I started this post hoping to produce a simple summary of what government is supposed to do, or what purposes it is supposed to serve. I was quickly reminded that such questions are very controversial. Taking a different approach, I decided to review works discussing several related topics, in hopes that these would yield a more informed sense of what one can and should expect of one’s government. The Summary (below) provides a brief recapitulation of what I learned and concluded along the way.
Contents
Origins of Government
Human Propensities and the Political Economy
Forms of Government
Measures of Effective Government
What People Want from Government
Beyond the Question of What People Want
Summary
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Origins of Government
It appears that humans lived in highly egalitarian hunter-gatherer tribes for their first 200,000 years. Inequality seems to have become a standard feature of society with the emergence of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago. Agriculture brought population growth, longer hours of work, planning for the future, accumulation of resources, and shortages (e.g., Suzman, 2017; Wikipedia).
According to Turner and Maryanski (2015, pp. 168-171), hunter-gatherers understood plant cultivation (e.g., that plants grow from seeds) at least 40,000 years ago, but simply found it easier to collect food than to go to the trouble of gardening. Pressures leading to abandonment of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle may have included population growth (i.e., the need to produce more food), resource depletion (e.g., gradual elimination of larger game animals), and barriers to mobility (e.g., growth of neighboring populations).
Over a period of thousands of years, Turner and Maryanski (2015, pp. 172-174) suggest, primitive horticulture evolved into agriculture (defined as farming with non-human sources of power), and then agriculture evolved — at varying rates in different places — into industry. Such developments created pressures favoring regulation (defined as coordination and control) of the population itself, and also of the production and distribution of food and other products. While such developments may push societies to become more sophisticated, progress toward more complex arrangements is not a one-way street: “societies . . . have collapsed [due to e.g., war, soil depletion, climate change] in ways that force populations to adopt simpler technologies, cultural ideas, and political systems in order to survive” (p. 174).
Such observations suggest that the purpose of government depends on what you want or need to regulate, and that that depends in turn on your society’s complexity (measured in terms of e.g., size of, or variation in, population or production). Almost invariably, it seems, in more developed (i.e., agricultural or post-agricultural) societies, the size of government falls somewhere along a spectrum, between “too small to deliver the desired regulation” and “too large to be compatible with societal expectations.” Such expectations may include, for instance, government at a reasonable cost, conducted without excessive interference with reasonable activities.
Human Propensities and the Political Economy
In place of the older (especially 19th-century) belief in linear progress from primitive to modern societies, Johnson and Earle (referred to here as J & E) (2000, p. 5) describe a theory of multilinear evolution. This theory, emerging in the mid-20th century, observed that societies evolve in different ways and at different rates, according to local needs and opportunities. There may still be a tendency to evolve from bands to chiefdoms to states, but the economics and the politics can vary at any such level. For instance, power may be seized by leaders in some communities while being granted to leaders by other communities.
Since Malthus (1798/1998), there has been increased awareness, albeit more at some times than at others (e.g., Ehrlich, 1968), that while technology may lead to improved living conditions, it cannot keep pace with (indeed, may foster) a tendency toward “a population extended beyond the means of supporting it. . . . [whose distress] must fall hardest upon the least fortunate members of society” (p. 15). J & E (2000, pp. 8-9) observe that, by the 1970s, environmental degradation, and the continuation of longer-than-expected working hours, fostered doubts as to the actual degree of social progress being achieved. In any case, the dominant understanding seems to be that growing population is linked with more complex societies, and that population and complexity are ultimately limited by the first essential resource (e.g., water, food) in which shortages spell an end to continued growth.
J & E (2000, pp. 20-21) list topics within evolutionary biology that appear crucial to the formation and functions of government. These include differences in male and female mating behaviors and goals; defense of territories (especially those containing desired resources); loyalty, trust, and altruism, especially toward near relatives; the relationship between speech and complex social interaction; the propensity of some people, mostly male, to seek dominance over others; and predispositions for socially beneficial behavior (e.g., cooperating, identifying untrustworthy and parasitical behavior, imitating approved behaviors). J & E suggest, however, that these tendencies do not control the outcomes observed in various societies, but merely serve as the raw material from which humans adapt solutions fitting their particular situations.
