It seems to me that your three barriers are more intertwined than you recognize.
Activist government, in which California leads nearly any other place on earth, puts much discretionary power in the hands of government. Practically, this is not in the hands of elected officials - most of the actual power is delegated to commissions, boards, and agencies. These commissions, boards, and agencies should not be expected to faithfully implement the state policies as envisioned; they are made up of people who have their own priorities and interests.
This leads to one or both of the following: either the government bodies are captured by the people and organizations most affected by the decisions, or they are run for the benefit of the employees. The California Public Utilities Commission is an example of the former; the utilities themselves are most directly affected, and will spend a great deal of energy molding policy to their advantage. The Department of Parks and Recreation is an example of the second: employees implement policies and procedures in ways that maximize agency budgets, increase agency employment, improve employee pay and benefits, and avoid criticism for breaking laws and regulations; services to the public are whatever is left after these interests are taken care of. All of this can be summarized in your first barrier (Narrow Interests).
In this view, the second barrier (Progressive Proceduralism) is merely a tool the Narrow Interests can use to advance their agendas. The opportunity for Proceduralism is built into the American approach to government. In order to prevent the kinds of abuses we've seen in the past, we try to write rules that will circumscribe discretion of elected, appointed, and civil service officials. The rules require hearings, investigations, and reports, which inevitably produce results that call the objectivity of the process into question, leading to more research, hearings, and reports before any action can be taken. All of this gives opportunity for the Narrow Interests to mold the policies in their interests, or to block new initiatives completely.
The third barrier (Anti-Statism) isn't really the belief that government can't succeed - at its best, it's a deep skepticism of the potential of expanding government's scope to solve problems that have no obvious solution. And it is a natural result of the first two barriers: people see that initiatives are hijacked by the Narrow Interests and bogged down in Proceduralism so that the purest of ideals end up achieving essentially none of their objectives, at great cost in terms of government spending as well as lost individual liberty. As you say, any other institution can also fail, but every other institution can be destroyed by its failures: businesses that can't deliver products go bankrupt; corrupted religious institutions lose their followers; voluntary organizations that are corrupted or no longer relevant lose their members. The consequence of government failure is generally more government.
There was a time when Californians achieved great things through government: they built freeways, water and irrigation systems, and created a very prosperous society blessed by lovely climate and beautiful scenery. In order to recapture this outcome, it seems to me that Californians will need to reduce government to a scale that can be effectively monitored by media, elected officials, and interested citizens, and to avoid the temptation to try to solve all problems with programs and rules. But that would cut against the Narrow Interests and be blocked in Proceduralism. These barriers can be overcome, but it would require mobilizing the citizenry on a scale not seen in decades at least, and the result would be transitory unless the scope of ambitions for the state is scaled back to match the scale of government that can be effectively monitored and held accountable.
Hi Brian, I've been thinking through your comment, and would like to understand it better. What I currently take away from your argument is a vision that size of government or scope of government action allows for capture by narrow interests, which then drives a dynamic of proceduralism which then leads to anti-statism. Am I getting this right?
At the moment, it feels like this argument proves too much. If we take (lack of) trust-in-government as a proxy for anti-statism, I understand your argument to imply that lack of trust should be directly correlated with size of government, but this seems, at best, to be not what the data show (see e.g. https://data.oecd.org/gga/trust-in-government.htm).
A fair response to my observation might be to say that what the post is really getting at is efficacy of government, rather than trust per se. On this view, I could read your comment as claiming that there should be an inverse correlation between efficacy of government and size of government. Pinning this down would require Misha (or us) to start defining "efficacy" (which I think is probably a good activity), but I would think that basic proxies such as citizen happiness, life expectancy, quality of life, low incidence of social ills (violence, crime, suicides, addiction, frayed social fabric), etc. should allow us to get started. The data for these proxies seem to track "trust-in-government" pretty well (see e.g. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-countries-in-the-world for happiness measures), with the top countries for happiness nearly identical to the top countries for government trust. My takeaway from this is that government efficacy, at least as captured by the above proxies, seems at best orthogonal to size of government, and possibly correlated with it. Let me know if you have a different read on this data, or this framing.
