One of the themes of Why Government Fails So Often, the new book by Peter Schuck, referred to by David Henderson, is that government programs should be evaluated for their effectiveness. The 2014 President’s Economic Report, which Greg Mankiw spotted, includes an entire chapter called “Evaluation as a tool for improving Federal programs.” It begins,
Since taking office, President Obama has emphasized the need to determine what works and what does not in government, and to use those answers to inform Federal policy and budget decisions…Today, evaluating Federal programs and interventions to understand their impact, and developing the infrastructure within agencies to support a sustained level of high-quality evaluations, remains an administration priority. By rigorously testing which programs and interventions are most effective at achieving important goals, the government can improve its programs, scaling up the approaches that work best and modifying or discontinuing those that are less effective.
The idea of shifting focus from intent to results is laudable. Ironically, however, all I can see from this effort is intent without results.
UPDATE: Jason Richwine heads his latest post “The White House’s Standard for Social Programs: Hints of Success Are Good Enough”
Develop the wrong metric for success in your rigorous testing process, and you wind up with outcomes that are downright perverse.
Nothing succeeds like success, especially in politics!
It is not Government that fails, it is the uses made of Government that fail.
“Governmental Failure” is the catch phrase used to describe the failure of a governmental intervention.
“Governmental Intervention” occurs as an operation of the Federal Administrative State seeking to attain politically determined objectives through use of the mechanisms and coercive powers of government.
That mechanism was not designed for, and because of its coercive powers cannot sustain its use as an instrumentality for the “purposive enterprise” of a Federal Administrative State.
**One or the other must fail. **
Failure of the Federal Administrative State (the true enterprise of interventions) by any definition of “failure” is inevitable.
That enterprise is dependent upon the use and control of resources, relationships and human conduct through the coercive powers of the mechanisms of government; taxes for example. The conflicts in objectives sought for the benefit of particular interests through that enterprise (the Administrative State), create conflicts in the uses to be made of the powers available through the mechanisms of government (such as, but not limited to, taxation, regulations, etc.).
The greater disruption will occur if the mechanisms of government collapse first, since they are already being seriously impaired (certainly fiscally). The effects upon individual liberty of this duality of governance by inclusion of an Administrative State have already been widely observed, examined and subject to scholarly comment.
I remember that promise in the 2008 campaign. My friends thought I was crazy for pointing that’s easier said than done.
But, re: why government fails, I thought everything fails, it’s just government is prone to repeat and double down on failures because it’s opm.