
Why Americans don’t trust government - jseliger
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/26/why-americans-dont-trust-government/
======
AnthonyMouse
What the article is pointing out is the problem caused by the fact that we
never repeal anything. Some problem happens, some regulation is put in place
to deal with it and now that regulation is permanent. Next year some other
problem happens and some regulation is put in place to deal with it. Each
seems reasonable on its own but after a hundred years when you put them all
together it turns a $5 million project into a $5 billion project.

But it doesn't really address _why_ we never repeal anything, and it's in
large part because we keep doing too much at too high a level of government. A
thousand years ago a population the size of New York City would have been a
_nation_ , but now it's a city inside of a county inside of a state inside of
a union. And the union is inside of a set of international treaties.

It's too many layers of bureaucracy. People keep advocating laws at the
highest level where they can get them passed, which both makes them harder to
fix because they're further removed from the affected people and more likely
to cause trouble because any flaws are amplified by the larger affected
population.

The flaw seems to be that people think federal legislation is less complex
than local legislation, under the theory that uniformity reduces complexity.
But in practice what happens is that you end up with 10,000 pages of federal
regulations instead of each city having their own 20 pages, and then not being
able to fix anything because San Francisco and Houston can't agree which rule
one should impose on the other when the sensible choice is to let each do what
they want.

~~~
ricree
Your way has its own set of pitfalls, and I'm not sure that they're less than
the alternative. If you do business in New York, Chicago, and Boston, then you
have to worry about laws in all three places. The more you lean upon local
lawmaking, then the more you risk adding a big layer of legal incompatibility
once you start crossing borders.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> If you do business in New York, Chicago, and Boston, then you have to worry
> about laws in all three places.

Which, first of all, you already do, the county/state/federal laws apply _on
top of those_.

But you're also assuming that uniform national laws will be less complicated
than dealing with different local laws, which doesn't seem to bear out in
practice. California is going to care about earthquakes and Massachusetts is
going to care about ice storms but not really the other way. If you do
business in both California and Massachusetts then you have to care about both
earthquakes and ice storms regardless, and if the relevant legislation is at
the federal level then it will cover both. Which means local laws aren't more
complicated for companies who do business in both places, they're _less
complicated_ for companies who don't, because then if you only do business in
Massachusetts you don't have to deal with earthquake regulations.

~~~
sharemywin
But does insurance, banking(mortgage, payday loans), transportation laws
really need 50 different laws? even contract law could be ubiquitous and where
lawyers can practice in all fifty states.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> But does insurance, banking(mortgage, payday loans), transportation laws
> really need 50 different laws?

Sure they do. You're insuring against earthquakes in California and ice storms
in Massachusetts. North Dakota has a much different banking environment than
New York City. Trucks pulling three trailers make sense in big empty western
states with wide open spaces but no sense in high traffic urban environments
with tight corners.

------
officemonkey
He missed the big picture. The mayor of Boston took care of the little things
because the mayor of Boston realizes that at a municipal-level, the people
hold their elected officials responsible.

Try to hold your congresscritter responsible. You can't. They blame gridlock
for anything that doesn't get done, and stake their position on the right side
of popular wedge issues to get reelected. This frees them up to be beholden
not to the citizens, but to the party and the donors.

It's only at the very top and the very bottom that we even give a fuck at what
our representatives are doing. That's why state governments are often the most
corrupt. They're doing god-knows what down there in the state capitol, and
chances are you don't even know their names.

------
geoffbrown2014
Top 5 reasons I don't trust the government

1\. Many of the regulatory systems which are supposed to protect the populace
have been captured or have their effectiveness impaired by special interests,
ie. the revolving door between the SEC and Wall Street, the FDA and Big
Pharma, and DOE and Big Oil

2\. Even when our institutions are not captured there is a perverse logic
supporting institutional missions that lead to abuse of power. The Tuskegee
experiment makes perfect sense you've got to have a control group in order to
better understand the pathology so you can better protect the populace.

3\. Poor execution or formation of government policies that would in any other
profession be cause for malpractice or being disbarred or worse are routinely
foisted upon the populace.

4\. Corruption

5\. Increasingly your rights and legal protections are seen by institutions as
being granted by those institutions instead of being protected by those
institutions. Your rights are correctly perceived by the institutions as
hindrances to their institutional missions.

Better legal policies wouldn't even crack the top 5 reason for me to trust
government. We are way beyond wonky tweaks to our legal system. All of the
above essentially boils down to accountability. If policy makers and lawmakers
could be held legally accountable for policy mistakes, possibly even
financially responsible for the mayhem they cause I for one would feel a much
closer allegiance to our government.