For the moment, when I look at the above data and then try to match it with your argument, it feels like a significant pivot comes at the end of your first paragraph where you write that commissions can "not be expected to faithfully implement the state policies as envisioned." This is not obvious to me, and I think it might be instructive, both for your observations and for Misha's post, to drill down on why this might be the case in CA. What are the incentives or mechanisms that CA lacks that would help ensure faithful implementation? How do international comparisons with high efficacy (e.g. the Nordics or Germany) get around this?
I wonder if a similar analysis applies to your comment in other places. For example, it's not clear to me that proceduralism/rules to limit discretion is the necessary outcome of governing agents diverging from the intent of legislators or the public. I would love a cross country comparison of mechanisms in use to successfully close this gap or prevent it from opening. My guess is that this may suggest alternate strategies that align the interests of the governing with the public interest without undermining effective governance. As I understand Misha's post (and the animating spirit of this substack), he is calling for exploring and envisioning new approaches to this problem through shifting incentives, embedding oversight and outcomes as integral parts of governance, etc. I think fleshing out what these alternatives might look like is vitally important, and I hope Misha and his collaborators take your comment as a call to do so!
Lastly, thinking through your comments on anti-statism, a hinge line for me is your comment about how other institutions can fail, but only government can fail without consequence. This is something I've heard for as long as I can remember (I think it goes back to Reagan/Thatcher, and likely even earlier) and it's never been one I can get on board with. There are lots of examples of state failure and social collapse in history! States can fail and go bankrupt just like businesses, faiths, etc. The difference is that because states are so much important to people's lives than other institutions, it's a much more consequential disaster for a state to fail than for a business or another social institution, and this is why we don't just leave it to "market" mechanisms to deal with.
The challenges we face right now in CA - cost/quality of living (e.g. housing crisis, schools), wildfires, water scarcity - are problems we need to solve as a society in order to prosper in CA long-term. Each of these is at a scale and with a level of public good (or "externality") as to make a solution without the state playing a major role both hard to envision and without good historical precedent (at least to my knowledge). And states that do govern effectively (like the Nordics, like Germany, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore) create tremendous improvements in the lives of their citizens, which I take as an argument that we should want the state to be as effective an ally and agent as possible, and not just something small that doesn't get in the way of other efforts.
Summing up, I think you're right that the way we've been approaching this in CA is badly broken, and from this sense, I can see a lot of resonances and overlap between your observations and those animating Misha's post. But I don't think the present situation is a foregone conclusion, or a logical outcome of a dynamic that arises inextricably when we ask for government that can effectively solve problems, rise to challenges, and provide a setting where citizens can flourish. I think we can and should ask for this type of government, and I hope Misha and his fellow co-authors can contribute to getting us there.
Well, you certainly cover a lot of territory. I admire your efforts to come up with an overarching theory, or framework. I'm not sure such a theory is really possible. Rather than try, I'll offer some reasons I don't think it's possible.
First, I don't think the question you link about trust in the national government is relevant to California's situation, because the issue isn't trust in the national government. In addition, I don't think there are any simple statistical or demographic factors to explain why one country would have high trust and another low; I think the answer lies in national history, social cohesion, and basic expectations. A small country like Switzerland may have high trust in the government in part because it is small, but it is still larger than most counties in the US, and I expect that many county governments don't have great confidence from their citizens.
For the US at national level, I think citizens had great confidence in the national government for about 25-30 years after the second world war. This was based on perceived success in curing the Great Depression through activist New Deal policies, on observed success in destroying the most dangerous militaries in the world, on unparalleled prosperity, and on general agreement among the population on what the government should do. It may not have been as strong as sometimes portrayed - I expect there were many people who felt left out of all this, and didn't share confidence in government. This confidence unraveled in the wake of Viet Nam, Watergate, social unrest and government's response, and perceived ineffectiveness of many government programs; nothing since has given reason to restore confidence.