One particularly important characteristic of a complex society is its division into what J & E (2000, p. 22) call its subsistence economy and its political economy. The subsistence economy is the economy of the household, the level at which individuals and families organize themselves to meet their basic needs (e.g., food, clothing, shelter, defense). In the subsistence economy, “the goal is not to maximize production but to minimize the effort expended in meeting household needs” (p. 24). The problem with the subsistence economy is that households clash. For instance, in the classic “tragedy of the commons” scenario (p. 25), when one pulls back to allow others to have their share of a common resource (e.g., a meadow on which all are free to graze their livestock), others exploit the opportunity to take more than their share, until the common resource is depleted, at which point everyone is worse off. The solution is the political economy: a politically governed system of rules and penalties that compels harmony among competing groups and individuals. In effect, the political economy is the aspect of government focused on mediating households’ economic interactions and their use of shared resources.
Needless to say, the political economy does not just happen. There are people involved in creating and expanding it. The tools at their disposal include not only “rules of proper behavior” (e.g., laws) but also “fictive kinship” (presumably including national identity) and “awe (sanctity)” (i.e., religion) (J & E, 2000, p. 25). The people who embody the political economy tend to form an elite, supported by mandatory contributions (evolving eventually into taxes). Their incentive is not to mirror the stability of the household’s focus on basic needs but, rather, to increase production in ways that benefit them. As such, the political economy “is growth-oriented in a highly competitive political domain, and thus inherently unstable” (p. 26).
That, in itself, tends to support the Marxist perception of the political economy as the home of “a power-wielding, self-serving elite” (p. 25). In partial mitigation of that judgment, J & E (2000, pp. 26-28) note that the elite is obliged to produce results, and to reinvest, so that households find continued participation advantageous — enough households, at least, with enough power, so that the rest find it infeasible to break out. The inherent conflict between the interests of households (seeking stable provision) and of the elite (seeking growth) can result in various harms, such as agricultural intensification that, in one example, “degraded the region and brought on a collapse” (p. 27). Thus, “The political economy, whose origin lay in solving problems of the subsistence economy, eventually comes into partial opposition to the well-being of households, raising the specter of domination and exploitation” (p. 29).
Leadership is a key part of that picture. J & E (2000, pp. 29-30) suggest that, as societies become more complex, and move closer to the brink of overpopulation, the need grows for more powerful leaders wielding more extensive control to achieve outcomes beyond the capabilities of individual families. Various developments can enhance that need. For example, strong leadership may be needed to protect against other entities (e.g., tribes, government), or to work out trade or reciprocal resource access deals with them in anticipation of bad harvests, or to drive investments in productive facilities. In place of older schemes distinguishing chronological eras (e.g., Bronze Age, Iron Age) or subsistence types (notably hunter-gatherer and agricultural), J & E (pp. 32-35) divide social units according to their leadership types:
- the family-level group, in areas of low population density, comprised of several families numbering perhaps 25-50 persons altogether, within which leaders step forward at times of need;
- the local group, with more of a village-type arrangement, likely to be headed by a Big Man (i.e., “a strong, charismatic leader” who is nonetheless at risk of seeing his followers abandon him for a competitor), with up to 500 people;
- the chiefdom, comprised of thousands, led by a chief within a more established elite, enjoying more reliable control due to supra-familial investments and systems (e.g., irrigation, external trade) as well as conquest; and
- the state, potentially comprised of millions, covering vast territory, with elite ownership of resources formalized, managed, and enforced through institutions (e.g., courts, military, bureaucracy).
To sum up, this section sketches out concepts and vocabulary contributed by Johnson and Earle (2000) for theorizing how (pre-) governmental expectations and obligations might emerge or become clarified. To the preliminary impressions suggested in the preceding section, this section adds awareness of the role that a ruling elite (including but extending beyond the top leader) might play. The self-serving motives of such elites apparently tend to result in leadership that is larger, more expensive, and more aggressive than in a small-scale subsistence society, driving enterprises capable of yielding greater rewards, at the price of greater expense and instability for individual citizens.
Forms of Government
Generally, the nations of the world have now arrived at the state level of organization identified by Johnson and Earle (above), though the governments of those states vary considerably in their power, their level of popular support, their degree of disorder, and other attributes.
