Haiti is certainly a counterexample, as is Zanzibar, but "all but 3" is pretty close to "all but 1," hardly deserving of "Huh?" Yes, Britain's war on the slave trade weakened slavery, but did not immediately end it in any state. I believe the conquest of Zanzibar is the only example of Britain forcing another state to abandon slavery.
I'm more concerned about the difference between "nation" and "state," which I think makes the original statement rather misleading. There are many states today, but most of them were parts of European colonial empires and their abolition was imposed from Europe. This was done peacefully by governments that gained their power through unrelated violence.
hardly deserving of "Huh?"
That was my attempt to express a model conflict, basically "this disagrees with my sense of history." As I understand it, global abolitionism was basically a British phenomenon, and the motive force seems to primarily be private groups, not state actors. It may be a point in credit to governments that they mostly acceded to the abolitionist movement nonviolently, but I don't think it's reasonable to claim they were the primary actors, or to claim that most governments did it independently. (There are still m...
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?