------
maxerickson
I don't trust government because it is made out of people.

~~~
HashThis
The problem has gotten infinitely worse lately. I think the 2008 recession
from a rigged economy was the first half of the problem. The NSA surveillance
state uncovered by Snowden broke the last half of trust in government. This is
why voters didn't revolt in 2008 or 2012 elections, but they are in 2016
elections (with Snowden's release in 2013).

The wrong doing in the 2008 recession plus the illegal surveillance state
combined to shatter trust in government. Evidence is seen in the Bernie
Sanders voters and non-establishment republican voters in 2016.

------
timthelion
I think that the problem of complex laws will only get worse and worse. It is
like code bloat when using test driven development. You say, "this interface
is too complex, lets tear it out" and all of a suddent 200 tests break. Then
you feel a sense of panic, "will the world explode if I just delete these test
cases?"

------
jmclnx
Massachusetts cannot build/maintain bridges or roads period. One example,
within 3 to 4 months New Hampshire build a large bridge over the Merrimack to
their airport. About 30 miles down river there is a 'temporary' bridge over
the river erected around 1986, that was suppose to be replaced by a permanent
bridge in 5 years, it is still there and causing massive traffic jams. There
are many examples of this, another good one, a 20 foot bridge in Westford MA
took 1 year to build. Mass. is the last place to base theories about
Government keeping up infrastructure. Anyone remember how "successful" the big
dig is :)

------
carsongross
While I find nothing objectionable in this particular light-fair essay, I
would also suggest that the reason many people don't trust the government is
because people like Larry Summers have such a large influence in it.

------
PaulHoule
I think Larry Summers is part of the reason why Americans don't trust
government.

But yeah, in Ithaca there was a little bridge by the police station that took
9 months to fix. It makes me wonder if the GWB and Tappan Zee bridge were
built by aliens, as some have alleged the Egyptian pyramids were. (No, just by
Moses... Robert Moses)

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_Tappan Zee bridge_

It's interesting that the article talks about bridges. The replacement for the
Tappan Zee bridge demonstrates, in a microcosm, one big problem with today's
government. From wiki[1]:

    
    
       The bridge was built on a very tight budget
       of $81 million (1950 dollars), or $796 million
       in 2014 dollars.
    

The replacement bridge, to be opened in a few years, costs at least 5x as much
(in roughly equivalent dollars):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Tappan_Zee_Bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Tappan_Zee_Bridge)

Where the _fuck_ does all the money go? Fix that problem and Americans will
start trusting government again.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tappan_Zee_Bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tappan_Zee_Bridge)

~~~
DrScump
The (San Francisco-Oakland) Bay Bridge replacement was first estimated at $400
million ($200 million to retrofit the existing bridge).

Actual spending is over $7 billion and counting for the new Eastern Span
alone, and it is fraught with defects.

------
com2kid
I went to a very liberal public school, where my teachers taught me to be an
independent thinker, and to distrust authority. We were rewarded for solving
problems on our own, and for investigating the evidence behind claims.

My middle school history course was taught to a backdrop of Beatles music. One
of my High School history courses was taught in terms of Monty Python movies,
which it turns out have a fair bit of historical accuracy to them.

A common refrain was "Why do we do things this way? _OLD DEAD WHITE MEN_."

When I went to college, I learned who funded the American Revolution. I took a
philosophy class that taught us how to deconstruct sentences into logical
statements. For practice we used political speeches, which amusingly enough,
when diagramed out would often times turn out to be equivalent to null.

For me, the answer is, I don't trust the government because my government
provided education deliberately taught me better.

This is also why I get upset when I see people insist that schools are "just
indoctrination centers for our youth". Heh. Maybe all my schooling experiences
from middle school on up were just serious outliers?

All that said, I do think people's relationship with the government in regards
to infrastructure investment is a bit... different. Growing up with a father
who worked Union Labor, I learned that the men and women who build this
country up have a lot of pride and love for their job. I also learned that
everything is far more complicated than I could possibly imagine, with far too
many moving parts.

Working in software I know the overhead cost of communications between
different teams, within the same company and across company lines. With the
number of suppliers and vendors that come together for any given public works
project, I am actually impressed that work gets done at all. To a large
extent, I think a huge source of problems is organizational efficiency.

