“Put more effort/attention into MY favored project or I’ll withdraw my approval from you” is a song anyone can sing, and the loudest, nastiest voices are the best at it. I don’t think it’s a smart tactic for those whose causes are actually good.
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Yes, I admit I’m sensitive about this personally. I think shaming people for not being good enough causes a lot of toxic side-effects. I know sometimes the right thing to do *is* to try harder, but there are ways to encourage effort that install less malware, I think.
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Good exhortatory content makes doing a hard thing look necessary, exciting, and *doable by you*. Skip the last part and you just demotivate people.
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I suspect almost all the failures can be attributed to funding cuts over the years rather than incompetence. It is highly disingenuous of small government types to undermine state and international agency funding and then attribute failures to incompetence.
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this argument makes sense for things like not having an adequate strategic national reserve, but it's difficult to see how the FDA making it illegal for local entities to create tests is a problem of inadequate funding or power
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Agreed, it’s not a complete explanation. These comparisons are messy. For things like weird rules, the answer is nearly always regulatory capture of a weakened state agency by a private interest. I’d bet $10 that FDA policy was written by lobbyists for a big commercial lab chain
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In general, a lot of the dumb shit attributed to state agencies that get in the way of small private actors was actually crafted by large private actors interested in keeping small fry competition in their place
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re regulatory capture, it's not clear that the blame lies on companies. the regulators have the legal power. if they're getting captured, they are allowing themselves to be captured. in the case of FDA/CDC, they're not elected, so there's not the excuse of needing campaign funds
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fwiw, i don't think that "the market" is the appropriate place to solve this problem. pandemics come second only to defensive wars in terms of problems that should obviously be handled by the state. just skeptical of args that budget + private industry are reason for bad response
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The budget plus private capture states are symptoms of a broader American distrust of the administrative state which is a more subtle cultural force driving the weakness. Americans are natural reactionaries despite the country being founded on notionally kicking out a king.
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Basically if you want my take on the root cause, I think it lies in Americans liking CEOs and de facto monarchs more than faceless public servants. That’s why the office of the president morphed into a personality cult. That position has its merits, but comes with real costs.
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The US does not seem to have worse COVID19 outcomes than Europe though. There can’t be a specifically American reason for a problem that’s not US-specific.
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Why not? There might be more than one way to hit specific outcomes. We'll see all the gory details laid out in a few years in the post-mortem. I'm willing to bet a strong state (in Fukuyama sense) = better outcomes.