Encyclopedia Britannica (n.d.) indicates that Plato and Aristotle (see e.g., Sidgwick, 1892) identified the forms of government that are most familiar to the average person (e.g., aristocracy, democracy, monarchy), but that more recent scholars have developed a variety of classifications. For example, Wikipedia notes that states have been classified according to power structure, power source, ideology, and other attributes; and the World Factbook produced by the U.S. government’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, n.d.) provides a simple list of 31 different types of government — with the caveat that a single government may qualify for more than one descriptor from that list (e.g., it may be both a republic and a democracy).
Elsewhere, in another list that is not dated but is presumably updated regularly, the World Factbook applies that list of 31 types to 234 states and territories around the world, with special notes summarizing complexities in a few (i.e., Antarctica, Cyprus, and Malaysia). I found some irregularities in that application (e.g., no places fitting some categories, such as “anarchy”; no definition of “semi-presidential” republic; the U.S. not categorized as a democracy; the U.K. listed as being “constitutional” although it does not have an actual constitution).
Irregularities aside, my first conclusion, from a review of the CIA lists, was that many descriptors apply to few if any places. There are few theocracies (or Islamic or ecclesiastical states), few communist (or Marxist, or socialist) states, few confederations, and few states “in transition,” to use the CIA’s term for failing or being in limbo. In some cases, the small numbers may result from CIA counting errors. For example, I did think the world had more than a dozen (or so) states that might be characterized as authoritarian, absolute, totalitarian, or dictatorship. The problem there seemed to be that, at least in some instances, the CIA would label a state as simply presidential, without additional labels, if it had a president, even if that president was essentially a dictator.
It appeared that a few concepts of government predominate around the world. “Republic” was the most common term in the CIA descriptions, followed by “parliamentary” and “presidential,” each applied to roughly a hundred states or more. A second set, applied to between 35 and 50 states each, included (in descending order) “democracy,” “monarchy,” and “constitutional.” Aside from “federal” (22 states) that was pretty much it.
Viewed by Wikipedia’s classifications, it thus seemed that the CIA, at least, was inclined to characterize governments by a few key factors. First, does the country’s rulers treat it as a family matter (i.e., a monarchy) or, rather, as a public matter (i.e., a republic)? Second, what type of republic is it? Among monarchies, key versions are absolute, constitutional, or merely ceremonial monarchy. Among republics, the predominant alternatives are constitutional, democratic, parliamentary, presidential, federal, so-called people’s, and Islamic republics.
The primary question distinguishing such variations, monarchical or republican, seems to be who or what (if anything) controls the government. For the most part, that appears to be a matter of whether voting and/or a legal system determines who wields power, how much power they wield, and how long they can wield it. Thus, for example, when the CIA World Factbook describes Vietnam as simply a “communist state,” that obscures the Factbook‘s own more detailed explanation that Vietnam has a constitution, a president and prime minister, a court system, universal suffrage, and elections. By Western standards, some of those components are inferior — for example, the Factbook states that the Communist Party is the only permitted party. More readable sources (e.g., BBC; Encyclopedia Britannica) indicate more clearly that, while there are elections, and nearly everyone votes, the Communist Party is the real center of power in Vietnam. Time (Lewis, 2016) explains that, in (for example) the 2016 election for members of the National Assembly, the party decided which names would appear on the ballot.
Measures of Effective Government
Among the various forms of government, which works best? To answer that question, one would need some way of measuring and comparing the achievements of various governments. This section looks at two different ways of evaluating government performance, and also at the question of what kind of evidence to use in conducting that evaluation. The discussion here is not very technical but, in any case, the final paragraph of this section offers a summary.
The question of how to measure governmental effectiveness begins with the meaning of the word “effective.” Various sources explain that being “effective” means “doing the right things,” while being “efficient” means “doing things right.” Cambridge Dictionary says that efficiency means working in a quick and organized way, while effectiveness means getting the desired results. In describing leadership styles, the Huffington Post (Peck, 2013) suggests that the efficient manager focuses on getting things done, while the effective manager looks beyond immediate results to consider long-term effects: “‘effective’ means balancing what’s required to get the job done well with [how] those efforts impact the people doing it.” Similarly, Livestrong (Northridge, 2015) argues that, in communication, efficiency favors brevity (i.e., using no more words than necessary to express an idea), while effectiveness typically requires interaction, with “a lot of verification and validation,” to insure that the parties understand each other, and also to give the other person an assurance that s/he has been understood.
