This post on good-governance countries by Scott Sumner is fascinating (via Reihan Salam). People on the left and the right may disagree with many of the particulars, but I think the overall thrust of Sumner’s post remains true: namely, that good-governance is really important and that smaller countries (like Sweden and Denmark, or city-states like Singapore and Hong Kong) are able to do this much better than big countries like the United States.
Riffing off of the World Economic Forum’s Global Economic Report, Sumner tries to recalculate the best governed countries:
It seemed to me that many of those categories measure “good governance” more effectively than the Heritage Index (which doesn’t tend to measure the output of services traditionally provided by governments (infrastructure, health, education, etc.) But market size seemed irrelevant to me, and I noticed it partly explained the high scores of the US, Germany and Japan. And I also thought the last two categories were unrelated. Innovation would reward countries that happened to have a comparative advantage in tech industries, and what the hell is “sophistication?” So I averaged the first 9, and here’s what I got:
1. Singapore 5.852
2. Switzerland 5.799
3. Hong Kong 5.696 5.778
4. Sweden 5.696
5. Denmark 5.602
6. Finland 5.584
7. Holland 5.513
8. Canada 5.509
9. Australia 5.452
10. Norway 5.444
11. Germany 5.361
13. U.K. 5.358
13. Taiwan 5.271
13. France 5.271
15. U.S. 5.187
16. Japan 5.147
Actually the WEF list is far longer. I did not re-compute all of the index numbers; a few other smaller European countries would probably have overtaken the US and Japan if I had. Here are some reactions to the new list:
1. Small countries are better governed.
2. The list has something for both those on the left and those on the right. Most of the top scorers are the sort of European welfare state beloved by liberals. France overtakes the US in this list. On the other hand the top three are usually regarded as pretty capitalistic places, and even if you throw out the two Asian city-states (which I’d oppose) Switzerland is often called the most capitalist country in Europe.
It seems to me this list is exposing a perspective that is orthogonal to the tired left/right debate over big government. It suggests multiple paths to nirvana.
There’s a lot more to the piece, so it’s worth digesting in full, but the long and short of it seems to be that the typical left/right divide on economic policy and the welfare state is really pretty irrelevant when it comes to successful governance. Switzerland features very high on the list, and it has one of the most functional systems of competitive federalism in the world, while Sweden – which is far more socialistic than anything most Americans would ever dream of and much more centralized than Switzerland – none the less has a 100% voucherized school system, something many American right-wingers would love to implement here. Many of these countries have far freer markets than America does, yet even the hyper-capitalistic Asian city states like Hong Kong and Singapore still have pretty significant welfare systems (and Singapore has a truly brilliant healthcare system that blends health-savings accounts with single-payer).
Sumner continues by asking some questions about these top-performing countries:
A. What values should government policies embody?
B. What policies effectively deliver those values?
C. When there is a dispute about which policies work best, how should the dispute be resolved?
The first question is moral, and the answer I give is “utilitarianism.” Unlike 99% of people in the humanities, I regard utilitarianism as a radically egalitarian value system—where people put the best interest of society ahead of their own narrow self-interest. The second question is scientific, and my answer is ‘economistic’ policies, those that are implemented by people cognizant of the (counter-intuitive) way taxes and regulations often distort decision-making. The sort of fiscal regime you get if 100 Martin Feldsteins sat down and designed a country on a pad of paper. In other words—Singapore. The third question is political, and my answer is democracy. And I don’t mean just having elections; I mean a system where the people actually govern. Where every school is a separate school district. Where taxes must be approved by referenda. Where every decision is made at the lowest feasible level of government.
Low and behold, all three of these models are represented in the top 5 of my list.
I think this makes a pretty good case for what Will Wilkinson describes as ‘limited-government liberalism’ or what has largely come to be known ‘liberal-tarianism’ around the blogosphere.
