Good, worthwhile post.
The purpose is not just to train my intuition away from the "governments are intrinsically incompetent" that I currently have (and which is unjustified by objective evidence).
"Incompetent" is too strong perhaps. But I think it is safe to say that bureaucracies are intrinsically prone to certain inefficiences. And a large government, like in the US, would not be exempt.
So I'm asking if commentators want to share government success stories they may have come across.
"Success" is too vague. Success from whose perspective? And by what parameters?
I think what tends to happen in this sort of examination is that we would identify governments as the means of optimizing toward certain ends. Some policies are successful to 51% of the people in a country. Some are successful to all citizens of that country, whille being significantly detrimental to the rest of the world. Some make everybody equally ecstatic right now and doom the whole lot us in the future.
At least in terms of domestic impact, would it make sense to compare and contrast countries with relatively large governments against those with small governments? I posit that you'd see less of an answer to which size/style governement is best, and more a landscape of the sorts of consequences they tend to yield.
When predicting future threats, we also need to predict future policy responses. If mass pandemics are inevitable, it matters whether governments and international organisations can rise to the challenge or not. But its very hard to get a valid intuitive picture of government competence. Consider the following two scenarios:
These two situations are, of course, completely indistinguishable for the public. The smartest and most dedicated of outside observers can't form an accurate picture of the situation. Which means that, unless you have spent your entire life inside various levels of government (which brings its own distortions!), you don't really have a clue at general government competence. There's some very faint clues that governments may be working better than we generally think: looking at the achievements of past governments certainly seems to hint at a higher rate of success than the reported numbers today. And simply thinking about the amount of things that don't go wrong in a city, every day, hints that someone is doing their job. But these clues are extremely weak.
At this point, one should look up political scientists and other researchers. I hope to be doing that at some point (or the FHI may hire someone to do that). In the meantime, I just wanted to collect a few stories of government success to counterbalance the general media atmosphere. The purpose is not just to train my intuition away from the "governments are intrinsically incompetent" that I currently have (and which is unjustified by objective evidence). It's also the start of a project to get a better picture of where governments fail and where they succeed - which would be much more accurate and much more useful than an abstract "government competence level" intuition. And would be needed if we try and predict policy responses to specific future threats.
So I'm asking if commentators want to share government success stories they may have come across. Especially unusual or unsuspected stories. Vaccinations, clean-air acts, and legally establishing limited liability companies are very well known success stories, for instance, but are there more obscure examples that hint an unexpected diligence in surprising areas?