But the issue isn't confidence in the federal government, but confidence in state government. So, let me re-state and expand my basic thesis: Voters tend to vote for politicians who promise to do great things for them. The politicians appropriate money to the cause, or pass laws requiring others (businesses, say) to do something pleasing, and claim they've done their jobs. The new programs and policies, however, are not implemented by the elected politicians, but either by appointees who can generally avoid much accountability, or by civil service employees who are generally sheltered from any accountability as long as they don't break any rules. This framework came out of the Progressive era in American politics; during the 18th and 19th centuries politicians openly used their positions for self-dealing and cronyism. The Progressive movement tried to reverse these problems by insulating civil servants from politics, but unfortunately also insulated them from accountability.
It isn't exactly inevitable that commissions won't faithfully implement the policies as envisioned, but it's close, unless the commission members can be held accountable. If the commissions are given great discretion, they seem to pursue the American tradition for self-dealing and cronyism; from what I've read of the California Coastal Commission, they're a great example, where Commission members and their friends can do what they want, and others are blocked and frustrated, often selling their property - to Commission members or their friends. If commissions and other agencies are given lots of rules to constrain their discretion, they will follow the rules because breaking rules can get one in trouble. They may do some self-dealing within the rules; an example would be the Department of Parks and Recreation responding to tight budgets by closing parks rather than reducing headquarters staff.
I don't know whether it's possible in the American system to have a level of accountability that will get public agencies to conscientiously work for the public good year in and year out. California had a pretty good record for a while. Multiplication of rules, and adding blocking points (Proceduralism again) is one way to kill an agency's mission.
Again, I think cross-national comparisons don't offer easy answers. Scandinavian countries are small and culturally homogeneous, at least until recently. They had a Lutheran work ethic where it would be shameful to take advantage of one's neighbors. Small size may help with self-policing, but all three are bigger than Connecticut, and Connecticut suffers many of the same problems as California. And Denmark and Sweden, at least, seem to be seeing their cohesiveness degrade - possibly because of new values of a welfare state, possibly because they have accepted significant numbers of immigrants and refugees who don't share the cultural background.
I didn't say that government "can't" fail - Somalia and Libya would offer examples, and quite a few others are close. But, barring social disintegration on that scale, governments in the US don't have to worry about going out of business. Municipalities may go bankrupt, but municipal employees won't be the main ones to suffer. State pension funds may go bust, but the people who manage the funds won't bear the costs. But these examples are small parts of the overall issue: agencies that fail at their missions claim that they need more resources, and politicians generally support these claims. If schools don't get good results, they need smaller class sizes (more teachers), or more teacher trainers, or more assistant principals or deputy superintendents. If a bridge collapses, the highway department needs more inspectors. And so on.
You're right that the failure of California government would be worse than the failure of Google. But, California politicians are energetically working to increase the likelihood of such a failure. They pushed for, and got, billions of dollars for a high-speed rail system that will never operate. They gave billions of dollars to sponsor biotech companies that don't have to return anything. They passed feel-good requirements for renewable energy that make electricity more expensive and business operations less attractive. Again, California isn't unique on this; I live in Connecticut, and our government has done most of the same things (no high-speed train yet).
Many of the challenges you cite could probably improve with less government and more market activity. Everyone knows how to make housing more affordable - just build more of it. Yet, the populated areas of California make new construction difficult and expensive. Water scarcity could be addressed by raising the price of water - this would encourage conservation, possibly close down activities that use too much water, and encourage new sources. Yet, California prefers rationing and water use restrictions.
If California's citizenry can pay attention to the state's government and demand accountability, and change its laws to make accountability achievable, and limit government's scope to the level of activity that citizens are able and willing to monitor, the state can recapture its magic. Otherwise, there's no reason to expect improvement.
You're free to ask for a government that energetically and effectively solves people's problems, but I don't think you'll get it. I won't be moving to California, so I won't have to live with the result.
"If California's citizenry can pay attention to the state's government and demand accountability, and change its laws to make accountability achievable, and limit government's scope to the level of activity that citizens are able and willing to monitor, the state can recapture its magic."
Yup Brian, this resonates. We need more citizens to pay attention. I think it's possible. We hope to help galvanize this via Modern Power.
It seems to me that your three barriers are more intertwined than you recognize.
