About not much of anything

I always find the disconnect between different disciplines and areas of study to be fascinating. Close friends are working on congressional oversight of the bureaucracy, and the executive branch more broadly, and they would in no way characterize Congress' role as micromanaging. More often, they would suggest that it was excessive delegation with overly broad mandates. Fukuyama is coming from a different angle, at a slightly different problem. I wonder how often these two discourses intersect.

Conversely, I would argue that the quality of governance in the US tends to be low precisely because of a continuing tradition of Jacksonian populism. Americans with their democratic roots generally do not trust elite bureaucrats to the extent that the French, Germans, British, or Japanese have in years past. This distrust leads to micromanagement by Congress through proliferating rules and complex, self-contradictory legislative mandates which make poor quality governance a self-fulfilling prophecy. The US is thus caught in a low-level equilibrium trap, in which a hobbled bureaucracy validates everyone’s view that the government can’t do anything competently. The origins of this, as Martin Shefter pointed out many years ago, is due to the fact that democracy preceded bureaucratic consolidation in contrast to European democracies that arose out of aristocratic regimes.

The "democracy came too quickly" argument is employed in many different contexts: why the US did not (supposedly) have as robust a tradition of class conflict and class consciousness, why we have a much more fragmented institutional structure of governance, why we elect judges. There is considerable force to these arguments, although sometimes they do seem to fall into the rhetoric of reaction/academic goldmine category of perverse consequences of good things/noble consequences of bad things.

This is via Marginal Revolution, which is always good--although, in my mind, rarely right--and for which my frequent links should not be read as a cheap distraction of the "Some of my best RSS feeds are conservative..." variety.