I'm the first person to explicitly call out public sanitation? Wow, ok.
Wherever humans gather together, big piles of human shit will inevitably follow. Cities are great, but if you want to live in one you have to solve the feces management problem. The traditional solution, rediscovered in widely disparate times and places throughout human history, is to poop in a pot and dump it in the river. You can get farther with that strategy than you'd probably think, but sooner or later everyone starts getting cholera and you have to switch paradigms.
The exact solution depends on the available technology; I happen to think ours (ubiquitous yet unobtrusive pipes which converge on chemical treatment plants) is especially nice. But somebody needs to build the aqueducts or lay the pipes or whatever, and then force absolutely everybody to use them (because recall that our goal is not the convenient flush toilet, it's to eradicate cholera).
And so we have. Probably every sidewalk you've ever walked on had a sewage pipe underneath it. In fact, it's likely that you're less than 100 feet from human feces at this very second, but you don't have to care because an infrastructure of staggering complexity and robustness exists to handle it for you. And if it breaks down, you can call a person who's made it their life's work to solve this sort of problem. Those things exist because we as a society now believe, with the kind of religious fanaticism that would make L. Ron Hubbard explode with envy, that shitting in the river is for animals. And we believe that because our ancestors created that world ex nihilo, their children grew up in it, and their grandchildren knew nothing else. Sometimes you can get that kind of paradigm shift out of private industry--just look at the automobile. But sometimes you don't.
More concretely, the leaded gasoline thing was pretty good.
In general, I think the purpose of government is to solve collective action problems. It'll succeed at insofar as 1) everyone agrees that that it's an actual problem, and 2) the solution is well-understood. To get #1 you have to build your government out of people whose understanding of reality is fairly well-aligned (the way everyone understands that it's bad for the tribe downstream to get cholera, for example). #2 does not generalize as well.
Less formally, one might say that government is for solving the problems about which everyone says "Ugh, yeah, someone should do something about that".
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?