I think Sumner’s claims about the Laffer curve are a bit too strong. Economists disagree mightily on what sort of tax rates would actually start to hit productivity and I think we could go quite a bit higher than Sumner suggests, but I could be wrong. I do think he’s right to point out that effective governance is key – in a country with really effective government, tax dollars simply go farther and produce more value. The problem with a very big, very populous and – let’s face it – very politically dysfunctional system like our own is that tax dollars do not produce all that much value. Much of our revenue effervesces quite quickly, or get sucked into our burgeoning defense budget or innumerable other wasteful programs. This is not an argument against generating revenue, by any means – taxes are an inevitability and probably a lot less important than most anti-tax advocates think in the big scheme – but rather an argument about how best to generate and spend it. I think a more decentralized system akin to the Swiss model makes sense for this country. (Perhaps ironically, we have already moved a bit closer to the Swiss healthcare model.)
Lots to think about, one way or another. And probably plenty to argue about as well. Politics is a vulgar business, but economics is the realm of mystics and seers.
Sumner concludes:
In my view the left/right debate is this country is so vicious because we are debating second best policies in a policy-making regime that is profoundly dysfunctional. Thus Matt Yglesias and I probably disagree strongly about extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich, but we both favor a simple progressive consumption tax as the ideal. I see these small countries with good governance as models that point the way forward, past our stale ideological debates. The question is whether we will pay attention to the lessons they are providing.
MikeJ
Why would you think anyone on the right cares about good governance? We’ve watched them govern. They have no interest in it.
Liberals look for what needs to be fixed and try to find a way to fix it. Conservatives demand that reality conform to their theory of how things should work, and are willing to live in a shithole as long as it is politically correct.
El Cid
Actually I think the American political system has been structurally opposed to ‘good government’ efforts. Large development projects don’t happen without being bribery for politicians. Heavy regulations and careful design of regulatory agencies are generally opposed by forces against them. When good governance happens, it typically happens despite prevailing forces. Sometimes political figures happen to have enough power and the situation lends itself to such intelligent reform efforts, such as the early 1960s experiments in economic development for the poor, which in the South was then attacked because such programs inevitably helped both whites & blacks and often brought them together.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
I see these small countries with good governance as models that point the way forward, past our stale ideological debates.
With crap like this, Sumner is starting to get into wanker territory. Who does he think he is, McMegan? Al From?
Violet
As far back as I can remember, in this country government has been deemed the enemy. Remember Reagan said the nine scariest words in the English language were; “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Given that the government has been made out to be the enemy, how could we expect the the US to have good governance? We undermine it at every turn.
Martin
The US has corporations with market caps that exceed the GDP of some of those top countries. Corporations like WalMart have annual sales that rival the GDP of some of those countries.
The US has a reasonably decentralized form of government, but the power of corporations to achieve their goals and roll over the citizenry – through regulatory capture, campaign donations, even control of the media – overpowers all local and most state governments. The same argument that called for a strong central government to defend against Britain in the 18th century applies today against Haliburton, Goldman Sachs, and others.
Smaller countries – even capitalistic ones – recognize the power differential between business and the citizenry and serve as a more active intermediary. We don’t seem to. Singapore and Switzerland are very capitalistic, but they’ve got regulatory frameworks there would send our conservatives through the fucking roof. Change that attitude here, and I suspect solutions to our problems would flow easily.
scav
well, there is also a bit of the usual “Other people’s views are merely political and ideological. My views are simply common sense.” going on here. Post-ideological is more or less on the same timeline as the rapture.
PeakVT
I think a more decentralized system akin to the Swiss model makes sense for this country.
No, it wouldn’t. The divides in the country cut across our rather arbitrarily drawn state lines, whereas the Swiss cantons have long separate histories and their borders mostly follow geographic divides. And it’s been repeatedly proven that a number of US states can’t be left to tend to themselves.
silentbeep
“I think this makes a pretty good case for what Will Wilkinson describes as ‘limited-government liberalism’ or what has largely come to be known ‘liberal-tarianism’ around the blogosphere.”
Sounds good to me. But Will convinced me a long time ago. Having a strong capitalistic free market, coupled with a secure, well-funded safety net, seems to be the way to go, as you evidenced above.
Martin
@PeakVT: Yeah, we haven’t transcended geographic determinism. California is an economic powerhouse not because of any magic of governance but because it has a climate that is incredibly favorable to agriculture, extensive and diverse natural resources to draw on (lumber, minerals, oil – you name it), all but one of the best ports on the west coast to ensure it would be a gateway to trade, and so on.