The conclusion seems to be that efficiency is not irrelevant — it is often, if not always, advisable to figure out the fastest and simplest way to accomplish something — but a focus on effectiveness may highlight important constraints that efficiency calculations must take into account. For instance, in a business context, production and sales are important, but it is also essential to determine the effects of that production or those sales. It would be important to know that, for instance, the company loses money on each sale, or that the product alienates users, or leads to lawsuits. Similarly, in government, it would be insufficient to observe that hospital stays have been reduced in length, if death rates rise as a result, or that more students are graduating from high school, if their so-called educations actually give them little that they will remember or use.
In the introduction to The Palgrave Handbook of Indicators in Global Governance (2017), Bhuta et al. (2017, pp. 6-7) suggest that the attempt to understand what constitutes effective governance has resulted in the production of numerous schemes for evaluating the performance of nations by many different indicators (e.g., democracy, corruption, rule of law, state fragility). Bhuta et al. (pp. 14-15) describe an “indicator culture” in which claims about numbers are quickly met with counterclaims about the meaning of the numbers in question, or about alternative numbers. For instance, Bhuta et al. (pp. 8-9) say that indicators may serve to create truth rather than to find it, insofar as a given indicator may facilitate judgments based on Western standards not necessarily suitable for other settings. An example would arise where surveys may reveal that citizens of one country want different things than citizens of another country, such that it would be wrongheaded to evaluate both countries according to a single standard of effective governance.
Bhuta et al. (2017) find that key debates swirl especially around indicators related to corruption, to governance, and to sustainability. Such debates have resulted in a turn away from the “first generation of global-scale indicators” (p. 16), such as those that aggregate many points of comparison to produce simplistic ratings and rankings of countries. For example, Bhuta et al. point to Beschel (2017), who cites Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (1995-2017) and the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI, 1996-2017) as preeminent examples of that first-generation approach. According to Kaufmann et al. (2010, p. 2),
The WGI consist of six composite indicators of broad dimensions of governance covering over 200 countries since 1996: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These indicators are based on several hundred variables obtained from 31 different data sources . . . .
Beschel (2017) concludes that measures like the WGI “provide a rough and cost-effective first approximation that can be used to assess the severity of problems” but that “newer second-generation analytical tools, such as the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) assessments, can provide more nuanced and granular information about specific government functions.” As its name suggests, PEFA (2016) offers more of an accountant’s perspective on national health: in comparison against the WGI, its “seven pillars” appear to include nothing on most of the key points covered by the WGI (e.g., citizen voice, political stability, rule of law). Moreover, for the lay reader, a brief look at downloadable WGI and PEFA datasets suggested that what Beschel described as “nuanced and granular information” may translate as “getting lost in the weeds.” That is, I appreciated WGI’s aggregate calculations of each nation’s score on its six composite indicators (above) — indicating, for instance, that in 2016, in terms of Voice and Accountability, on a scale of zero to 100, Afghanistan ranked 21.18, while Australia ranked 82.76.
As a different example of second-generation tools for assessment of good governance, Bhuta et al. (2017, p. 19) point to the Government at a Glance (GG) “dashboard” produced by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2017). Lafortune et al. (2017, p. 209) describe the dashboard approach as one that offers narrowly defined indicators without any WGI-style “super-aggregations . . . aimed at summarizing the performance of activities . . . into a single figure.” Contrary to my hopes, the “dashboard” terminology evidently does not imply the existence of a graphical user interface (as in OECD’s Better Life Index) providing a visual comparison of countries as the user changes the weighting of various components of governance. The “at a glance” phrasing appears to refer, rather, to the availability of targeted datasets.
It is rather paradoxical that Lafortune et al. (2017, p. 209) understand GG as seeking “a wider audience, including opinion leaders, academics, students, public interest groups, and, not least, interested citizens.” For one thing, GG “is not constructed on the basis of an explicit definition of what good governance is,” which is precisely where many interested citizens would like to start. The information made available to end users in GG tends moreover toward the arcane. Consider, for example, this question from GG’s Public Sector Integrity dataset: “In your country, what kinds of mechanisms are used to mainstream integrity policies across line ministries (e.g. health, education etc.)?” Even an “interested” citizen might find it challenging to be very interested in that. In any event, is not clear how interested citizens would be involved in “discussion” focused on “conceptualisation, definitions, and substantive elements of indicator building in close collaboration with government officials” (p. 235).
