How to FIX America, for Realzies.
It's the institutions, stupid...
America has some big problems.
Economic growth is slow, real wages are being squeezed by a crisis of affordability, and too many are left in a state where they struggle to make ends meet or, even worse, fall prey to poverty and homelessness.
Our healthcare system is failing to provide everyone with affordable and timely access to the care they need.
Our education system is falling short of equipping the next generation with the skills and knowledge they need to be productive members of society in the 21st Century.
Mass incarceration is leading to incredible amounts of suffering while failing to keep our communities safe.
People are punished by the state for doing the things they want, even when those things don’t harm anyone else.
A debt crisis is looming in our future, fueled by endless deficit spending over decades and unfavorable demographic trends.
Car centricism has leveled our cities and put 100s of millions of Americans in cities that, by all accounts, are unwalkable and bad for their physical and emotional health.
Greenhouse gas emissions are driving forward a climate crisis that will have devastating consequences for the human race.
Our authoritarian foes around the world are emboldened and now capitalizing on our weakness to attack their neighbors and expand their power.
Meanwhile, extremists are turning Americans against one another and sowing division on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, class, immigration status, and religion.
None of these problems are unsolvable, and in fact, many of them are easy to fix. In most cases, simply following the evidence would find one with an abundance of policy solutions that are perfectly compatible with the values of the public. Yet each of these problems persists and, in many cases, gets worse; why?
Because our government is broken.
In the face of the crises of the status quo, our government has found itself utterly incapable of effectively solving problems. In fact, in many cases, it is the government itself that has created these problems.
The political system of today is dominated by gridlock, partisanship, propaganda, and special interest group capture. Our political leaders are not incentivized to find evidence-based solutions to our many problems but rather to do what is necessary to maximize their political power, which is often quite different than what is best for society.
This is not a personal moral failing of any one politician but rather a systemic consequence of institutions that are poorly designed for their purpose. Presently, our political institutions promote polarization, and the taking of extreme positions discourages bipartisanship and compromise, leads to laws being rushed and principally informed by special interest groups and politicos rather than academics and experts, is overwhelmed with veto points that provide rent-seeking opportunities, and relies on an election system that frequently gives more of the power to the side with less public support.
It is no wonder our government doesn’t work. How could it, with all these factors working against it? The good news is all of this can be fixed, and most of these fixes do not face insurmountable political hurdles.
Here are some of my favorites:
Which is better than Ranked Choice Voting and more realistic than the best form of voting, STAR Voting.
Micah Erfan, spot on. The US may have been fortunate to become as prosperous and powerful as it is, because most countries that utilize FPTP, single-member districts, and Presidential systems of government are not so lucky.
For the US, there are no easy fixes, but unicameralism, proportional representation, and parliamentarian appear to be, on balance, the better way to go: https://www.lianeon.org/p/imagining-our-martian-government
I doubt any of those things will do the trick. It reflects what I would call the centrist fallacy. That the problems we face could be solved with a better government or better institutions, but that what we have underneath these institutions is sound.
Consider problems 1, 3, 6, 8 and 9 on your list. The better institutions approach would be to enact effective solutions to each of these five problems. Another approach would be to tweak a handful of core economic operation parameters to improve the functioning of the political economy that underlies the institutions and see how much of these problems go away. History suggests quite a bit. And then fine tune policy to improve things a bit more. You need the better institutions for this latter bit and also to address problems 2, 4, 5 and 7. Other than healthcare, these problems seem more tractable and probably would not require as much institutional improvement.