Yet the public demands a certain level of accountability and transparency for
our public works projects. We want open and honest bidding, and that means
dealing with all the overhead of having 20 different vendors win different
contracts for different parts of a project. There is an inherent inefficiency
there that would not exist if we could just trust "one person" or "one
company" to completely execute on a project.

~~~
tikhonj
Yeah, your experience was an outlier.

Do you know what the biggest meta-lesson throughout my education was? The
single thing that was hammered home in every single class? _Following
directions._ I think that says a lot.

The learning experience was highly regimented and structured. Show up on time,
do your work the way we tell you, get an A.

The actual content of any given class was a bit more varied but none of the
classes had much flexibility. When they set out to teach or engage creativity,
it was always in narrow, controlled ways: assignments and projects with
specific, detailed instructions. The creative aspect was confined to how you
fulfilled those instructions—the moral equivalent of coloring within the
lines.

I think I had a grand total of two truly open-ended assignments _in all of
high school_ : one in a CS class and one in a physics class. I built a single
thing for both (with permission, of course), and it was easily the best thing
I ever did in high school. But that was definitely the exception, not the
rule; every other "project" was just a bigger homework assignment.

Maybe I'm being too harsh but, looking back, the experience absolutely _did
not_ nurture independence—quite the opposite.

~~~
com2kid
> The actual content of any given class was a bit more varied but none of the
> classes had much flexibility. When they set out to teach or engage
> creativity, it was always in narrow, controlled ways: assignments and
> projects with specific, detailed instructions. The creative aspect was
> confined to how you fulfilled those instructions—the moral equivalent of
> coloring within the lines.

Ironically, a lot of my assignments were free form, and I hated it! I had to
sit through so many poorly done video presentations other groups of students
did that I eagerly wished for teachers to teach us how to make a proper
presentation and make students stick to the format! There are some basic rules
to structuring a presentation that I don't think ever got taught, heh.

But those were the monthly assignments. On a larger and more fun scale, both
my Middle School and High School had free form graduation projects. My Middle
School project was on the history of video games, my HS project was on LED
lighting. A minimum report size was dictated, but we also had to come up with
a presentation on our own, with no real guidelines given other than a minimum
time we had to present for.

A lot of my English reports were open ended. Sure I was given a general topic
to write about, but that is sort of the point of a classroom, to provide
general structure for students to learn within.

I remember one middle school project were we had to design a life form. That
was pretty much it for instructions, just go off and design a new life form
and be prepared to present it to the class. I ended up with a scale model, a
description of locomotion, vision systems, and a general outline of culture.

Another project was to write a children's storybook.

Then there was the student produced school news channel. We were given
instruction on how to operate equipment, but everything else was left up to
the students.

Biology class, open ended report with presentation, mine was on the quality of
life enhancements that genetic engineering of humans would bring about.

Elementary school, second grade, students wrote and directed a play, we did
Stone Soup, we ended up performing it at the Senior Center as well as in front
of the school.

Countless classes writing poetry. Either structure or theme was dictated,
rarely both.

My social studies class had multiple debate sessions throughout the year. I
remember one of them, Rome vs. Greece. My team was arguing Rome, my
counterpoint to their claim of philosophers was "You cannot claim the great
philosophers that you killed! In Rome, even the lowliest of gladiators could
rise up to be a powerful and respected man. You kill your wise men." Not
logically sound, but appeals to emotion work.

I'll admit, my parents worked hard to get me into the best public schools that
they could, but at all times these were just public schools! Thankfully I
graduated before No Child Left Behind made testing all the rage, from what I
gather, things have been going steadily downhill in regards to how much
flexibility teachers have in their job.

------
Zigurd
Larry Summers needs a helicopter. The bridge he is talking about is a
state/local problem, and while there are problems of trust and efficiency in
all the government bodies that touch that bridge, none are readily applicable
to "Why don't Americans trust government?" He would not have written this rant
if he had a helicopter.

~~~
justratsinacoat
>Larry Summers needs a helicopter [...] He would not have written this rant if
he had a helicopter

Can you elaborate? It's not clear to me why he would not have written this
rant if he had a helicopter. Are you trying to tie his frustration with the
bridge to his commute times?

~~~
Zigurd
> _Are you trying to tie his frustration with the bridge to his commute
> times?_

Yes, for starters. He even says so in the article. I also doubt Larry Summers
and the people who distrust government can relate to each other. So I conclude
maybe there might not be larger lessons to be learned from talking a long time
to rebuild an old bridge over the Charles in an area with insane traffic and
no possibility of building a temporary bridge, due to the layout of the roads
in the area.