In short, GG does not appear to be designed for use by interested citizens. Its concerns seem legitimate. But summarizing an entire nation in a manageable set of concepts and/or numbers for use by “opinion leaders, academics, students, [and] public interest groups” will inevitably entail reductionism and, at times, oversimplification. Mistakes will be made. Bhuta et al. (2017, p. 17) euphemize that second-generation tools like GG require “data publics” to be “tolerant of greater complexity in deriving conclusions from indicators.” More frankly, Lafortune et al. (pp. 215-217, 235) admit that such indicators are not media-friendly; acknowledge that “some concepts of government activities are multidimensional and cannot be accurately measured/captured” by such narrow indicators; and agree that “composite indicators can be useful tools” when “constructed rigorously” and used in an informed manner by people aware of the complexities of the underlying data. Summarizing those underlying complexities in a digestibly cautionary form may be about the best that opinion leaders and academics can do, when massaging something like GG into a form useful for non-expert discussion.
As Lafortune et al. (2017, p. 210) acknowledge, officials or experts, responding to the surveys that underlie tools like GG, “may interpret and answer the questions differently and/or they may not answer the questions completely objectively.” Lafortune et al. respond to that problem with a potentially misplaced faith in accompanying literature providing “extensive guidance on how to interpret the questions and fill out the responses.” Less optimistically, Rotberg (2017, p. 45) questions a GG-style use of “a very complicated array of ‘second-generation’ data . . . when much simpler, more direct ways of assessing good governance are easily available.” In Rotberg’s (pp. 35, 40) view, governance is simply “a collection of responsibilities” to produce certain outputs. Thus, Rotberg suggests evaluating government on the basis of its outputs. Although Bhuta et al. (2017, pp. 20-21) contrast the views of Rotberg (2017) against those of Ivanyna and Shah (2017), in my reading the latter primarily suggest that outputs can be measured effectively by surveying citizens. There is, admittedly, the problem that citizen opinion is subject to biases due to governmental intimidation, mass media distortion, and citizen activism (p. 422; see also Ivanya & Shah, 2011, p. 61).
To summarize, this section approaches the topic of effective governance by looking at a few tools that have been used by major players (e.g., World Bank, OECD), over the past two decades, to capture and summarize information about the quality of government in various countries. Such tools differ from one another in their willingness to trade accuracy for usability. The risk on one extreme is that data on divergent topics will be aggregated into an absurdly simplistic composite number most useful for extreme comparisons (e.g., Afghanistan vs. Australia); the risk on the other extreme is that findings will be presented in a fragmented form that leaves would-be users at a loss as to what such data means or how it can be used. To the extent that such tools focus on processes rather than outputs, Rotberg (2017) makes the persuasive point that, as indicated at the start of this section, measurement of governmental effectiveness requires identification and measurement of expected outputs.
What People Want from Government
As the preceding section indicates, the Palgrave volume (Bhuta et al., 2017) presents current expert opinion on tools and methods for measuring governmental effectiveness. Such efforts assume consensus on what government should be effective at. This is perhaps a straightforward matter. Rotberg (2017, pp. 41-42) contends that, since the 17th century, citizens everywhere have tended to seek a rather stable set of outcomes. These universally desired outcomes, he says, include security, safety, fair and predictable legal process, freedom from corruption, self-governance or at least having a voice in governance, prosperity (e.g., more and better food, adequate housing), fair wages, private enterprise (i.e., being “free to use their own skills to better themselves”), and essential public services (e.g., education, healthcare, clean water, environmental protection).
More detailed lists exist. For instance, one might add the blizzard of criteria of good governance covered by the WGI and GG, the dimensions of governance outcomes suggested by Ivanyna and Shah (2017, p. 411), indeed the many expectations spelled out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). All of these sources, and many others, identify ideal outcomes. Yet their lists differ, and governments also differ on the issues they consider most important. Why?