Take CA taxpayers federal subsidies out of the equation and you’d have to either give up the US Navy or watch about 8 states descend into 3rd world status within a decade.
kth
I’ve never thought comparisons between behemoths like Indonesia and the United States, and small states like Nicaragua and Denmark were especially useful. At least some of the “best places” surveys in our country group the metros in tiers, and don’t try to compare Chicago with Billings, MT.
lamh32
OT: ABC reporting: Elizabeth Warren To Be Appointed to Help Create Consumer Finance Protection Bureau
Anticlimatic??? I guess that enthusiasm gap is gonna tick up now right??
lamh32
Also, I may have missed this, but saw on CNN’s ticker that Castle WILL NOT endorse O’Donnell!
kth
It’s entirely possible that this is true, but the “best countries” ranking provides no evidence for it (even if you accept the methodology). If I had to hazard a guess, I’d bet that the bottom 20 (recalculated per Sumner’s method) was dominated by small countries as well.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Question: Would small countries like those you mention exist as they are without big countries like the US making things relatively stable?
Redshift
I dunno, the piece seemed to be a lot more “I can find stuff in the statistics to support my point of view” than being particularly insightful. I’ll give him props for noting that stuff can be found in the statistics to support other people’s points of view, too.
Considering that the “debate” over “big government” is actually between the right and the right’s caricature of the left, I’d say that reality is orthogonal to it.
And again, we have the assumption that both conservatives and liberals see the welfare state and capitalism as being in conflict, and because conservatives root for the capitalist “team,” liberals must be against it.
If he doesn’t bother to find out what other people actually believe before deciding which systems they would like, it doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in his interpretation of what those countries are like, either.
Ouish
A problem with this list is that the countries at the top are stifling. The highest-ranked one I’d even consider living in is Denmark.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN)
@PeakVT: Saying that a more decentralized system makes sense is not the same thing as saying that decentralizing along our current state boundaries makes sense. I agree that the latter is a bad idea.
I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the idea that more regional power would be an improvement. One problem with the US as a political unit is that it is so diverse that it is nearly impossible to come up with a coherent governing coalition. Take a look at Congress. The fact is, you can’t come up with any coherent bloc that could muster a majority. It’s guaranteed that, at any given time, however controls a given house will only be able to do so by putting together a ramshackle bunch of members, many of whom are certain to be castigated as a “xINO”. It isn’t possible for the Democrats to ever take charge without the Blue Dogs playing a dominant role. The same is pretty much true of the Republicans, though they papered that over by not really wanting to do much that necessitated legislation.
A part of this is a the governing framework, but not all of it. The Confederacy has become an extreme outlier, but the cultures of the Northeast, the Industrial Midwest, the Agrarian Midwest, the Rocky Mountains, the Desert Southwest and the West Coast are all very disparate. So too are the types of politicians that succeed in each.
Matt Yglesias talks a lot about how there need to be civic minded members of both parties in order to pass legislation in the face of parochial interests in both parties that are opposed. This is really only true because there are so many different parochial interests that the parties can’t sort them out.
Devolving responsibility to regions of the country would help to alleviate this problem. It would allow more things to be decided in legislatures in which there is a narrower range of interests, and thus more rational coalitions can form. It doesn’t make any sense to do this by state, but it does make sense.
To anticipate one objection, yes, I agree that this would leave people in less congenial regions out in the cold. However, it would also allow for there to be much better legislation and policy in more congenial regions, and that’s true for any given definition of “congenial”. It’s a trade off. As the federal government becomes more and more dysfunctional, we’d be giving up less and getting more.
morzer
Isn’t it time for more people to demand that ED “Man with the orange mohawk” Kain declare his real political allegiance and then flagellate him ritually no matter what he says? I feel that a week with a post on this topic is simply too long!
Or, in the immortal words of Brave New World:
“We – want – the whip!”
Bailey
Interesting discussion. What those functional, small countries–or city-states, even–have in common is that in addition to small populations, they also are fairly homogenous in the make up of their populations. Is it easier and simpler to govern if 95% of your population is of the same ethnic/religious background?
MikeJ
@Ouish: Having spent months at a time there, I’d say Sweden is worth living in.
