As someone who formerly worked in this space, the issue is administration is orthogonal to legislature.

Administration and implementation is inherently technocratic in nature, but legislation is is often driven by short-term electoral needs.

This isn't to say autocracy is the answer (it isn't), but the dysfunction arises when people assume that every single administrative decision needs to be made by "elected officials" and constantly second guess administrators.

When administration from local to federal becomes politicized (as is increasingly the norm across the democratic world), implementation slows down severely because the "ideal" solution might not be political tenable.

A good example of this is welfare expansion in the US - the assumption is lower income voters who voted for Trump voted irrationally, but in action, the majority of Trump voters tended to be in the 25th-75th percentile income bracket, which in most cases put them outside of the bracket for a number of social services. Those services which were available such as the ACA/Obamacare have been protected by legislators for that very reason because they know they would lose their seats as a result.

You're in Japan so you've probably seen similar decisions being made with regards to Japanese rice protectionism [0] - unpopular with urban voters, but urban voters don't swing elections at scale.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41367653

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pjc50 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Japan is 93% urban. 25% of the population lives in Tokyo! It's not that they can't outvote the farmers, it's a more complicated mix of agrarian nationalism that supports farm subsidies in a lot of countries, plus outright bribery with literal sacks of rice.

> administration from local to federal becomes politicized

Administration is politics. It's a mistake to go full technocrat and proceed without the consent of the administered. The problem comes when techocrats get rings run round them by misleading populists.

	▲	alephnerd 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> It's not that they can't outvote the farmers Japan is a parliamentary system, and the amount of Single Member Seats in the House of Representatives needed to flip an election are primarily small towns or rural. This is what happened in the 2009 election when the LDP lost the farmer vote.

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eru 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

There's actually plenty of examples out in the real world with competent administration to learn from. Especially if you generalise enough to look at how pockets of competence work even in an otherwise abysmal system, instead of demanding overall competence.

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alephnerd 3 days ago | parent [-]

What you end up seeing is those cases of "competence" only worked in cases where administration and legislation was aligned. But even in those societies you'd still see problems which are distinct, but problems nonetheless.

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gsf_emergency_6 3 days ago | parent [-]

GP might be saying that analyzing _differences_ in how perf targets are met in say, VN&CL (or SG&CH IE&HK TW&SI KR&DK) might be most productive. As you mention, in particular, how are their sad paths ("problems") different? Or the same?

Now there are subdepartments of study devoted to this very question (empirical study of the legislative-administrative divide) , but in the US I'm hard-pressed to list the corresponding think-tanks :) I suppose some MBA level depts in the US will have to suffice

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eru 3 days ago | parent [-]

Going on a tangent:

I wish in the US more areas of policy would be decided at the state level, and I wish more state government would flip coins to decide on their policy. (Even better, if we can push it down to county level.)

The first part is about subsidiarity, which is a good idea anyway. But together this is just a tongue-in-cheek plea for doing more randomised, controlled experiments. (Alas, we can't blind them.)

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alephnerd 3 days ago | parent [-]

> I wish in the US more areas of policy would be decided at the state level, and I wish more state government would flip coins to decide on their policy. (Even better, if we can push it down to county level.)

The overwhelming majority of policy is decided at the state and local level in the US so long as it's not foreign policy or monetary policy related.

Whatever is decided on the Hill has no bearing once administration and implementation comes to play - which is overwhelmingly done by state and local government.

This is why the US has become increasingly dysfunctional over the past few years - state and local elections which were previously staid affairs became polarized partisan affairs because turnout is low and the overwhelming majority of decision making roles are elected.

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gsf_emergency_6 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Flipping GP's tangent on its head (after all states in the US are akin to countries in the EU/EA:)

If you can't blind them find them

I suggest that, absolutely, state governance has _already_ generated lots of excellent data >> federal level :) probably much more accessible than corporate governance data )

Of course YC's Seibel might have something to say here, it's probably not a new perspective

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eru 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I wish you were right. NYC can't even charge people for their using their roads (whether that's driving or parking) without the state and federal governments getting involved.

	▲	alephnerd a day ago \| parent [-]
		NYC is an outlier because it was in receivership in the 1970s-80s and near bankruptcy [0] [0] - https://rockinst.org/blog/behind-the-fiscal-curtain-forgotte...