State capacity
Especially applied to western democracies, especially Australia
December 20, 2024 — December 23, 2024
A mess of links about the state and its capacity to do things, incorporating institutions, social licence and the like. Participatory budgeting, participatory resource management, lack thereof.
Practically speaking, it seems that most citizens would kinda like the state to invest in maintaining a society that was not a crumbling pit of poverty awash in disease and toxic waste and ruled over by robber barons. However, given that they don’t trust the state to get anything right, the same citizens seem to tend towards a fallback plan of keeping their tax money to spend on a nice home cinema to brighten the crumbling pit of poverty, awash in disease and toxic waste, ruled over by robber barons.
What is going on here?
- collective action problems deserve a mention
1 Incoming
The how we need now: a capacity agenda for 2025 - Niskanen Center
Charlie Stross, who can turn a phrase, calls the modern democratic malaise the Beige dictatorship:
Here’s a hypothesis: Representative democracy is what’s happening. Unfortunately, democracy is broken. There’s a hidden failure mode, we’ve landed in it, and we probably won’t be able to vote ourselves out of it.
Overall, the nature of the problem seems to be that our representative democratic institutions have been captured by meta-institutions that implement the iron law of oligarchy by systematically reducing the risk of change. They have done so by converging on a common set of policies that do not serve the public interest, but minimise the risk of the parties losing the corporate funding they require in order to achieve re-election. And in so doing, they have broken the “peaceful succession when enough people get pissed off” mechanism that prevents revolutions. If we’re lucky, emergent radical parties will break the gridlock (here in the UK that would be the SNP in Scotland, possibly UKIP in England: in the USA it might be the new party that emerges if the rupture between the Republican realists like Karl Rove and the Tea Party radicals finally goes nuclear), but within a political generation (two election terms) it’ll be back to oligarchy as usual.
John Robb and his screeds, e.g. The real existential threat and his Hollow State thing.
Globalization, financialization, and rapid technological change is not delivering the improvements it promised — at least, not to anyone but the technorati. The rest of America is being left behind.
The left behinds are the supermajority of Americans getting creamed by the hollowing out of America.
Americans who lose more good jobs, benefits, and status with each passing year. Americans who went deep into debt for college (in order to ascend to a slot in the technorati) but are perpetually underemployed. Americans who work all day but can only make enough to buy food with the money they earn…
His perspectives are often interesting. His habit of putting things in blog-sized, unreferenced, repetitive and sweepingly generalised posts is irritating; possibly this is how you write to feed the Internet Content Machine, but it reduces the ideas to a kind of prepper mind-candy when I want numbers.