In defense of the US government
A reply to Kelsey Piper — a longtime friend in the rationalist / EA community, later a writer at Vox’s Future Perfect — whose blog post had argued that the United States government is, on balance, evil. The exchange was part of a longer running disagreement; Alyssa’s objection is that the strong selection bias toward bad news in media coverage makes any large-scale system look uniquely awful in isolation, and that the US government holds up well by comparison to almost any reasonable alternative.
I really have to strongly disagree with the recent post calling the US government evil. There’s a clear, very strong selection bias where a problem that is solved well gets ignored, while a problem that isn’t solved gets all kinds of articles written about it, making it seem like any large system is net negative (since only the problems are ever mentioned). I know that’s a familiar point, but the post really doesn’t appear to take it into account.
I’ll start with evil defined as “much worse than most reasonable alternatives”, which seems like a pretty good definition to me. AFAICT, there is no reasonable metric by which the US government is worse than most reasonable alternatives, especially if we’re going by historical standards rather than (heavily-US-influenced) contemporary ones. To quote the great Alon Levy, comparing the US to a median contemporary country: “By the same standard used for third-world countries, $2/day, the poverty rate is in round figures zero. People in the bottom 5% of the income distribution have apartments made of brick, running water, toilets, electricity, and refrigerators.
Electricity and water are both universal and universally available, with very few outages.
There are regular elections without violence, no significant vote buying, no cancellations of elections, and no military coups.
Police violence is at low enough level that when one person is killed at a protest, it makes national news.
There is no insurgency in peripheral regions — Cliven Bundy is a joke by the standards of the Naxalites, Boko Haram, etc.
Farmers don’t sharecrop, and have high levels of nutrition and income security.
The government can’t expropriate private property without due process, and there are multiple mechanisms that allow landowners to sue if the compensation is insufficient.
Urban residents either formally own apartments/houses or rent them from people who do. When they are evicted, it is on a small scale and often with an appeals process — the government does not demolish thousands of apartments in one day without notice.
People can get government services without paying bribes.
Industrial disasters are uncommon, and death tolls in the low two figures are sufficient to make national news.
As a general rule of thumb, if first-world countries were in any way like third-world countries, people from the third world wouldn’t be illegally crossing borders to get to the first world.”
Even if we exclude the majority of all existing governments (and the vast majority of governments that ever existed) as a point of comparison, look at the US versus, say, France. France is a nice, friendly, well-developed, peaceful country that genuinely does many things better than the US does (as I’ve argued myself). But it made some business and tax policy mistakes, probably fairly subtle ones. As a result, per the Economist, the youngest firm in the main French stock index (excluding mergers) was founded in 1967. “The US has some big companies founded in the last 50 years” seems very boring and won’t ever be headline news, to compete with all the headlines saying “The US has accidentally droned ten more innocent civilians having dinner”, but the world would be dramatically different if that weren’t the case. Going down the Fortune 500: There would be no Intel and no AMD, so probably no personal computers, at least in anything like their present form.
Needless to say, there would also be no Google or Amazon, no Apple or Facebook, no Microsoft, no YouTube or Twitter, and certainly no Tumblr.
There would be no Walmart, Costco, or Home Depot; instead, there would be local stores with generally worse hours, uneven quality, and much higher prices. France’s per capita income is about 65% of the US’s, so we can also assume substantially lower salaries to go with those higher prices (even before taking taxes into account).
There would be no FedEx, and therefore probably no overnight package shipping, at least at reasonable prices. No real-time package tracking. Definitely no Amazon Prime. Definitely definitely no Postmates or same-day delivery services.
No JetBlue, Southwest, Spirit, or other discount airlines. Flights would still be on legacy carriers, and much more expensive.
No Starbucks, founded 1971. No Tesla Motors, of course, and therefore no electric cars. No Staples, Office Depot, or OfficeMax. No GAP clothing, Old Navy, or Banana Republic….
Because everyone is used to all this stuff, people usually ignore it, and act as if it just all falls right out of the sky. But most of the world isn’t like this. Things didn’t have to be this way. There is much historical precedent for the “microchip” remaining some exotic experimental technology for big research labs, like how fusion energy is today, even assuming there were no major catastrophes and history went just a bit differently.
Going over the rest of the historical record, it’s hard to say exactly what the US “caused”, especially since the “US” is made up of millions of people often acting at cross-purposes. But I can safely say that the following things happened, and that there’s abundant historical evidence that many many many governments would have screwed them up somehow, if they’d been in the US’s place: With America as the world’s largest military force, there has been no war between major powers in seventy years, and global deaths from war per capita are at an all-time low. No major power today has a passion for large territorial conquests, as all of Europe did before 1914, and as Soviet Russia did before it was stopped by American forces at the Elbe (and all around the world later on). Many countries have downsized their militaries under the protection of US mutual-defense pacts.
The Internet, invented in and largely developed by the US, connects every country in the world and over half the world’s population. It is politically neutral, and is only censored in certain areas when particular states go to great lengths to impose censorship.
Science in almost every field is much further advanced than at the end of World War 2, and the US — with 4% of the world’s population and 20% of the GDP — has far outclassed any other country in scientific achievement. Per the Times rankings, out of the top 25 universities in the world, 17 are in the US. (China has none. Russia has none. France has none. Germany has none.) Americans, whether by birth or immigration, dominate lists of Nobel Prizes and other scientific achievements.
The US has by far the largest immigrant population of any country in the world. It has eliminated all legal discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities. It has effectively eliminated the KKK, lynchings, and other organized violence against various minorities, and is much less tolerant of informal discrimination than, say, Japan or Korea (never mind somewhere like Zimbabwe or Myanmar). The population of African origin, despite having been brought to the US as slaves, are materially much better off than both Africans living in Africa, and African populations in other Western Hemisphere countries with a history of slavery (Brazil, Haiti, Colombia, etc.).
Books, newspapers, magazines, and so on produced in the US dominate the world market, especially after taking into account language barriers. Government censorship is non-existent, free speech protections are the strongest in the world, and the US has laws specifically to shelter controversial writers from legal action in other countries (eg. British libel law is far broader than American). Facebook now has over two billion users, in significant part because American law lets it host user content without legal liability.