Honk if you want better government
Nobody would ever write a book called Why Government Succeeds So Often. A book with the opposite title was published because government failure is so commonplace.
But equally, government does succeed sometimes – even the US government! The US built the New Deal infrastructure, won World War II, and put a man on the moon. And these successes didn’t happen randomly: some institutions consistently succeed brilliantly.
To explain this success, observers often point to the charismatic leaders and popular mandates of these agencies. But have you ever wondered how they did their accounting? How they wrote their job descriptions and decided who to promote? What sort of records they kept, and how they organized them?
For most well-adjusted adults, the answer is no – so the mission of State Capacitance is to ask these questions for you. More broadly, I believe that proponents of state capacity need the courage to ask extremely boring questions about how successful agencies actually functioned.
Some of this is merely interesting history, but the real benefit is to serve as a model for reform. What worked in the past might work again in the present.
This publication
“State capacity” refers to the government’s ability to actually deliver on the goals that it commits to. What does the title State Capacitance mean, then? Capacitance is the ability to collect and store energy, but this energy is inevitably discharged over time.
And capacitance is a useful analogy for bureaucracy: bureaucratic competence is built up by charismatic founders or determined reformers, and stored in the institution’s policies and culture. But without constant effort, this competence is slowly lost over time – even as the bureaucracy keeps chugging along.
We need competent bureaucracies that can enact the democratic mandates of elected politicians. And to reform bureaucracy today, we might study past episodes in which competence was either built up or lost.
To that end, this publication offers several types of content, including:
Case studies – Deeply researched explanations of past government initiatives, whether these are successes to imitate or failures to avoid.
Historical articles – Factual descriptions of how government processes worked in the past. The government often faced the same challenges as today, but came up with startlingly different solutions!
Notes on public administration – To keep track of the many proposals for reform, it is helpful to classify them: how many fundamental approaches are there to e.g. budgeting? These notes offer the minimum theory needed to understand bureaucracy, without any jargon.
This publication does not (directly) address current political debates. But if the history of, say, personnel classification strikes your interest, then by all means:
