Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better (66 page)

15
. John J. DiIulio Jr., “Facing Up to Big Government,”
National Affairs
, Spring 2012, 18–19.

16
. Robert P. Jones, Daniel Cox, Juhem Navarro-Rivera, E. J. Dionne Jr., & William A. Galston,
Do Americans Believe Capitalism and Government Are Working?
(2013), 9.

17
. Franklin Foer, “Obamacare’s Threat to Liberalism,”
New Republic
, November 24, 2013.

18
. E. J. Reedy & Robert E. Litan,
Starting Smaller; Staying Smaller: America’s Slow Leak in Job Creation
(July 2011),
http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/job_leaks_starting_smaller_study.pdf
.

19
. Floyd Norris, “In Actions, S.&P. Risked Andersen’s Fate,”
New York Times
, February 8, 2013, B1.

20
. See, e.g., Floyd Norris, “Bad Grades Are Rising for Auditors,”
New York Times
, August 24, 2012.

21
. See, e.g., “The Other Vampires: Credit Rating Agencies,”
Economist
, May 15, 2010, 83.

22
. William Alden, “Nasdaq’s Latest Breakdown,”
New York Times
, August 23, 2013; Julia Werdigier, “Computer Breakdown Halts Trading at London Exchange,”
New York Times
, September 8, 2008.

23
. See, e.g., Neil Barofsky,
Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street
(2012); Sheila Bair,
Bull by the Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street from Wall Street and Wall Street from Itself
(2012); and Jesse Eisinger, “Lesson Learned after Financial Crisis: Nothing Much Has Changed,”
New York Times
, March 20, 2013.

24
. Melissa Eddy, “Crisis-Struck Europeans Say They’re Losing Faith in Governments,”
New York Times
, July 10, 2013, A6.

25
. Pippa Norris, ed.,
Critical Citizens
(1999); Joseph S. Nye, Philip D. Zelikow, & David C. King,
Why People Don’t Trust Government
(1997). For a Carter-era study, see Seymour Martin Lipset & William Schneider,
The Confidence Gap: Business, Labor, and Government in the Public Mind
(1983).

26
. DiIulio, “Facing Up to Big Government,” 10.

27
. “In Congress, Gridlock and Harsh Consequences,”
New York Times
, July 8, 2013.

28
. Thomas Mann & Norman Ornstein,
It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism
(2012).

29
. Nancy L. Rosenblum, “Good Neighbor Nation: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America” (unpublished manuscript, 2013).

30
. See Ronald Inglehart, “Postmodernization Erodes Respect for Authority but Increases Support for Democracy,” in Norris, ed.,
Critical Citizens
, chap. 12.

31
. “We Have Met the Enemy, and He Is Us,”
http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2011/04/we-have-met-enemy-and-he-is-us.html
. For a similar view of the problem, see Derek Bok,
The Trouble with Government
(2001), 13, 95.

32
. Robert Higgs,
Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government
(1987).

33
. Paul C. Light,
A Government Ill-Executed: The Decline of the Federal Service and How to Reverse It
(2008), 24–36.

34
. Niall Ferguson, “The Regulated States of America,”
Wall Street Journal
, June 19, 2013.

35
.
DiIulio, “Facing Up to Big Government.”

36
. Nye et al.,
Why People Don’t Trust Government
186.

37
. “The Size of the State,”
Economist
, July 28, 2012, 23.

38
.
Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2012
, Table 471.

39
. See U.S. Government Accountability Office,
2012 Annual Report: Opportunities to Reduce Duplication, Overlap and Fragmentation, Achieve Savings, and Enhance Revenue
,
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12–342SP
.

40
. See, generally, Peter H. Schuck & Richard J. Zeckhauser,
Targeting in Social Programs: Avoiding Bad Bets, Removing Bad Apples
(2006).

41
. U.S. Department of Defense, “Debt Is Biggest Threat to National Security, Chairman Says,”
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=65432
. Secretary of state John Kerry agrees that ineffective policy accounts for much of this debt. See Michael R. Gordon, “Kerry Links Economics to Foreign Policy,”
New York Times
, January 25, 2013.

42
. “Over-Regulated America,”
Economist
, February 18, 2012, 9.

43
. “This Time It’s Serious,” Schumpeter,
Economist
, February 18, 2012, 71.

44
. Niall Ferguson, “How America Lost Its Way,”
Wall Street Journal
, June 8, 2013.

45
. See, e.g., Joanne B. Freeman,
Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic
(2001); Pietro S. Nivola, “How, Once Upon a Time, a Dogmatic Political Party Changed Its Tune,”
http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2012/11/14-war-1812-nivola
; and Mark Bowden, “ ‘Idiot,’ ‘Yahoo,’ ‘Original Gorilla’: How Lincoln Was Dissed in His Day,”
Atlantic
, June 2013.

46
. See, e.g., Adam Goodheart & Peter Manseau, “American History Hits the Campaign Trail,”
New York Times
, July 8, 2012.

47
. “Assessing Peter Schuck’s
Diversity in America: Keeping Government at a Safe Distance
” (symposium),
Yale Law
& Policy Review
23 (2005): 78–79; citations omitted.

48
. “FEMA Operations Criticized in Report,”
New York Times
, April 15, 2006.

49
. AEI Public Opinion Study,
Attitudes toward the Federal Government
.

50
. See, e.g., James V. DeLong, “America’s Crisis of Political Legitimacy,”
The American
, August 28, 2012,
http://american.com/archive/2012/august/americas-crisis-of-political-legitimacy
.

51
. Light,
A Government Ill-Executed
, 159–60.

52
. Ibid., 36, 126–28.

53
. James A. Morone,
The Democratic Wish: Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government
(1990).

54
. Abby Goodnough, “Governor of Tennessee Joins Peers Refusing Medicaid Plan,”
New York Times
, March 28, 2013, A17.

55
. Gallup, “Americans Wary of Health Law’s Impact,” June 27, 2013,
http://www.gallup.com/poll/163253/americans-wary-health-law-impact.aspx
.

56
. David Brooks, “Midlife Crisis Economics,”
New York Times
, December 26, 2011.

57
. Bowman & Rugg,
Five Years after the Crash
, 10.

58
. Kelman,
Making Public Policy: A Hopeful View of American Government
(1987), 208–9.

59
. James Q. Wilson & John J. DiIulio Jr.,
American Government: The Essentials: Institutions and Policies
, 12th ed. (2011), 467–68; emphasis in the original.

60
. Nate Silver, “Health Care Drives Increase in Government Spending,”
New York Times
, January 17, 2013.

61
. Ezra Klein, “Our Corrupt Politics: It’s Not All Money,”
New York Review of Books
, March 22, 2012, 42, 44.

62
. DiIulio, “Facing Up to Big Government,” 3–5.

63
. Ibid., 3.

64
. Even here, some failures seem clear enough. See, for example, the scathing congressional report on a major counterterrorism program. James Risen, “Criticism of Centers in Fight on Terror,”
New York Times
, October 3, 2012.

65
.
See, e.g., Erica Goode, “Some Chiefs Chafing as Justice Department Keeps Closer Eye on Policing,”
New York Times
, July 28, 2013; and Rachel L. Swarns, “After Decades in Institutions, a Bumpy Journey to a New Life,”
New York Times
, September 30, 2012.

66
. Anthony King & Ivor Crewe,
The Blunders of Our Governments
(2013).

67
. Peter H. Schuck & James Q. Wilson, eds.,
Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation
(2008).

68
. See, e.g., R. Kent Weaver & Bert A. Rockman, eds.,
Do Institutions Matter? Government Capabilities in the United States and Abroad
(1993). One imaginative study compared the efficiency of postal services in 159 countries by mailing letters with a return address to nonexistent addresses in each country and seeing whether they were returned and, if so, how long that took. About 60 percent of the letters were returned, and this took an average of over six months; the international postal convention to which all of the countries are signatories specifies return within one month. No country met that standard; the United States returned all the letters within ninety days. Alberto Chong, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, & Andrei Shleifer,
Letter Grading Government Efficiency
, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 18268 (2012).

69
. The closest general analyses that I have found are Amihai Glazer & Lawrence S. Rothenberg,
Why Government Succeeds and Why It Fails
(2001), and Clifford Winston,
Government Failure versus Market Failure: Microeconomics Policy Research and Government Performance
(2006). Both are excellent analyses, rich with insights that I will harvest for my own purposes here, but they eschew legal-institutional factors and focus almost exclusively on economic incentives. Thus, Glazer & Rothenberg note, “[We assume] an idealized political state where forward-looking politicians in a democracy attempt to realize, rather than subvert, policy objectives. Though … we refer to core features of democracies (most notably, how political turnover affects policy success and how endogenous support for a policy can make it more effective), we integrate them with considerations of economic behavior. Similarly, we neglect institutional and constitutional differences; though, for example, we often discuss the United States, our study aims to be generic and rarely relies on special features of the American system …” (3). And Winston notes that “although I recognize that policy assessments must account for institutional complexities and government entities that shape policy implementation and affect performance, I limit my discussion to the theoretical motivation for each policy, its essential features, and its economic effects” (11). My study, in contrast, emphasizes the special features of the American system that systematically affect policy implementation.

70
. Peter Orszag & John Bridgeland, “Can Government Play Moneyball?”
Atlantic
, July–August 2013, 63.

71
. Alan S. Gerber & Eric M. Patashnik, “Government Performance: Missing Opportunities to Solve Problems,” in Gerber & Patashnik, eds.,
Promoting the General Welfare: New Perspectives on Government Performance
(2006), 6. For my review of this book, see Peter H. Schuck, “Is a Competent Federal Government Attainable or Oxymoronic?”
Geo. Wash. Law Review
973 (2009).

72
. Terry M. Moe, “Delegation, Control, and the Study of Public Bureaucracy,”
The Forum
10 (2012): 13.

73
. James Q. Wilson, “Policy Intellectuals and Public Policy,” in
American Politics, Then and Now: And Other Essays
(2010), 32.

74
. Peter H. Rossi, “The Iron Law of Evaluation and Other Metallic Rules,”
Research in Social Problems and Public Policy
4 (1987): 3–20. I am unaware of any refutation of these “laws.”

75
. Gerber & Patashnik, eds.,
Promoting the General Welfare
.

76
. See Alan S. Gerber & Eric M. Patashnik, “Sham Surgery: The Problem of Inadequate Medical Evidence,” in Gerber & Patashnik, eds.,
Promoting the General Welfare
, chap.
3. This indifference to evidence of cost-effectiveness is in stark contrast to the comparatively rigorous requirement of efficacy (and safety) for drugs and (to a lesser extent) medical devices.

77
. Clifford Winston, “Urban Transportation,” in Gerber and Patashnik, eds.,
Promoting the General Welfare
, 77.

78
. Edgar O. Olsen, “Achieving Fundamental Housing Policy Reform,” in Gerber and Patashnik, eds.,
Promoting the General Welfare
, 105.

79
. Jay P. Greene, “Fixing Special Education,” in Gerber and Patashnik, eds.,
Promoting the General Welfare
, 130–41.