7 thoughts on “How to govern well

  1. I think is very correct to point out there is, based on this evidence, there is more then one way to have a nice country. There are great differences among all these mostly nifty places to live. I’m fine with the modesty you suggest mostly because i think hiding behind ideology is a way of avoiding making choices. To many people say we absolutely can’t do X since it doesn’t fit their ideology even when there are examples of how it can work. The country we have is far more about the choices we make. But i would add being modest about ideology would suggest we aim for a more pragmatic, evidence based view. And not doing or doing or doing so in a modest way are all political choices. There are no neutral options.Report

  2. Plus, we have no way of knowing if all these countries are functioning way below potential — so, perhaps, instead of finding which country to emulate, or insisting that countries emulate us, we need to innovate. I happen to have some good ideas that have been only partially tried.Report

    1. @M. Farmer,

      Maximize what potential seems like the question does it not?

      The other question is should we maximize the potential good things or minimize the bad things. Most likely you would want to do something in the middle.Report

        1. @M. Farmer, that’s a pretty central part of the problem regardless of specific ideology. There’s no way to test theories in total. Compromise makes it so that any failures can be blamed by opponents by the core action but also be blamed by proponents as a function of the incompleteness of implementation due to the compromises that had to be made along the way.Report

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