Speaking generally, people seem to have unrealistic expectations about human institutions. Name a large one that isn't bureaucratic, that doesn't have inefficiencies of large organizations, and where its priority isn't loyalty to the institution itself (though Congress, consisting of elected people nationwide, might be an exception to that).
Not all institutions are the same; some are better than others and we shouldn't just accept problems and corruption. But why do people keep believing big talkers who say they're going to magically eliminate all those things and make it run like a hyper-efficient 5-person business?
IMHO, much of it is people looking to get elected by looking for problems and things to complain about, rather than looking how to get things done.
Without time to examine it in detail (I've got to run), I'd hypothesize that most of what's important in the world is accomplished and has been accomplished by large institutions.
In "American Amnesia" (1) Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson argue that post WWII, the mixed economy of private business / free markets doing what it does best, in conjunction with the government investing in education, science, technology, and infrastructure (which all benefit private sector), while providing a safety net, resulted in prosperity.
The trend since Reagan / Thatcher years (neoliberalism) and anti-government free market fundamentalism threatens this constructive partnership where private sector and government were both rivals and partners.
On the one side you have "starving the beast" (think Grover Norquist, Tax Pledge), defunding critical programs to the point of dysfunction. Does it surprise anyone that the IRS is underfunded by Congress to pursue tax evaders, as Congressman are lobbied to keep loopholes open?
Another calamity is NASA's Earth Sciences, the part that studies Earth itself (climate change, etc).
On the other side of the isle, the dems have failed to make government /efficient/ and a visible positive force in the daily lives of average people.
I have heard variations of this argument many times, but it isn't clear how this represents US history since WW II. By any measure (% of GDP, etc). government spending is much larger than it was in the post WWII era. By any measure, government regulations and control over the economy is much larger than it ever was in the post WW II era.
>...On the one side you have "starving the beast" (think Grover Norquist, Tax Pledge), defunding critical programs to the point of dysfunction.
What has changed since after the WW II era, is that the spending on the safety net is many times larger than it was earlier. Even with overall spending going up, this has resulted in less spending on federal R&D, infrastructure, NASA, etc.
Offhand, I don't know of any economist or politician who has said they believe in "free market fundamentalism" - as such I don't think the term is useful as it just becomes a label used to poison the well and prevent meaningful discussion.
TL;DR: The foundation for the SV was laid by the US government in WWII. Only on that basis did private enterprise build the industry.
From today's point of view, WWII saw today unimaginable spending - huge waste! - by the government. On research, research, more research and infrastructure, and more infrastructure, and even more research. Imagine even half the amount they spent back then announced today (in today's dollars). The cries about government overreach and waste and "oh my god the debt!" would shake the North American continent down to 5 km below the surface.
Government also developed or funded: The Internet, fracking, most academic research ... and the educations of everybody reading this, to at least some extent.
What's amazing is that we actually have to remind people of this. Every large, powerful, cohesive society in history has had a centralized state of some sort. Societies that don't tend to get conquered by armies ranging from bandits to systematic invaders, or to get balkanized into wasteful little feudal domains.
>I'd hypothesize that most of what's important in the world is accomplished and has been accomplished by large institutions.
Teams of people are good at solving problems that individuals could not do by themselves, nothing new there. On the flip side of this hypothesis, the most grievous acts have also been committed by teams of people.
Accountability and transparency are the important factors here.
Are Americans' perceptions more or less accurate than they were 50 years ago, when confidence in public institutions was a lot higher? Look at the factors 'vaadu listed:
> Corruption. money gets access
Back in the day, money used to buy votes and offices outright.
> Elected government folks' priority is getting reelected.
That's always been the case.
> Unelected government folks have far too much power
The power of the administrative state contracted dramatically during the Reagan/Clinton era. Measures like price controls are taboo today, but were seen as a standard tool of governance in the 1950's and 1960's.
> Lack of accountability for wrongdoing and incompetence
Government is way more transparent today than it used to be, both voluntarily and involuntarily. The FBI's investigations into MLK took about a decade to come to light. The NSA's activities are being leaked almost in real time. U.S. covert missions in other countries used to take decades to come to light. These days, we all but have a play-by-play of every drone strike.
Another example is that the morals of our leadership are subject to more scrutiny than ever. JFK was literally raping young women in office. George H.W. Bush had a mistress that everyone in knew about. But the media never talked about any of that--there was a code of silence about that. But that code of silence is dead today. Obama is probably one of the most morally virtuous men to hold the office--if he wasn't his failings would've been plastered 24/7 across the Internet.
I'd argue that peoples' increased cynicism is not a response to government getting worse, but peoples' expectations getting higher because they have more information about everything.
Getting the people inside the institution to recognize that people don't trust them may lead to them trying to do better.
I'm pretty sure that most people that work in hospital billing have little notion of how terrible a process it is. They just think they are doing the best they can given the situation (nevermind that the institutions have created the situation). For example, I was discussing a bill with someone (I was complaining that it seemed high) and their unimpeachable logic was that I shouldn't care about how much it was because it had already been applied to my deductible. Yes, they actually said something along those lines.