JMG
Dear Mr. Kain: It is worth noting that one common fact about these well-governed small countries is that they also have relatively small armed forces, or at least less-expensive armed forces, than do large countries — removing a drag both on public finance and overall economic performance.
Scott P.
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN):
Except it is a nearly universal truism that state governments are more corrupt and less efficient than the federal government, and city governments are more corrupt and less efficient still.
Martin
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Wut? If the smaller countries didn’t exist, what would they be? Big countries? Governmentless nomadic expanses?
Did you mean to ask ‘Would those countries have been as successful without big countries?’
MikeJ
@Bailey:
Not kidnapping and forcing millions of people to come to your country against their will goes a long way to homogeneity.
Zifnab
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN):
The corporationists seem to be doing fairly well.
Barry
I apologize if I’m beating dead horses – I skipped right to the end of the comment thread. OTOH, Sumner’s argument deserves this sort of flogging:
“1. Small countries are better governed.”
He says this because there were a lot of small countries in the top 10, without checking the rest of the list. Considering that there have got to be a lot more small countries than large countries, he doesn’t have any evidence.
” On the other hand the top three are usually regarded as pretty capitalistic places, and even if you throw out the two Asian city-states (which I’d oppose) Switzerland is often called the most capitalist country in Europe. ”
Those top three also have strong, interventionalist governments. They have levels of government control which would freak out Republicans.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Scott P.:
Certainly I’d rather go to a federal prison than a state prison.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN)
@Scott P.:
This is a truism in our current conditions and our current system. It is far, far from a truism that this is necessarily the case. In fact, evidence seems to point the other way.
What has happened in the US is that, as power migrated up to the federal level, the stakes in state and local political affairs became more and more concentrated. The fracturing of local governments into so many different bodies (city council; school board; county board; park board; and on and on) made this even more true. The main reason for the level of corruption at the local level is that so few people are paying attention to any given policy fight that they tend to become dominated by those with a parochial interest.
If you devolve power down levels, this becomes less and less true. The stakes become higher, to the point that it becomes more worth paying attention to.
Zifnab
To make this assumption, you’d have to claim that claim historically. But if you stretch back to the New Deal, it seems as though tax dollars could be spent very effectively given the right people in office.
I can see the argument that government at the local level is more effective because the officials are more directly accountable to the public. A 100k Congressional district sending off one of 435 House Reps to dicker over legislation that impacts all 300 million US citizens can’t draw the same conclusions that a 10k township can with a town council that impacts just them and maybe their immediate neighbors.
That said, it’s like @Martin: said. Corporations are a national issue. Decentralizing power might give us Switzerland. Or it might give us Africa, where guys like Dutch Royal Shell and DOW chemical shit all over everything and laugh at the governments they’ve spent the last century corrupting, terrorizing, and infiltrating.
If nothing else can be said about the power of the US Presidency, it’s not a mantel that gets purchased cheaply. Not so much with leaders like Mugabee or Quadafi.
Amanda in the South Bay
Eh, this may be a minority view here, and probably just my own fantasies talking, but I think in a sane world, if you were to redraw the borders of the current states on a more rational basis, I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t come up with the same 50-some larger states, like CA, could (and probably should) be divided into a northern and southern half, there are lots of sparsely populated Rocky Mountain states that could probably be consolidated, western Oregon has more in common with western Washington than it does with eastern Oregon, etc. And that’s just the west, but only because I’ve never lived back east.
Maybe that might contribute to a more sane political party system, IDK, I don’t have a PhD in anything.
Martin
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN): Well, if as a starting point we simply worked off of the existing 435 congressional districts (perhaps with some gerrymandering removed), we’d get a somewhat tolerable socioeconomic map, and a uniform population distribution. Granted, that puts all of Alaska on equal footing as Rangel’s district, which you can walk across on your lunch hour, but hey, you gotta start somewhere.
Once there, you have to eliminate our system of government with a parliamentary system, however. You’re right that you’d never get coalitions in a 2 party system, but with multiple parties banding together to form a majority it’d probably work decently well – probably better than it does now, in fact.
It’s an interesting thought exercise, but to get where we are into something resembling local power that’s workable would require tossing the Constitution and starting over. Pretty much takes us well out of the realm of the possible.
