Why fixing the government is the key to fixing everything else
Our government needs to be more adaptive and innovative to meet the challenges of the 21st century
This is Essay 1 in a series on innovations in governance.
Our time is riddled with large-scale issues of massive importance. Human trafficking, species extinction, pandemics, child exploitation, war, social unrest, natural disasters, the changing world order, and the list goes on. These are issues we need a functioning government to address — in some cases to lead and in others to get out of the way and let other organizations do their work. Yet somehow, although we have the largest and most expensive government in history, its capacity is decreasing over time and citizens at all levels are opting out.
This is the first piece in a weekly series I will do this year exploring potential ways out of the seemingly insurmountable problem of governance.
When I was 28, I lived in a small town on a bay in Southern Costa Rica. I spent my days in the jungle doing ecological rehabilitation and agricultural work. I planted trees, cleared invasive plants, and generally tried to improve a piece of land that was heavily degraded. You could say I was an environmentalist. I believed in sustainable food systems and harmonizing food production with animal habitats. I worked and sweated up on the mountain during the day and came home and drank rum and read books at night. It was a lonely but rich existence.
One day, in my small house which stood on stilts over the water I had a revelation: The biggest problem to solve isn’t the environment, it’s the government — because if we can’t solve the government, we’ll never be able to organize well enough to solve the environment.
All at once my life’s path set itself before me. I would return to the United States, I would work on improving the way the government functions. I would do so by using technology to improve democratic processes thereby creating better, more accountable representation.
That was 11 years ago. In the intervening years we’ve lost two massive wars, borrowed 17 trillion additional dollars just to keep the lights on (that’s $50,000 per citizen), and trust in government “to do what is right” remains at a low 20%. Unsurprisingly populism is on the rise and somewhere in there Donald Trump got himself elected president. In short, things are not improving.
I did eventually find work in the local government space, but I’ll save that for another essay. What I want to do here is lay out a project that I’m embarking on this year researching innovation in governance.
How are we doing?
My feeling is now more than any other time in my life we have the potential for great advancement or great calamity. I think you may feel that too. The old playbook isn’t working. We finally have the capacity to eliminate scarcity and allow all humans to live flourishing lives. And the reason we don’t do this is no longer a resource problem or a technological problem, it’s a governance problem.
It should also be noted that we live in a time when the rising superpower, China, runs forced labor camps where hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities are forced to work and be “re-educated.” This same government exports surveillance technology around the globe, helping other authoritarian governments control their populations and crack down on dissidents. We can expect whatever information is surveilled to find its way back to the Chinese Communist Party, increasing its power significantly over time. I’ll return to this theme of surveillance technology vs freedom technology throughout the series.
Meanwhile, the US system is fracturing all over. Political polarization, runaway debt, increased cost of living, once in a generation inflation, endless war, supply shortages, and failing infrastructure. The question seems less whether the US can be a check to an increasingly assertive China and more if it can even stay together in its current form into mid-century.
America’s bright second act
Yet, I’m an optimist, and I have a vision for the US having a second act even greater than the first. Also, I’m a realist. If it does have a second act, let’s be honest, it won’t be because we simply elected more Democrats or Republicans to wave a magic wand and reverse all of the negative trends mentioned above. Our problems run deeper than that, and we will only solve them by addressing our system of governance, not individual politicians.
If we have a bright second act, it will be because we have innovated seriously on our governance model, our democracy, such that we can adapt to the present issues of the 21st century, achieve better representation, bring about prosperity inside our borders and give our allies an easily copiable model for doing the same.
The project
That is why I’ve decided to do a year-long writing project on governance. Because our answers will not come from the system. They will come from us, the people. As Katherine Gehl says in The Politics Industry, “The system isn’t broken, it’s fixed.” Our leadership is playing its own game. If we as the American people want to reinvent the government into a truly representative body, then likely we the people will lend a hand in the re-design.
