Thread by @Noahpinion

Today's @bopinion post is about how coronavirus has exposed a decline in U.S. national effectiveness, and what might be the cause of that.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Pandemics and wars have a way of illustrating differences in countries' overall effectiveness.

By now you've read a million articles about the U.S. failure to test for coronavirus.

Here's a good one:
nytimes.com/2020/03/28/us/…

So why did we fail so badly in the early stages of this pandemic?

Hypothesis 1: We're not actually in decline, and it's just Trump.

He did, after all, fire people who were working on pandemic readiness.

snopes.com/fact-check/tru…

And Trump has made controversial appointments to head the FDA and the CDC, which were the two agencies most responsible for the testing failures.

statnews.com/2019/09/10/ste…

motherjones.com/politics/2020/…

Plus Trump may have personally put pressure on government agencies to NOT test for coronavirus, in the hope of covering up the epidemic in order not to spook the stock market.

In the coming months, I expect we'll see some investigative reports assessing whether he did this.

It's also possible, as many claim, that U.S. institutions are simply old and out of date.

But another possibility is that the last few decades have been a period of general institutional decline.

For example, the civil service has been starved of money, with pay caps, pay freezes, etc. limiting the talent of the people we can hire.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

It's possible that general antipathy to the bureaucracy and civil service has reduced our state capacity.

marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…

Another possible reason for long-term institutional decline is the capturing of regulators, legislators, and civil servants by an entrenched network of special interest groups. Economist Mancur Olson predicted that this would happen.

amazon.com/Rise-Decline-N…

Finally, it's possible that we've allowed our state capacity to decline -- or actively attacked it -- because of racial disunity.

If you think the government mainly acts on behalf of groups of your countrymen you don't like, you'll tend to disdain government.

Some economists have suggested that the U.S.' failure to craft a modern welfare state is due to racism.

(Example: Remember when Rush Limbaugh said that Obamacare was "racial reparations"?)

scholar.harvard.edu/files/alesina/…

The question is how we reverse the decline in U.S. state capacity and reverse the decline.

I have four basic suggestions:

1. Don't elect leaders like Trump

2. Increase the prestige of the civil service

3. Reduce lobbying and special interest power

4. Foster racial unity

Of course, all of those are easier said than done, especially the last one!

But perhaps the coronavirus crisis has made us realize the crucial importance of these long-term difficult goals.

(end)

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…