Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

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Almost everything the government does is extremely complicated. How about the modern coast guard search and rescue process, weather forecasting, air traffic control, making counterfeit resistant money, etc etc.

Of course it’s all stuff the government does directly like GPS that generally works even if theirs issues with version 1. Go to Healthcare.gov today and it works fine, but wow 8 years ago there where issues. People still get mileage talking about that launch presumably because it’s that unusual.

Bringing up the FTC there’s keeping the wireless spectrum clean. You can blame the Government for not solving all shorts of issues, but people complain while at the same time they largely don’t want state or federal government internet. Healthcare is the same issue, we apparently don’t want even a public option, yet somehow the government is still on the hook.

People are always going to talk up government boondoggles because that’s what’s memorable. Clean water in all 155,693 public water systems in the United States isn’t easy it’s a monumentally difficult task that works 99.9% of the time across a huge range of public and private organizations managed by a huge range of different locations from tiny towns to vast cities. Of course if people actually trusted their water then bottled water would be less popular…

Almost anything any government does is extremely complicated, and yet most of the developed ones succeed in ways our fails at. Why are we unique? Countries poorer than us, less dense than us, smaller than us, still manage to provide many basic services, rights, protections, and guarantees that ours does not. This is American exceptionalism gone awry.

Those things you mentioned aren't recent developments. Yes, there was a time when our government was capable of producing good output. What happened? Why are we still judging today's government by its successes of decades past...? Most of what you mentioned is literally last-century tech. The world has moved on; our government has not.

> You can blame the Government for not solving all shorts of issues, but people complain while at the same time they largely don’t want state or federal government internet.

Maybe there's one class of issues that government can't deliver on because the public mandate isn't quite there yet, like single-payer healthcare. But there's another class of issues that the public DOES want, the government already wrote the laws and allocated the budget for, and then did absolutely nothing about (like rural broadband grants basically going to corrupt telcos, with zero real enforcement). That has nothing to do with the lack of public will, just sheer incompetence and corruption.

Then there's the outright unconstitutional things, like warrantless wiretapping or drone assassinations of US citizens... to say nothing of recent developments, like Roe v Wade.

It's not that our boondoggles our more visible, it's that we fail at providing basic services for a huge portion of the population -- things that most other developed democracies can provide without much issue or controversy. By that measure, we fall far short.

It’s generally possible to find individual governments that do just about any specific thing better than the US gov, but that’s not to say each of those countries is better in every way. The best healthcare isn’t in the country with the lowest crime, least corruption, down a list where the 2nd country is then second on every criteria. Further only looking at US failures ignores how other counties fail in different ways. The UK’s land situation is seriously messed up and yet we rarely consider that when comparing governments. I am not going to say the US is #1, but it’s a long way from abject failure.

Also when you excluded say Nigeria and in fact most counties then every remaining country is going to seem worse simply because you just arbitrarily raised the standards. It’s not US exceptionalism to simply say few countries or groups of countries have landed anything on Mars which is freaking difficult. Sure, providing great healthcare is more important, but it’s also something very few counties have done well.

In the detracting from success by looking at unrelated failures misses my argument, at best it speeks to the likelihood of success not the possibility.

(Sorry for the late reply, didn't see your response until now.)

So what do you think is a fairer way to measure governments? Ratio of important successes to important failures? A matrix of weighted policies and implementation scores?

You'd probably end up with something similar to to the UN's human development index (http://hdr.undp.org/en/composite/HDI), in which the US ranks #17, behind Norway, Ireland, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Iceland, Germany, Sweden, Australia, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Singapore, the UK, Belgium, New Zealand, and Canada. All of those are perfectly livable countries. My only criterion was "developed democracies", and Hong Kong isn't even much of a democracy anymore. I don't think that's an unreasonably high bar.

Our government is just on the low end of mediocre compared to other developed democracies, at least by the metrics I can think of.

If you can think of a better metric, I'm all ears.

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