Yes, this is a herculean, generational task, and no, I don’t have delusions of grandeur. My goal is simply survey options at hand, and if I’m successful, start some conversations about how we can begin to frame and implement some of these improvements.
Innovative and adaptive government
Just like any industry, the key improvements our government needs to make are to become more innovative and adaptive.
Innovative Government
Peter Thiel defines innovation as doing more with less. It’s that simple. Most industries do it as a matter of course — the result of competition. The government shouldn’t have to require bigger budgets to deliver the same (or increasingly worse) services. It should be the opposite. Services should increase and costs should go down or at worst stay flat. Yes, it’s true, “government isn’t a business” but I’ve never seen any convincing evidence that governments can’t innovate and provide better services more efficiently. Common sense will tell you that along with enforcing rule of law, it’s this ability to be efficient with taxpayer dollars that differentiates good government from bad government.
The reasons government doesn’t achieve this are all baked into the incentive system inside bureaucracy, procurement, and elections. Incentives is the keyword. If we change the incentives to govern better, our leadership will govern better.
Adaptive government
Adaptation is the ability to make changes to be better suited to one’s environment. The world now is not the pre-electricity world of the 1700s when we designed some of our core systems, and it’s not even the pre-internet world of the 1930s-1970s when we designed most of our federal departments. The new world we live in is digital, it’s fast-paced, and presents many challenges and opportunities the Founders never dreamed of.
A key function of adaptive systems is collecting and adjusting to feedback. Since this country started, that has been expressed in voting. But when disapproval of both recent candidates is at a generational (maybe all-time) high, and trust in almost all institutions is at a record low, voting might not be enough feedback. The issue with only using first past the post voting to collect official feedback from Americans deserves an essay for itself, so I won’t go deep into it here. But I’ll try and make the point with a question: do you feel you’re able to express yourself to the government and they hear it?
The good news
The good news is there are tons of hopeful developments in democracies all over the world to draw on. Whether they be more representative future-oriented parties, insightful proposals about how government can be updated for the 21st century, new budgetary processes to engage people in local funds allocation, or serious proposals on how to open up real competition in the US political system, there are a lot of successful experiments happening out there!
Where we’ll go together
I’ll be writing one piece per week on innovation in governance. My hope is to strike a balance between conceptual “futuristic” themes and concrete practices happening in cities right now that would be of interest to practitioners and members of local government. I will focus on the local level because I believe democracy is something you do, like sports, and we need more players, not armchair quarterbacks. The local level is also where experimentation happens in our great decentralized republic, and successful experiments at the local level will scale outward and upward to other cities and higher levels of government.
Once per month, I will also interview a practitioner innovating the civic space, either working with or within the government.
My goal is to build a better picture of self-government for the digital era and outfit myself and my readers with a quiver of new ideas for how we might, as a generation, reclaim the US as a country where we feel truly represented, can flourish, and help our friends do the same. Since our system is a democracy it is up to people like you and me to make this happen- a few of us at first, and in alliance with millions eventually. You should find that proposition both daunting and empowering. But if you care enough about your city, country, and world to read this far, then you are, in fact, a key player.
So take a deep breath, pal. You’re it.
Aside —
Funny enough, I happen to be writing this essay three doors down from where I had that revelation 11 years ago. I’m back on a trip to Costa Rica. Although I now work in local governance full-time, I still come back here and work on the property a couple of times a year. Although it’s been hard and sometimes frustrating work, the land is much more beautiful and healthy than when I first started. Previously it had been a cattle pasture for decades and had been overrun with invasive plants that are poisonous to animals. There are many more birds, butterflies, monkeys, and nice views. It’s a far cry from “innovating democracy”, but it reminds me that places can transform.
Matt Harder runs the public engagement firm Civic Trust, where he helps cities strengthen their civic environment by helping residents, civic organizations, and local government work together to create public projects. Follow him on Twitter.
