Robin Hanson is really one of those people who is a joy to read for the sheer idea/word count ratio.
Subscribe to his blog Overcoming Bias. It’s tagged as Essential Reading in my Google Reader.
When people complain about Government , they seem to forget this.
That governance is hard.
That governance is like a green marine on his first training run in full 20kg packs running uphill hard.
This is why for someone to be able to govern well he has to have some of these things:
- Natural curiosity.
- A sense of who to trust.
- An understanding of the Major Issues facing the Philippines.
- A group of people he/she trust and worthy of that trust.
- A lack of a reality distortion field or an ability to go in and out of that field.
In a sense I’ve felt that Gordon, Gibo and Noy has equal footing on everything except the last 2.
The key thing to understand is: governance is hard, especially in a democracy. Fundamentally, this is because coordination is hard.
It can be very hard for even a single owner to coordinate with a dozen subordinates that each coordinate with a dozen employees in an ordinary firm to achieve a simple clear goal like making and selling a simple product at a profit. Organizations fail at this task all the time, and for thousands of different reasons. Most new organizations attempting this fail, and most that are succeeding now will fail in a few decades. When they fail, they will fail so badly that it will not be worth trying to save them; better to throw them away and start anew.
….
Types of government activities vary both in how valuable are their possible impacts, and it how difficult is their coordination task (both relative to private coordination and to doing nothing). If your politics were about policy, and you were reasonable, then you’d support programs with high value impacts and easy coordination, and oppose programs with low value impacts and difficult coordination. Ideologues who oppose all government programs no matter how valuable or easy, or who support all programs with laudable goals no matter now difficult their coordination task just don’t get it. That might signal their values and blind faith or hatred in leaders, but not their reason.
via Overcoming Bias : Coordination Is Hard.