Always astonished by human capacity for mental exaggeration. Just take a look at the journey of public opinion on the UK. Starting point "a very competent country". (thread)
During the Brexit campaign, politics became disconnected from the civil service and some... let's say extraordinary things were said and done. At first people thought there must be a secret plan - precisely because of the amount of respect for competency.
But there was no secret plan. Suddenly people started to think "are we fundamentally incompetent? What is wrong with us?".
And now - that the rollout of the vaccine works so well - there's almost surprise "oh look at us go". But the thing has always been thus: The UK has areas of enormous competence. That has never changed. We really should not be this surprised.
We also tend to look at single items and overgeneralize "the inefficiency of this one shopping mall from now on will forever form my image of what the US is fundamentally like". And of course, it isn't.
Countries are complex entities. No single item is representative of the whole thing.
And sometimes things are in a construct. Take a centralized v. a decentralized health system. You would expect the latter to be better at quickly reacting to a new challenge. The former to be better at centralized projects. Curiously. That seems to actually be happening.
(Another example: US elections. We seem to be incapable of looking at the US as a country split between D and R. Instead, when our favored side wins we love the US, it is our favorite country. When the other side wins we proclaim it is lost forever. The US itself does that, too)
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