Above I'm alluding to the people inside of them wanting to believe in what they are doing. The average person working in medical billing doesn't actively want to participate in a cluster fuck, they are putting up with it because they need a job.
Mostly, I think the way to fix broken institutions is to dismantle them.
Because a new institution is going to sprout up in its place. Maybe some aspects (e.g., medical billing) will be improved. But there will still be a new institution and it will still have lots of bugs, some new and some old.
Your suggestion is like noticing that a few modules of an XX MLOC code base suck and then deciding to rewrite the entire code base.
You might decrease the code base. But probably not by an order of magnitude.
You might fix some bugs. But you'll sure as hell introduce new ones, too.
You're definitely going to end up spending a shitload of money.
And eventually, assuming your software is actually used by real people, your beautiful new code base will become a cluster fuck for the same reason the old one did.
In most cases, the wise move is to actually identify the problems and solve those, leaving in place the solid components that actually work well.
Just like the XX MLOC codebase, institutions aren't the problem; rather, they are the inevitability. You won't get rid of them by throwing away the ones we have now, and in most cases you're better off fixing bugs than starting anew.
It is a problem that the American people are too cynical. Cynicism is the reason negative campaign ads are so effective - no one trusts political ads unless they're negative - and the more negative they are, the more people believe them. Cynics don't bother actually studying the positions of a candidate - because they know all candidates are corrupt anyway, and all parties are the same - but of course they'll vote for anyone who's politically incorrect and promises to "throw the bastards out," because the only politician anyone trusts is a politician who pretends they're not running for office. Cynicism has made the concept of being engaged with the political process a joke to anyone who doesn't want to destroy that process.
I mean, the cynics are correct, but they're also more than a little responsible for perpetuating that system by setting the bar so low.
I think a big part of the problem is that we have a concept of cynicism at all. It's very similar to the conspiracy theorist label. There are known conspiracies. Big ones. It's not that crazy to be a conspiracy theorist. It is crazy to think that we've been visited by aliens or that the elite are reptiles. Thinking those things does make a person a conspiracy theorist. That doesn't mean that all conspiracy theories are crazy. In the same way, not all cynicism is petulant and hopeless. But when a population is trained to recognize and dismiss cynics that is frequently what they become.
>In the same way, not all cynicism is petulant and whiny.
That's true, but most of it is, and I don't think that's entirely accidental. Many cynics are cynics because society expects them to be. People mistrust the government before they really even understand what it is.
>It's just that when a population is trained to recognize and dismiss cynics that is frequently what they become.
I would argue the population has been trained to be cynical in order to disengage them from politics, lead them to expect nothing from the system, and make them more easily manipulated. It does seem evident that there is a feedback loop between the cynicism of voters and politics.
> I would argue the population has been trained to be cynical in order to disengage them from politics
I actually agree. However, I think the discussions we need to be having are ultimately cynical. We need to be able to tolerate it. The opinion you've just expressed is terribly cynical and that doesn't undermine it's legitimacy.
- Sabotage and subversion. (It is easy to forget to add this one to the list...but there is probably quite a bit of this going on at various levels).
- Lack of "Jokers" or lack of the right kinds of them...? [1] [2].
The Jokers bit is interesting. To quote [2], "Jokers are crazy, sadistic bastards who care nothing about the group benefit (so they don't consume it), but they do care about destroying things. They usually do so while cackling and making bad puns. They closely resemble Cesar Romero, Jack Nicholson, or Heath Ledger (depending on the decade), or sound like post-Star Wars Mark Hamill (the best Joker of all time)."
Interestingly, in a public goods game involving Cooperators (your good institutional contributors), Defectors (your bad actors), and Jokers, there are three possible outcomes:
1. Without Jokers in the game, Defectors do better than Cooperators.
2. With semi-effective Jokers in the game, an indefinite cycle of (a) Cooperators doing well, then (b) Defectors taking over, then (c) Jokers beating out Defectors happens.
3. With super-effective Jokers in the game, they take over and beat out both Cooperators and Defectors.
- Elected government folks' priority is getting reelected.
- Unelected government folks have far too much power
I'm sure there's any way to have both of these be managed. If you give more power to elected officials, they have even more incentive to get reelected. If you take power away from them, the elections just matter less.
I think it has more to do with institutions that lack ladders for people to climb. Who can dream of becoming a politician or a banker? Such realities are closed to most people.
You have to enable people to do the right thing. Sufficient stability and resources, combined with active and effective accountability.
No project, much less institution, is "set and forget". Nor can any individual continually nor consistently "do the right thing" in the face of ongoing personal threat and insecurity.
Not every aspect of life benefits from loose, disposable relationships.
You don't notice when things go well. If you have a good experience with the Fire Department, you aren't going to say "wow, I wish we could take down that institution". It just disappears from your mind.