KG
@Martin: some times, in my darker moments, I wonder what happens to the continent if/when our little American experiment finally fails (and yes, all experiments in government eventually fail)
Amanda in the South Bay
@KG:
Well, assuming its not because of a nuclear war, invasion, or the bad guys don’t win in civil war redux, then I’d like to think a much better form of government would be devised.
Zifnab
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN):
But that cuts both ways. The guys on the park board might be incompetent or corrupt, but they don’t really have a lot of political capital. By contrast the guys in the US Capital have a multi-trillion dollar budget and sweeping legislative authority. Raising the stakes at the local level might draw attention to those races, but so what? You think people can’t lie and manipulate and smear over a park commissioner’s seat? And if that commissioner isn’t bound by federal rules on park use, how long until he’s turned the property over to developers or industrialists to do with as they please?
No matter where the power lays or who has what authority, you still need transparency and an informed citizenry. Distributing power downward might change which offices are worth fighting over, but they don’t change who will be fighting over them or how dirty they’ll be willing to fight.
Zach
The Swedish system, though, has proven to be a failure. Ironically, conservatives (at least in Britain) say this is because there’s no centralized power capable of identifying failing schools and stepping in to fix them. Well, just because a policy’s proven to be counterproductive doesn’t mean it’ll lose conservative support, I suppose.
j low
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN): I live in Portland Oregon where some folks in the 1970’s were brilliant enough to set a Metro government that overlays the city and county governments and is responsible for broad planning oversight with the interests of the entire region in mind as opposed to the more specific interests of each municipality and county. Not Gonna Happen but this country definitely has distinct geographic regions that would be served well by this sort of authority.
Zifnab
@KG:
The British have been going strong for the last 800 or so years (assuming you mark the beginning of the modern English system with the Magna Carta). India has been relatively stable since the end of colonialism. Hell, even Egypt hasn’t really gone anywhere in the last 6000 years – ups and downs sure, but it’s still kicking. It’s not like the US is just going to fall off the map if we have another Civil War.
PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population
There are only 23 countries that have populations over 60+ million. 5 of them make the top 16 but none make the top 10. Without knowing more of how these rankings hard to know what difference being in the top 16 even means compared to being in the top 10: is a person/business really that much better off in Sweden rather then Germany or Japan?? In any case 5/23 make the top 16 for a percentage of 23%
Now there are 137 countries with about equal to or less population then LA county. 6 of the top 16 make the top 16 that makes 16/137. That about 8% of small countries have “good governance”
So size “correlates” with top 10 as no big countries get but expand the criteria slightly of what counts for good governance and there is no correlation at all. Not ready to make grand pronouncements based on that
John Bird
Hmmm, I wonder if Sweden’s top-to-bottom commitment by the state to social welfare from cradle to grave has anything to do with why school vouchers are a good idea for them and an absolutely insane idea for America?
Or its commitment to limiting income disparity? Sweden has a Gini coefficient of 25. The U.S.? 40.8.
Could that maybe, possibly, have some effect on the vast difference between school vouchers in Sweden and school vouchers in the U.S.?
Couldn’t be . . . because that would be socialism.
dhd
@Bailey: Singapore is decidedly not ethnically homogeneous. It’s also decidedly not democratic, either, though.
Adam Lang
@Martin:
If we toss the Constitution and start over, it’s going to be as a
theocrazytheocracy.Skippy-san
Interesting-a country that is effectively a family run dictatorship (Singapore) ranks at the top in terms of governance. Singapore has a free for all business climate that allows business literally to get away with murder. Protest what the PAP wants? You get sued to the bejesus for libel. Ask Joshua B. Jeyaretnam.
Their health care system is great-but it is an anthema to Tea Partiers. It REQUIRES that you contribute to both your health care and retirement-in fact you are basically required to fork over 35% of your income for Retirement Savings, health care and taxes. Then again-you can use your retirement savings as collateral on a home loan-which is why Singapore has one of the highest rates of home ownership in the world.
But don’t fool yourself-its all done to keep the masses happy so they won’t complain about the blatant class system there ( Chinese first, Malay’s second, Europeans third and every body else a lot lower)-and the lack of basic rights we take for granted.
