George Friedman is my go-to guy for foreign affairs at his Geopolitical Futures website. Today he takes a stab at analyzing our domestic difficulties and writes something I’ve been thinking but haven’t yet published.
The nature of this new institutional crisis is becoming clear. It started when the COVID-19 pandemic revealed how ineffective a federal technocracy is in imposing solutions over a vast and diverse continent.As I argued in “The Storm Before the Calm,” experts are essential but insufficient when it comes to governance. Their fundamental weakness is that expertise in one area can be insensitive to or ignorant of the problems their solutions create. Medical institutions did the best they could do under the circumstances, but their solutions disrupted the production and distribution of goods and alienated people from one another.Governance is the art of seeing the whole. Physicians tend to see only their own domain. The federal government responded to expertise in one area without creating systems of competing expertise, and it often failed to recognize the variability of circumstances that the founders envisioned.
He also writes about the dysfunctional mess that our universities have become and how the self interests of academia, the banks, and government all found a common interest in spending too much on higher ed. That’s a story for another time.