Activist government, in which California leads nearly any other place on earth, puts much discretionary power in the hands of government. Practically, this is not in the hands of elected officials - most of the actual power is delegated to commissions, boards, and agencies. These commissions, boards, and agencies should not be expected to faithfully implement the state policies as envisioned; they are made up of people who have their own priorities and interests.
This leads to one or both of the following: either the government bodies are captured by the people and organizations most affected by the decisions, or they are run for the benefit of the employees. The California Public Utilities Commission is an example of the former; the utilities themselves are most directly affected, and will spend a great deal of energy molding policy to their advantage. The Department of Parks and Recreation is an example of the second: employees implement policies and procedures in ways that maximize agency budgets, increase agency employment, improve employee pay and benefits, and avoid criticism for breaking laws and regulations; services to the public are whatever is left after these interests are taken care of. All of this can be summarized in your first barrier (Narrow Interests).
In this view, the second barrier (Progressive Proceduralism) is merely a tool the Narrow Interests can use to advance their agendas. The opportunity for Proceduralism is built into the American approach to government. In order to prevent the kinds of abuses we've seen in the past, we try to write rules that will circumscribe discretion of elected, appointed, and civil service officials. The rules require hearings, investigations, and reports, which inevitably produce results that call the objectivity of the process into question, leading to more research, hearings, and reports before any action can be taken. All of this gives opportunity for the Narrow Interests to mold the policies in their interests, or to block new initiatives completely.
The third barrier (Anti-Statism) isn't really the belief that government can't succeed - at its best, it's a deep skepticism of the potential of expanding government's scope to solve problems that have no obvious solution. And it is a natural result of the first two barriers: people see that initiatives are hijacked by the Narrow Interests and bogged down in Proceduralism so that the purest of ideals end up achieving essentially none of their objectives, at great cost in terms of government spending as well as lost individual liberty. As you say, any other institution can also fail, but every other institution can be destroyed by its failures: businesses that can't deliver products go bankrupt; corrupted religious institutions lose their followers; voluntary organizations that are corrupted or no longer relevant lose their members. The consequence of government failure is generally more government.
There was a time when Californians achieved great things through government: they built freeways, water and irrigation systems, and created a very prosperous society blessed by lovely climate and beautiful scenery. In order to recapture this outcome, it seems to me that Californians will need to reduce government to a scale that can be effectively monitored by media, elected officials, and interested citizens, and to avoid the temptation to try to solve all problems with programs and rules. But that would cut against the Narrow Interests and be blocked in Proceduralism. These barriers can be overcome, but it would require mobilizing the citizenry on a scale not seen in decades at least, and the result would be transitory unless the scope of ambitions for the state is scaled back to match the scale of government that can be effectively monitored and held accountable.
Hi Brian, I've been thinking through your comment, and would like to understand it better. What I currently take away from your argument is a vision that size of government or scope of government action allows for capture by narrow interests, which then drives a dynamic of proceduralism which then leads to anti-statism. Am I getting this right?
At the moment, it feels like this argument proves too much. If we take (lack of) trust-in-government as a proxy for anti-statism, I understand your argument to imply that lack of trust should be directly correlated with size of government, but this seems, at best, to be not what the data show (see e.g. https://data.oecd.org/gga/trust-in-government.htm).
A fair response to my observation might be to say that what the post is really getting at is efficacy of government, rather than trust per se. On this view, I could read your comment as claiming that there should be an inverse correlation between efficacy of government and size of government. Pinning this down would require Misha (or us) to start defining "efficacy" (which I think is probably a good activity), but I would think that basic proxies such as citizen happiness, life expectancy, quality of life, low incidence of social ills (violence, crime, suicides, addiction, frayed social fabric), etc. should allow us to get started. The data for these proxies seem to track "trust-in-government" pretty well (see e.g. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-countries-in-the-world for happiness measures), with the top countries for happiness nearly identical to the top countries for government trust. My takeaway from this is that government efficacy, at least as captured by the above proxies, seems at best orthogonal to size of government, and possibly correlated with it. Let me know if you have a different read on this data, or this framing.
