2014-07-15

Peak Social Mood, Peak Government Competence

It's Not Your Imagination: The Government Really Is Worse Than Ever
Using data drawn from news archives, Light identified government failures dating back to 1986 and found that major problems occurred at a rate 1.6 per year until 2001 – nearly doubling in the years afterward, to 3.0.

It appears to be getting even worse. President Obama may have had fewer major failures than his immediate predecessors have, but as Light points out, his second term isn’t over yet. “At its current pace, government still has plenty of time to set a record average before Obama leaves office in 2017.”

The purpose of Light’s paper was to identify the causes of major government failures and try to isolate what can be learned from them. His conclusion: The largest contributor is poor policy, which he treats as an umbrella for tasks that are too difficult to begin with, too poorly designed, or are assigned to an agency already too damaged to see the policy through. The second largest contributor, he found, was inadequate resourcing, another umbrella category that included insufficient funding, inadequate staffing, or a lack of collateral capacity such as information technology.

The element of Light’s paper that’s getting the most attention, though, is his conclusion about why government failures are becoming more common – and he points fingers at both sides of the aisle. It boils down to Democrats being too timid to stand up for their beliefs and Republicans being willing to vandalize federal programs in service of an ideology that believes smaller government is better government.
The decline is a result of declining social mood. Even his conclusion is itself a form of negative social mood: he is dissatisfied with both parties.

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