in our system of government may be awry. Pretty much everyone with a basic understanding of the concept of economic externalities can point to several situations in which the US utterly fails to subsidize or tax correctly (subsidies for bovine agriculture and fossil fuels, lack of sufficient subsidies for clean energy or sustainable agriculture, the list goes on). Based on the assumption that these things have been evidently good for a long while, and the assumption that the majority of the US public is likely to come around to those views reasonably quickly given a good debate environment, if they do not agree already, it becomes necessary to make meta-critiques of the government or at the very least political culture in the US. In this post you put most of the weight on the latter critique, but I would perhaps argue that the state could go a long ways to fostering a healthy culture of civic participation, improving voting accessibility by making election day a holiday, automatically registering voters, and making government IDs free (or the first one or two free, to disincentivize carelessness, if necessary) as a bare minimum.
Excellent post, a good reminder why I'm a paid subscriber 🥰
Love this! I think we need to learn to talk to each other in a new way, a way that recognizes what is underneath our differences. I wrote a book about it! Persuade, Don't Preach
This project has emerged into a very similar perspective, emphasizing culture:
https://corporate.substack.com/p/cultures-of-extraction?s=r
https://corporate.substack.com/p/cultures-of-regeneration?s=r
https://www.sympoetic.net/Managing_Complexity/complexity_files/1973%20Rittel%20and%20Webber%20Wicked%20Problems.pdf
It sounds like you are saying that we are great at "tame problems" but struggle with "wicked problems."
The "NIMBYs want to preserve their neighborhoods" hyperlink is broken
Two of these are "distribute money" projects, seems relevant.