Jager
A former co-worker of mine has lived and worked in Switzerland for almost 15 years running a branch of a US Company. He was offered a bigger job, more money etc to take over the New York office, he respectively declined his companys offer. Privately, he said “I wouldn’t move back home for 4 times the pay, we love it here, my kids have grown up here and its is simply a wonderful place to live, I’d have to be fucking nuts to move back to the states, its a nice place to visit, but I don’t want to live there”. BTW, he is a Texan!
John Bird
I’d also like to point out that I agree with Sumner that Scandinavian countries have a low-drag turnover of taxpayer dollars because of a stronger consensus between the left and the right (vs. our contentious and wide-ranging debates over every last little thing as though it were a life-or-death moral issue).
But that consensus places them to the left of the U.S. Democratic Party on what we call “welfare” issues, and they call “social” issues: that is, guaranteed income for the unemployed, guaranteed health care, guaranteed support for parents, guaranteed education. These things are often guaranteed through constitutions in these countries, and when they’re talking about reforming these programs to deal with spending, the idea of eliminating them is considered depraved by most in these countries – it would be the government abandoning its obvious responsibilities.
Collective political responsibility, it turns out, often occurs alongside collective social responsibility, and collective government action to solve problems. Who knew? So when it comes time to take swift action to reform policies, even policies that erred by spending too much on the people, the people themselves trust that their politicians are invested in a good end result.
I think we do need a Scandinavian consensus. Unfortunately, both Sumner and Yglesias would likely both deride it as too left-wing to be feasible.
John Bird
@Zifnab: Don’t underestimate the right people being in all the other offices that we don’t vote on. That’s also quite important, and Europe has been way out ahead of us in public administration since, well, there was such a thing.
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN): Here’s something worth considering. If you devolve in the United States, you’re going to end up devolving on issues of human rights. We’ve already accepted this as the norm in the country, in fact. So what you are doing is charging anyone who realizes that they’re gay at 12, and lives in Alabama, a ‘birth tax’ to relocate somewhere that their rights are respected. You’re saying that they have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they want basic dignity, much less the right to see a doctor or pursue higher education.
Sm*t Cl*de
the US making things relatively stable?
LOL
beabea
I am Swiss but have lived in the US most of my life. This is completely anecdotal obviously, but one thing that in my opinion makes Swiss capitalism so different from that in the US, is the social orientation that undergirds the two systems.
While here we have such an emphasis on individualism, the Swiss way of thinking has a very strong element of “what if we all did that?” Not to suggest that such thinking is absent in the US, but it is far more socially ingrained there I think. As Martin pointed out, the Swiss regulatory framework would be unacceptable to US conservatives. But in Switzerland, even conservatives generally accept it because of this “doing what’s good for society in general tends to benefit me personally in the long run” kind of thinking.
The concept of “freedom” is also very different. For example, in Switzerland you are not free to mow your lawn early on Sunday morning. It’s not against any law, but it might as well be given how your neighbors will treat you. But that’s okay; the freedom to enjoy a peaceful, restful Sunday morning is prized far more than the freedom to mow your lawn whenever the heck you want. There’s this notion that true freedom does entail giving up some things, but you (and others) get something worthwhile in return.
The idea of suing or protesting because the government makes you buy health insurance, is something I think the Swiss would find absolutely bizarre. “What if we all did this; not buy health insurance until we’re sick?” It would go without saying that of course it makes sense for me to pay for health insurance while I’m still healthy, or the system won’t work–for me or anyone else. But because you’re always going to have the odd guy who violates the unspoken social contract (and perhaps also mows his lawn at inappropriate times), the government compelling the purchase of insurance serves as a necessary and accepted backstop.
Again, just some observations from a Swiss-American hybrid who sometimes feels like she belongs to both countries, and to neither.
E.D. Kain
@silentbeep: Well I know you’re a liberaltarian from your twitter account, so…thanks!
E.D. Kain
@morzer: I died my mohawk pink, thanks very much.
E.D. Kain
@Bailey: Good point, homogeneity is important. But Americans have their own brand of melting pot homogeneity that shouldn’t be understated.