I'm sure there's a term for this, but I don't know what it is.
I wonder if the reason we distrust our institutions is because we almost worship them.
As I've watched the society become more atheistic, I've watched it look more and more to the human institutions to replace what it lost. All the grandeur and power we expected of a god is missing. Instead we see corrupt humans just like us doing corrupt things.
Every time something bad happens, we scream for the government to do something. We don't hold the person accountable; we hold the tool. When the government does something and it has unintended consequences, we get mad that they didn't forsee it coming or we get mad that they knew what would happen and just wanted steal even more power.
The same is true for financial institutions. We expect them to magically make money and prosperity for our stocks. We give them grand titles and powers. Then they fail. We gnash our teeth and curse these Titans of industry.
This is one of the main points of "Sapiens." That Capitalism, Communism, Nations-States, et al are manifestations of a new wave of religions that followed the first wave (polytheism, tree worship, animism, etc), and the second wave of monotheistic religions like Islam, Christianity etc.
It's sad because congress is where our individual vote carries the most weight. It's a crucial institution for our country, without which we'd be nothing more than an empire (in my opinion). Now more than ever it is important to root out the cronyism, nepotism, and big-money that has corrupted this important branch of our government.
You can't clean up Congress because you only get to vote for one of 438 members. In general the problem with members of Congress is that their constituents actually like them and frequently re-elect them.
This fact is quite sad when you consider that there are some representatives who state that it's their job to make sure nothing happens. Then people elect these people!
Maybe people have higher confidence in their own Congresspersons. Perhaps, they disagree strongly with their counterpart voting constituents on the Coasts. If this is the case, democracy is working as expected.
I also believe democracy is "working as expected".
It's hard to see locally, but we're a country that's deeply divided on some core issues. Half the country wants gay marriage, the other half doesn't. A single-payer-advocating socialist almost won the Democratic primary, where his opponent is talking seriously about trying to "roll back" the ACA ("Obamacare"), this president's legacy domestic policy achievement.
I feel like half the country wants to become more like Europe -- more socialist, higher minimum wage, high taxes, big social safety net, free universities, lots of job protections (and the reluctance to hire that goes with it), minimal/no religion, less marriage, whereas the other half wants to step back about 50 years to picket fences, nuclear families, and a more isolated national existence.
We aren't going to have another civil war but I wouldn't be surprised if, looking back, we're more ideologically divided now than the country was, then.
That divide is fabricated by political strategists (see "wedge issues"). When you talk to people about topics where the parties haven't staked out a position yet most people are willing to compromise or simply don't care.
As many American soldiers died in the Civil War as in every other war we've ever fought combined. If we were as divided now as we were then, I think it'd be surprising as hell.
The Civil War didn't occur just because of how deep the divisions were, but because they were strongly correlated with geography and not strongly correlated with class (particularly, that the divisions were quite present among the upper class with disproportionate influence on governments, and, while not perfectly aligned with geography, strongly correlated with it especially among the upper classes.)
The same degree of division with different geographic and class distribution could very well not have similar results.
My senators are douchebags. They (almost purposefully) split on nearly every important vote, thereby saving the 'state' from being on the 'losing' side... never mind having a united front on anything...
I'd call it an almost complete breakdown of the parliamentary process in this country. The unwillingness of Congress to advise and consent with regard to filling a supreme court vacancy is unprecedented and the media is essentially ignoring it given the constitutional crisis it truly represents.
Then you must address the fact that SCOTUS is now adjudicating law based not on the law itself or precedents or logical reasoning, but how the individual judges personally feel the law should apply... which is why congress is hemming-and-hawing over it.
also, much like Soylent Green, companies are now 'people'...
Life in America is simple, "To each his own". You are on your own if you fuck up and no, you can't rely on institutions to save your ass. Institutions are just looking for their own good.
Your path leads to lots of problems. Humans are social; our entire adaptability revolves around being able, in times of discomfort or disaster, to use the tools others have spent their time and resources creating. Someone thinking it's possible to make it on his/her own just shows that cooperation is so ubiquitous that we don't even notice it.
The development patterns of the last 75 years, with their spreading out of people, have caused huge problems here, causing people to be physically distant from one another, eroding a very natural support network.
Additionally, we've lost powerful charitable forces over the recent decades: religion and unpaid women. Wealthy wives, being expected to stay home with the kids, were hugely important in social work. Now that church influence is in decline and women are paid for their work, we have to pivot to other institutions for support structures. In the US, we've not quite gotten that next generation of support figured out.
Not all institutions are the same; some are better than others and we shouldn't just accept problems and corruption. But why do people keep believing big talkers who say they're going to magically eliminate all those things and make it run like a hyper-efficient 5-person business?
IMHO, much of it is people looking to get elected by looking for problems and things to complain about, rather than looking how to get things done.
Without time to examine it in detail (I've got to run), I'd hypothesize that most of what's important in the world is accomplished and has been accomplished by large institutions.