For the moment, when I look at the above data and then try to match it with your argument, it feels like a significant pivot comes at the end of your first paragraph where you write that commissions can "not be expected to faithfully implement the state policies as envisioned." This is not obvious to me, and I think it might be instructive, both for your observations and for Misha's post, to drill down on why this might be the case in CA. What are the incentives or mechanisms that CA lacks that would help ensure faithful implementation? How do international comparisons with high efficacy (e.g. the Nordics or Germany) get around this?
I wonder if a similar analysis applies to your comment in other places. For example, it's not clear to me that proceduralism/rules to limit discretion is the necessary outcome of governing agents diverging from the intent of legislators or the public. I would love a cross country comparison of mechanisms in use to successfully close this gap or prevent it from opening. My guess is that this may suggest alternate strategies that align the interests of the governing with the public interest without undermining effective governance. As I understand Misha's post (and the animating spirit of this substack), he is calling for exploring and envisioning new approaches to this problem through shifting incentives, embedding oversight and outcomes as integral parts of governance, etc. I think fleshing out what these alternatives might look like is vitally important, and I hope Misha and his collaborators take your comment as a call to do so!
Lastly, thinking through your comments on anti-statism, a hinge line for me is your comment about how other institutions can fail, but only government can fail without consequence. This is something I've heard for as long as I can remember (I think it goes back to Reagan/Thatcher, and likely even earlier) and it's never been one I can get on board with. There are lots of examples of state failure and social collapse in history! States can fail and go bankrupt just like businesses, faiths, etc. The difference is that because states are so much important to people's lives than other institutions, it's a much more consequential disaster for a state to fail than for a business or another social institution, and this is why we don't just leave it to "market" mechanisms to deal with.
The challenges we face right now in CA - cost/quality of living (e.g. housing crisis, schools), wildfires, water scarcity - are problems we need to solve as a society in order to prosper in CA long-term. Each of these is at a scale and with a level of public good (or "externality") as to make a solution without the state playing a major role both hard to envision and without good historical precedent (at least to my knowledge). And states that do govern effectively (like the Nordics, like Germany, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore) create tremendous improvements in the lives of their citizens, which I take as an argument that we should want the state to be as effective an ally and agent as possible, and not just something small that doesn't get in the way of other efforts.
Summing up, I think you're right that the way we've been approaching this in CA is badly broken, and from this sense, I can see a lot of resonances and overlap between your observations and those animating Misha's post. But I don't think the present situation is a foregone conclusion, or a logical outcome of a dynamic that arises inextricably when we ask for government that can effectively solve problems, rise to challenges, and provide a setting where citizens can flourish. I think we can and should ask for this type of government, and I hope Misha and his fellow co-authors can contribute to getting us there.
Well, you certainly cover a lot of territory. I admire your efforts to come up with an overarching theory, or framework. I'm not sure such a theory is really possible. Rather than try, I'll offer some reasons I don't think it's possible.
First, I don't think the question you link about trust in the national government is relevant to California's situation, because the issue isn't trust in the national government. In addition, I don't think there are any simple statistical or demographic factors to explain why one country would have high trust and another low; I think the answer lies in national history, social cohesion, and basic expectations. A small country like Switzerland may have high trust in the government in part because it is small, but it is still larger than most counties in the US, and I expect that many county governments don't have great confidence from their citizens.
For the US at national level, I think citizens had great confidence in the national government for about 25-30 years after the second world war. This was based on perceived success in curing the Great Depression through activist New Deal policies, on observed success in destroying the most dangerous militaries in the world, on unparalleled prosperity, and on general agreement among the population on what the government should do. It may not have been as strong as sometimes portrayed - I expect there were many people who felt left out of all this, and didn't share confidence in government. This confidence unraveled in the wake of Viet Nam, Watergate, social unrest and government's response, and perceived ineffectiveness of many government programs; nothing since has given reason to restore confidence.