Part of the reason is, of course, that different circumstances call for different responses (see e.g., Andrews, 2008). But another part of the reason is that governments and planners are not always in the driver’s seat — that, contra Rotberg (2017), the supposedly unanimous voice of humanity is in fact conflicted and confused, with considerable inconsistency in actual priorities. For example, Rotberg (pp. 44-45) himself observes that poor little Malawi achieves better governance than the much larger and wealthier Kenya, partly because of Kenya’s ethnic tensions. In effect, Kenyans (like a growing number of Americans, it seems) would rather hold onto their mutual animosities than pull together in pursuit of an improved society. Speaking of Americans, how can it be that such a rich and settled nation would turn in such a lackadaisical performance, relatively speaking, in pursuit of some of Rotberg’s supposedly universally desired outcomes (e.g., fair and predictable legal process, shared prosperity, healthcare)?
In my hours of reading among such sources to this point, I saw plenty of evidence that scholars had identified practical considerations (e.g., security, clean water, human rights) that sensible people would prioritize, if their primary and collective task in this life were simply to control the threats imposed by predatory and destructive forces in nature and in humanity. I also saw recognition of misgovernance and state fragility (e.g., Venger & Miethe, 2017). What I did not see was attention to the possibility that people free to seek ideal outcomes would instead become preoccupied with pursuits that, perhaps making sense from one perspective, or within one timeframe, would appear self-defeating and perhaps even self-destructive on a longer timeframe, or in a larger perspective.
I did not think, for instance, that Americans of the World War II generation, with their social organizations and attitudes, their expectations of self and family, and their optimism about America’s place in the world, would have been happy to know that they were laying the foundation for a nation riven with loneliness and mutual distrust. It seemed to me that the members of that older generation might have done some things differently, if they had realized that they were constructing an economy in which wages would languish while the rich became vastly richer. I believed that the parents of many Baby Boomers would have pursued an alternate vision of the good life if they had foreseen that their children’s consumerism would leave them wondering whether Social Security would survive political machinations, or how the nation would ever repay its enormous indebtedness — especially but not only to China — acquired in exchange for the plasticware filling oversized houses with shrinking lawns on which children, glued to electronic devices in lieu of real face-to-face interaction, never play.
An American of the World War II generation — indeed, a person of any generation, from almost anywhere — might expect that the world’s most powerful nation, and one of its wealthiest as well, would emanate a sense of positivity and happiness. It would have seemed almost absurd to propose that, as it turned out, for the past 40 years, at least one-third (indeed, for most of the past decade, more than two-thirds) of Americans would be dissatisfied with the way things are going in the U.S. (Gallup, 2018). That is, unfortunately, the reality. That cannot be what we or our parents (or their parents) wanted. It is not something that anyone could have forced upon us, if we had been committed to the achievement of a different outcome. It is simply what our priorities led us to, within the shortsighted timeframes that shaped our self-defeating perspectives.
This century has seen enormous disruptions to, and shifts in, this nation’s global position, its priorities, and its capabilities. Relatively unforeseen catastrophes include the Great Recession of 2007, the Iraq invasion of 2003, the rise of China, the opioid addiction epidemic, and (depending on one’s politics) the election of Donald Trump, or the circumstances making Trump’s election the best result in a bad situation. It does seem that researchers focused on logical and practical priorities have failed to adjust for the enormous distortions wrought by the preferences of a confused or unfocused public, and by those who capitalize upon the resulting opportunities.
Beyond the Question of What People Want
The preceding section suggests that traditional human priorities (for e.g., food, shelter, freedom of speech) explain only part of human expectations of government. A more complete explanation would take account of a will to drive oneself and one’s homeland into the ground, though plainly that is not what people think they are doing, nor is it what they say they want to do. Possibly the mechanism at work involves being spoiled, losing touch with human suffering, or otherwise becoming clueless and/or corrupted, such that one takes for granted one’s privileges and advantages, at least until some other person or sequence of events compels, perhaps too late, a corrected recognition of what might have been.
To the extent that government serves only to give the people what they think they want, government in corrupt times becomes an accomplice in the public’s disintegration of its own hopes and possibilities. Certainly government was the mechanism by which America brought about several of its own catastrophes and other forms of deterioration listed above. Government, with its protection of free speech that is patently false and sociopolitically destructive, is likewise the hapless facilitator of opportunists who stir up the mob for personal advantage. It is increasingly plausible that, as some (e.g., Demaggio, 2017; Astore, 2013) have suggested, the U.S. is following the “bread and circuses” path of the Roman Empire, insofar as American leaders increasingly “generate public approval,” not by forging real solutions to problems, but rather by distracting the public’s attention and by meeting its “most immediate or base requirements” (e.g., food, entertainment) (Wikipedia).