Roger Moore
@Bailey:
Except that they aren’t. The two two countries on the list each have 4 official languages because their ethnic makeup is so diverse.
Jager
@beabea:
The things you wrote about Switzerland are many of the things my dis-placed Texan buddy says he loves about living in Geneva. That, and his daughters speak 4 languages!
beabea
@E.D. Kain: Don’t know if I’d agree about homogeneity when it comes to Switzerland. The country is divided into four language regions: French, German, Italian, and Romansch. Then there’s also a large immigrant population, whose labor is needed but which has not necessarily been welcomed with open arms; witness the regrettable mosque building ban that recently passed by national referendum.
KG
@Zifnab: well, with England, you had the Cromwellian Commonwealth. The end of Indian colonialism was 1947, so you’re talking a short period of time, relatively speaking. And sure, Egypt is still here, so is Greece, but what they are today and what they were 6000 years ago are rather different, when it comes to a form of government.
Roger Moore
@Bailey:
I suspect that the bigger issue is whether the different ethnic groups get along. It’s a lot easier to run a multi-ethnic society if the different ethnic groups treat each other with respect than distrust. IOW, the ethnic problem in the US isn’t that we’re diverse, it’s that there’s a committed part of the majority that is committed to keeping the minorities down by hook or by crook.
morzer
@E.D. Kain:
I am confused. Have you passed away? Has your mohawk gone by the road of no return? Why, ED, why? Or is this all code for rejecting the Orange Revolution? Or possibly the Glorious Revolution?
Speak, O oracle!
beabea
@beabea: Doh! Mosque-building is not banned, just the minarets. Which almost makes it more shameful by the added dimension of absurdity and pettiness.
morzer
@Roger Moore:
You can have different languages within a population and still be ethnically fairly consistent. Switzerland’s linguistic diversity is a function of its geographical position rather than a sign of ethnic divisions per se. It might help that the various cantons are rather strong, effectively self-governing republics within the state, and most of them have only one official language. Only 4 of the 26 cantons have more than one official language, and only Graubünden has more than two (German, Italian, Romansh – it is the only canton to have Romansh as an official language btw). The overwhelming majority of cantons have German as their official language.
angler
Montesqueie was right.
cmorenc
Ouish wrote:
I visited my daughter in Denmark last spring, where she was spending the spring semester as an exchange student at the University of Copenhagen. That she chose to go there in the heart of a frigid winter, rather than someplace laid-back and sunny like Spain surprised me greatly, especially since she’s one of the less politically or worldly-aware college kids I know, and of my two kids I would have heretofore guessed she’s the more likely to someday disappoint me and turn out to be a Republican. She really knew little about Copenhagen before she went except that the word was that Copenhagen was a “cool” city to live in, and the English-language classes offered there worked well toward her major. I feared she would Skype us two weeks in on the verge of tears complaining that going there was a big mistake, she was miserable, cold, lonely, and hated the place.
MUCH TO MY SURPRISE my daughter LOVED the place, other than that the cost of living was kind of expensive. She remarked how clean, orderly, and well-run and…well, just plain fun the place was, despite it being one of the coldest, windiest, iciest winters there in many years. When we visited her in April, I couldn’t help but notice how damn clean, well-run, beautiful, yet decidedly un-stifling it was…and how prosperous the city and country seemed. The natives seemed almost annoyingly contented, and also had an uncanny knack for seeming congenitally unable to know how to make anything that looked truly ugly or uncomfortable, and Copenhagen was anything but stifling.
The United States could do lots worse than becoming much more like Scandanavia. If that’s the briar patch, throw me in it Brer’ Bohemer.
mclaren
@KG:
You’re lookin’ at it, bubba.
Palin/O’Donnell 2012!
slag
@Barry:
Actually, Republicans might like Singapore. Very lax to big business and very interventionist with the average citizen. And they use corporal punishment. Find me one Republican who doesn’t love a good S&M-style lashing!
If you put Singapore at the top of your “good governance” list, your list is deeply flawed.
Jeff Stone
I wonder what the top ten countries on the list spend on their military? Must be nice having spare cash flow.
RobW
Hong Kong, despite its relative autonomy from China, is not a country. That autonomy exists only because China permits it; it could end tomorrow if Beijing so decided. True, it’s a Special Administrative Region. So is Macau, which is nowhere in this report.