But the issue isn't confidence in the federal government, but confidence in state government. So, let me re-state and expand my basic thesis: Voters tend to vote for politicians who promise to do great things for them. The politicians appropriate money to the cause, or pass laws requiring others (businesses, say) to do something pleasing, and claim they've done their jobs. The new programs and policies, however, are not implemented by the elected politicians, but either by appointees who can generally avoid much accountability, or by civil service employees who are generally sheltered from any accountability as long as they don't break any rules. This framework came out of the Progressive era in American politics; during the 18th and 19th centuries politicians openly used their positions for self-dealing and cronyism. The Progressive movement tried to reverse these problems by insulating civil servants from politics, but unfortunately also insulated them from accountability.
It isn't exactly inevitable that commissions won't faithfully implement the policies as envisioned, but it's close, unless the commission members can be held accountable. If the commissions are given great discretion, they seem to pursue the American tradition for self-dealing and cronyism; from what I've read of the California Coastal Commission, they're a great example, where Commission members and their friends can do what they want, and others are blocked and frustrated, often selling their property - to Commission members or their friends. If commissions and other agencies are given lots of rules to constrain their discretion, they will follow the rules because breaking rules can get one in trouble. They may do some self-dealing within the rules; an example would be the Department of Parks and Recreation responding to tight budgets by closing parks rather than reducing headquarters staff.
I don't know whether it's possible in the American system to have a level of accountability that will get public agencies to conscientiously work for the public good year in and year out. California had a pretty good record for a while. Multiplication of rules, and adding blocking points (Proceduralism again) is one way to kill an agency's mission.
Again, I think cross-national comparisons don't offer easy answers. Scandinavian countries are small and culturally homogeneous, at least until recently. They had a Lutheran work ethic where it would be shameful to take advantage of one's neighbors. Small size may help with self-policing, but all three are bigger than Connecticut, and Connecticut suffers many of the same problems as California. And Denmark and Sweden, at least, seem to be seeing their cohesiveness degrade - possibly because of new values of a welfare state, possibly because they have accepted significant numbers of immigrants and refugees who don't share the cultural background.
But, even if we could confidently identify factors that make things work in one place, it wouldn't mean that they could be replicated elsewhere. Megan Mcardle wrote about this in some depth here: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-02-23/you-can-t-have-denmark-without-danes.
I didn't say that government "can't" fail - Somalia and Libya would offer examples, and quite a few others are close. But, barring social disintegration on that scale, governments in the US don't have to worry about going out of business. Municipalities may go bankrupt, but municipal employees won't be the main ones to suffer. State pension funds may go bust, but the people who manage the funds won't bear the costs. But these examples are small parts of the overall issue: agencies that fail at their missions claim that they need more resources, and politicians generally support these claims. If schools don't get good results, they need smaller class sizes (more teachers), or more teacher trainers, or more assistant principals or deputy superintendents. If a bridge collapses, the highway department needs more inspectors. And so on.
You're right that the failure of California government would be worse than the failure of Google. But, California politicians are energetically working to increase the likelihood of such a failure. They pushed for, and got, billions of dollars for a high-speed rail system that will never operate. They gave billions of dollars to sponsor biotech companies that don't have to return anything. They passed feel-good requirements for renewable energy that make electricity more expensive and business operations less attractive. Again, California isn't unique on this; I live in Connecticut, and our government has done most of the same things (no high-speed train yet).
Many of the challenges you cite could probably improve with less government and more market activity. Everyone knows how to make housing more affordable - just build more of it. Yet, the populated areas of California make new construction difficult and expensive. Water scarcity could be addressed by raising the price of water - this would encourage conservation, possibly close down activities that use too much water, and encourage new sources. Yet, California prefers rationing and water use restrictions.
If California's citizenry can pay attention to the state's government and demand accountability, and change its laws to make accountability achievable, and limit government's scope to the level of activity that citizens are able and willing to monitor, the state can recapture its magic. Otherwise, there's no reason to expect improvement.
You're free to ask for a government that energetically and effectively solves people's problems, but I don't think you'll get it. I won't be moving to California, so I won't have to live with the result.
"If California's citizenry can pay attention to the state's government and demand accountability, and change its laws to make accountability achievable, and limit government's scope to the level of activity that citizens are able and willing to monitor, the state can recapture its magic."
Yup Brian, this resonates. We need more citizens to pay attention. I think it's possible. We hope to help galvanize this via Modern Power.