Though it may seem obvious that the purpose of government must ultimately be to serve the people, that does not necessarily require giving them what they think they want. It is quite possible that, just as most people may sometimes fail to take action that is highly recommended to avoid bigger problems later, the public as a whole may resist or reject steps that are important but unpleasant. In such a situation, a good government may sometimes have to enforce policies that a majority would vote against. For instance, the “Not In My Back Yard” (NIMBY) mentality has been responsible for blockage of numerous projects that would benefit many at the expense of a few (Wikipedia; Forbes, 2015).
In this light, it appears that the purpose of government is to deliver good government. While that formulation may seem simpleminded, it can be construed as a shift in focus, from an abstract question about “purpose” to a more concrete question about best outcomes. In this context, good government thus means having the power and inclination to make decisions and take actions that are best for the people, even if the people don’t necessarily agree.
The problem with this line of thought is that, when you give one person or entity the power to overrule the public will, you get the bad along with the good. Ideally, the people acquiring this kind of power would always use it wisely and effectively. But even if they do, the time comes when they hand it off to others, or others seize it, and then anything can happen.
To avoid that sort of outcome, it would make sense to avoid reaching a crisis point resulting in an irregular seizure of power by any person or entity not subject to public control. If it starts to appear that the existing government is no longer capable of governing effectively, then it would be wise to have that debate and reach the necessary decisions sooner rather than later. Ideally, one would develop plans for a possible future transition — would amend the Constitution, in the case of the U.S. — so that the switch to a different form of government would continue to be governed by laws and would unfold in a stable manner.
It does seem that a major transition point in American government may be coming somewhat closer. Such a development is not surprising. After many years, car engines may need to be rebuilt, computers may need to have their operating systems reinstalled or upgraded, human hearts and knees may need surgery or replacement. It is possible that day will never come, but wisdom would recommend being prepared for the fair chance that it will. In that case, the purpose of government seems to include planning for ways to insure that good government will anticipate and survive a transition to a different form of government. The American Constitution does not presently include that, but perhaps it should.
Summary
Among the various possibilities discussed in this post, a plausible conclusion is that, for better and for worse, humanity is presently at the state-level stage of political development, where a powerful elite typically governs the public, in a manner that is inevitably parasitical and in some ways destabilizing, but that also contributes, at its best, to happier, more peaceful, and more prosperous lives for those who are governed.
There have been many efforts, some quite sophisticated, to evaluate how well governments perform at the state level. In many if not all regards, it appears this evaluation is best focused on governmental outputs — not on how much government spends on healthcare, for instance, but on whether and how health is improved, as determined by direct observation and/or by surveys of those affected.
It seems that a focus on results must take account, not only of the sensible things that the public claims to want, but also of the counterproductive if not senseless things that the public sometimes pursues. In the U.S. particularly, there is a rather vivid contrast between the sort of nation and government that our ancestors seemed to want and the situation in which we presently find ourselves.
This contrast raises the question of whether the American public would benefit from a temporary or permanent switch to a form of government in which an extraordinarily powerful leadership would compel changes, particularly unpleasant changes, conducive to a better long-term future for America and its people. Of course, such a switch would pose the risk that an extraordinarily powerful leadership would abuse its power or simply fail to govern wisely, forcing changes that would result in more harm than good.
Notwithstanding that concern, in unsettled times there remains the possibility that such a change of government will come, whether one prefers it or not, through deliberate scheming and/or the use of force, or possibly through simple chaos. This sort of thing does happen, after all, sometimes with positive results but often ending in disaster.
Such thoughts suggest that the purpose of government may be, not only to deliver outcomes desired by the public, and perhaps sometimes to administer medicine that the public would prefer to avoid, but also to prepare for its own eventual transition into a different form. That conception of government may recommend that the contingency planning begin sooner rather than later, so as to prepare for a smooth transition into an alternate form of government offering the fewest risks and the greatest payoffs.
The American System 