Why Governments Fail
Did the government fail?<p>I don&#x27;t know. We got a vaccine remarkably quickly and the governments (federal and state) distributed it efficiently. I don&#x27;t blame the government for not taking the virus seriously to start with. SARS and MERS didn&#x27;t pan out and people, on the left and right (including me), figured COVID would be the same. Some people predicted COVID would be bad but it wasn&#x27;t crazy to think COVID wouldn&#x27;t turn into a pandemic.<p>The countries that did well with COVID are mostly islands and East Asian countries. I doubt the &quot;Chinese and Japanese are really obedient&quot;-type expanations. I wonder if some East Asian countries had antibodies from similar viruses that flew under the radar and granted partial immunity. That&#x27;s pure speculuation...but even if those countries suceeded due to law and order, that&#x27;s a double-edged sword. Do we really want to build our society to survive viruses with the fewest causalities or are there perhaps higher ideals (freedom, self determiniation) that we should aspire to? And of course there&#x27;s no freedom without the freedom to be wrong.<p>&gt; And where the world needs to head is to establish new means of producing credibility and good reputation that are robust to current technologies. What we’re now calling “populism” might turn out to be the least of our problems.<p>In terms of populism stuff, I think there&#x27;s some truth to the idea here that the internet has led to the unmasking of leaders&#x2F;government as incompetent. To some degree, modern populism consists of people recoiling in horror after realizing just how dumb you can be while holding power. But it&#x27;s easy to notice other people being wrong and quite hard to do any better yourself. Mostly, these populist movements seem bereft of ideas and are just expressing incoherent outrage.<p>It will be interesting to see if the internet makes it possible to have better, more accountable governments. I don&#x27;t discount the possibility. The thing that worries me is that, in my opinion, more transparency is in some sense the problem. We learn about governmental incompetence via the internet but the internet also turns politicians into influencers, and that&#x27;s a signiciant part of the problem too.