Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better (65 page)

CHAPTER 13

Conclusion

W
e have completed a long journey into the heart of domestic policy failure. Along the way, we have reviewed a plethora of evidence documenting this failure and analyses of the systemic, deeply embedded reasons why it occurs so often. All Americans—liberals, conservatives, in-betweens, and even the socialist and libertarian fringes—are well-advised to accept these facts and reasons, and to ponder their implications for our collective future. Liberals should worry that their ability to generate public support for governmental programs is increasingly hostage to low quality performance and vulnerable legitimacy. Conservatives should accept the fact, demonstrated in
chapter 1
, that big government is here to stay while continuing to insist that its policies be effective and conform to our political and cultural values. The rest of us—“militant moderates” like me, those who have only a limited interest in policy, and those for whom government seems distant and mysterious—should insistently demand that government’s ends be tailored to its institutional means and capacities.

Here, then, are these facts, distilled in summary form.

1. Government policies often fail to satisfy even the most minimal, reasonable standards, elaborated in
chapter 2
, that Americans observe in their private choices. In some cases, programs cost more (often
much
more) than they are worth. In others, what they do may be worth doing but could be done either at a lower cost or with more bang for the same buck. Still other programs mainly benefit those
who gain much less from them than would others who need them more. And yet these failures persist, as if immortal.

2. These policy failures do not occur always or in every respect. The government has produced some striking successes, and we can discern some of the reasons (see
chapter 11
). Alas, such successes are hard to replicate, while the failures are frequent and large enough to explain Americans’ growing doubts about whether their expanding government can be counted upon to do the right thing (see
chapter 1
). Their doubts on this score are hardly new—indeed, they reach back to colonial times—but they have now reached levels that threaten a democracy based on the consent and confidence of the governed.

3. If these failures occurred only in a few substantive policy areas, the remedy would be obvious and straightforward: simply institute better policies. If they occurred only when Democrats or Republicans controlled the levers of power, we could simply vote the incompetents out of office. This book, however, has shown that neither of these solutions is adequate to the nature of government’s problems, whose roots are deep. The failures are not just random, occasional, or partisan; they are large, recurrent, and systemic. Few are
total
failures—after all, the government’s money and authority almost always do
some
group
some
good. But if the relatively small group of winners are powerful enough, the policy failures are that much more firmly entrenched. This is why—to pick but one example out of the many presented here—the manifestly inefficient, egregiously mistargeted agricultural subsidies that Congress thought it had reduced and reformed in 1996 are vastly larger today even where crop prices are higher.

4. The previous chapters put us in a position to understand the most endemic reasons for these failures. Structurally, they include our
decision making system
, which is the complex, opaque machine that processes the public’s choices into specific policies (see
chapter 3
), and our unique
political culture
, which frames and constrains those choices (see
chapter 4
). These structures are both desirable and undesirable. They are desirable because the elements of this culture reflect our deepest constitutional, political, and social commitments as a people, and because they tend (and are meant) to limit both the
scope of government power and the ill effects when it fails. They are undesirable because some of these same elements work to make such failures more likely. Each element of process and culture entails normative tradeoffs both internally and in tension with the other elements. So deeply embedded in our national DNA are they that we can neither isolate their effects empirically nor contrive to modify them very much. For example, localism remains a powerful force in our public philosophy more than eighty years after the New Deal began to nationalize our politics and policy agenda. For good
and
for ill, this localism shapes government performance.

5. We have seen (in
chapters 5
and
6
) that the essential ingredients of sound policy are seriously wanting in our system. Increasingly, this system lacks, indeed stifles, socially desirable incentives; rational selection of ends and means; accurate, unbiased, up-to-date information; the capacity to adapt promptly and flexibly to a changing policy environment; credibility to those actors whose expectations and responses will ultimately determine policy success or failure; and a bureaucracy that can manage and implement policies effectively in the real world. Without these ingredients, even the best-intentioned policy choices are unlikely to dislodge, much less improve, the embedded status quo, and can even make matters worse.

6. Even a relatively well-crafted policy is vulnerable to powerful market forces (see
chapter 7
). Policy makers cannot readily bend these forces to their will without introducing new distortions, which nimbler, more incentivized, better-resourced market actors can often exploit to their advantage. The pillow metaphor is apt here: when officials push against a particular area of market activity, that activity is displaced to other, harder-to-control areas. This effect is most evident with tax and financial regulation where the market actors are usually better trained, counseled, compensated, and motivated, and more experienced, than their official adversaries whose compliance tools are relatively crude, slow-moving, and behind the technological curve. But this market actor advantage also favors even the relatively unlawyered, uneducated, low-status actors on the street, like illegal drug traders. For all these reasons, the mass compliance necessary for
effective policy implementation depends far less upon episodic agency enforcement than upon a fragile condition: citizens’ internal sense of the rectitude, competence, and legitimacy of the law and of the officials who administer it (see
chapter 9
). The public opinion evidence presented in
chapter 1
strongly suggests that this condition is a steadily eroding asset. Increasingly, this civic bargain is experiencing defections by citizens who resent both paying taxes to what they see as a feckless, expanding government, and being snookered by laws that others exploit. Once lost, this legitimacy may be impossible to restore. We may assume that most people today obey the law most of the time. (Of course, we probably wouldn’t know if they didn’t!) But this legitimacy is a contingent social fact, not a foregone conclusion.

7. Even the most rationally designed policies may run aground when they confront political, institutional, economic, and other complicating factors in the field.
Chapter 8
began with the showcase Oakland Project, which was launched with significant policy advantages yet like so many others foundered on the shoals of implementation. That chapter’s detailed compendium of evidence of policy failure—all of it published in peer-reviewed social science, government’s own reports, and the nation’s most respected newspapers—demonstrates that the Oakland Project’s failure was no outlier. The programs reviewed there span numerous and disparate policy domains and deploy a wide variety of policy instruments and approaches—yet they fail to satisfy even the minimal criteria of effectiveness presented in
chapter 2
. One may certainly quibble with this or that assessment, of course, but the overall verdict of pervasive policy failure is overwhelming. At a minimum, those who want to dispute these assessments and defend these programs as now configured bear a heavy burden of disproof.

8. The most striking feature of this failure—other than its sheer frequency and pervasiveness—is how deep and structural its causes are. They are grounded neither in Democrats’ abiding commitment to an activist domestic policy agenda nor in Republicans’ traditional opposition to it. (Although these partisan ideologies do play their part, they largely offset each other). Nor is failure due to insufficient resources
or lack of official commitment. As
chapter 1
shows, vastly expanded federal domestic spending and programming—in real terms, as a share of gross domestic product, and even when compared to some European welfare states—has been a steady trend. Might government’s greater ambition be a
cause
of the public’s lower confidence in its performance, or are the two trends merely coincidental? Only a controlled experiment, which is impossible, could answer this question for sure. Instead, I have shown that this relationship between government’s growing ambition and its endemic failure is rooted in an inescapable, structural condition: officials’ meager tools and limited understanding of the opaque, complex social world that they aim to manipulate. Since the tools are relatively fixed and the social complexity is ever-increasing, this chasm between policy means and ends can only widen in the future. The remedies proposed in
chapter 12
, if implemented, promise to improve government performance at the margin. Such marginal gains are very much worth pursuing, but the lesson of this book is that the chasm will remain too wide for policy makers to bridge except under the most favorable conditions. As
chapter 11
suggests, however, these conditions are less likely to materialize in the future than they did in the past.

James Q. Wilson nicely captured the spirit of melioristic realism that has informed this book: “If we are to make the best and sanest use of our laws and liberties, we must first adopt a sober view of man and his institutions that would permit reasonable things to be accomplished, foolish things abandoned, and utopian things forgotten.”
¹
Just as we teach the facts of private life to our children, we must teach these facts of public life to ourselves, to each other, and to our governing institutions.

Notes

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

1
. “Beyond GDP: A New Global Comparison of Standards of Living,”
Economist
, September 20, 2010,
http://www.economist.com/node/17079148
.

2
. Bruce Meyer & James Sullivan,
Winning the War: Poverty from the Great Society to the Great Recession
, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 18718 (2013).

3
. Peter H. Schuck & James Q. Wilson, “Looking Back,” in Schuck & Wilson, eds.,
Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation
(2008), 628–29; Karlyn Bowman, Jennifer Marsico, & Andrew Rugg, “Polls on Patriotism: What You May Have Missed in the Polls,”
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/06/polls-on-patriotism/?utm_source=Today&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=062813
.

4
. See, generally, Dalton Russell,
Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices
(2004), chaps. 1–2.

5
. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, “State Governments Viewed Favorably as Federal Rating Hits New Low,” April 15, 2013,
http://www.people-press.org/2013/04/15/state-govermnents-viewed-favorably-as-federal-rating-hits-new-low/
.

6
. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, “Distrust, Discontent, Anger, and Partisan Rancor,” April 18, 2010,
http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/606.pdf
. Trust in the mass media has also declined sharply, particularly among conservatives and independents. See Josh Vorhees, “The Numbers Say You Probably Won’t Believe the Numbers We’re about to Show You,”
Slate
, September 21, 2012,
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2012/09/21/distrust_of_media_gallup_poll_shows_record_number_of_americans_don_t_trust_the_media_.html?wpisrc=newsletter_jcr:content
.

7
. Karlyn Bowman & Andrew Rugg,
Five Years after the Crash: What Americans Think about Wall Street, Banks, Business, and Free Enterprise
(2013), 10.

8
. Neil King Jr. & Rebecca Ballhaus, “Rancor in Washington Fans Public Discontent,”
Wall Street Journal
, July 24, 2013.

9
. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “For ‘Millenials,’ a Tide of Cynicism and a Partisan Gap,”
New York Times
, April 30, 2013.

10
. Janet Hook, “Tough Place to Fill Job Openings: U.S. Senate,”
Wall Street Journal
, June 17, 2013.

11
. Adam Liptak & Allison Kopicki, “Approval Rating for Justices Hits Just 44% in Poll,”
New York Times
, June 8, 2012.

12
. AEI Public Opinion Study,
Attitudes toward the Federal Government
, February 2011, 8–11, 17, 22–23.

13
. Pew Research Center, “State Governments Viewed Favorably.”

14
. See, e.g., President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, February 12, 2013 (“After all, why would we choose to make deeper cuts to education and Medicare just
to protect special interest tax breaks? … It’s not a bigger government we need, but a smarter government that sets priorities and invests in broad-based growth.”); Bill Clinton,
Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Smart Economy
(2011), chap. 4 (suggesting reforms to make it run more efficiently); Democratic National Committee, “Moving America Forward,” 2012 party platform,
http://assets.dstatic.org/dnc-platform/2012-National-Platform.pdf
(“We know that transparent and effective government makes economic sense” and blaming special interests as corrupting government programs); and Nicolas Confessore, “Attacking Bush, Clinton Urges Government Overhaul,”
New York Times
, April 14, 2007 (Hillary Rodham Clinton calling for “smart government”).