The report from which this comes does not measure “good governance” and does not claim to; it measures competetiveness, rather narrowly defined.
Its criteria for judging a country’s competetiviness:
1. Institutions (defined as the legal/admin. structure and how it encourages productivity and generation of wealth)
2. Infrastructure
3. Macroeconomic environment
4. Health and primary education
5. Higher education and training
6. Goods market efficiency
7. Labor market efficiency
8. Financial market development
9. Technological readiness
10. Market size
11. Business sophistication
12. Innovation
He just arbitrarily decided that Market Size is irrelevant and recalculated until he had a top 16. Apparently everything below that is irrelevant as well, hence his odd declaration that small countries must be better governed than large ones. As I think someone has already pointed out, if one doesn’t do them all, one can’t make such conclusions: what if the bottom 16 are all small countries?
Most bizarre to me is the arbitrary assertion that the Competetiveness Index, minus the Market Size criteria, is the measure of good governance- that promoting or increasing economic competetiveness is the only thing a government is good for.
See what’s not on that list? Civil liberties. Civil Rights. Democracy.
He just doesn’t seem to care about people’s actual, you know, liberty. How else could one end up putting Singapore at the top of a list of “good governance” unless one completely disregards the absence of free speech, a free press, an elected government?
“Right wing liberal” he calls himself. Liberal, my ass.
RobW
Oh, I just realized what else isn’t on the list: crime rates, especially violent crime. You’d think that effective policing might be a measure of a “good governance,” particularly when balanced against a measure of civil liberties.
Public health? Not on the list; doesn’t matter.
Clean environment, clean air, clean water? Who cares? Apparently these are also not a proper concern of a good government.
The measure of a legal system (part of the “Institutions” criteria) apparently is just how well it encourages the generation of wealth. Not how well it administers justice.
I could go on, but I’m starting to get pissed off, and I find that’s just not much fun anymore.
RobW
(so much for the edit function…)
Ok, actually health is listed as a criterion, lumped together with primary education. Why they’re lumped together is not explained.
They do explain why it’s listed though: a sick workforce is less productive than a healthy one. Again, no concern for human welfare, human suffering, human pain and misery. It’s just all about productivity, the only thing a “good government” should care about.
Chuck Butcher
Once you’ve got Singapore at the top of a list of best don’t you think there might just be a bit of a problem with your criteria?
Maude
@Chuck Butcher:
Don’t drop a gum wrapper in Singapore.
On thing is that in all the coutries mentioned, we are the only one with freedom of speech. This isn’t to be taken lightly IMHO.
We have our problems, but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
mattH
No they wouldn’t. Sweden provides a govt voucher to the tune of $10k (voucher advocates claim that it would cost much less, as that’s one of their major selling points), and the Swedes have actually pushed back against religious influence in those private schools, the exact opposite of what those in the US want. Not to mention that it certainly hasn’t helped achievement standards in Sweden. Devil/demon/gremlin/poltergeist is in the details.
Anne Laurie
Sweet suffering Finley Peter Dunne! Having tried to reinstate the McKinley Era — and seen just how farcical a FAIL that attempt produced — our glibertarian neighbors are now reinventing the Goo-goos!
First time a tragedy, second a farce… nah, the Goo-goos were always pretty much a farce.
Ecks
@Maude: Huh??? You are suggesting that Swedes don’t have freedom of speech??? Singapore is the only one anybody is talking about here where pretty much all reasonable speech is not protected (i.e., protesting the government’s policies is reasonable speech, extortion is not).
I guess could make a case that in Europe you can get put in jail for denying the holocaust and promoting Nazism, but if that is the bright line you are using to separate “free” from “not”, you have to realize you’re making a pretty contentious statement (not indefensible, but contentious).
Further to other people’s point, I would like to add Canada to the list of extremely non ethnically-homogeneous countries. About 20% of the population is foreign born, and it’s been that way for nearly a hundred years. Of course, in the old days “foreign” was mostly Europe, but for the past few decades, it is from literally all over the world.
brantl
“Those top three also have strong, interventionalist governments. They have levels of government control which would freak out Republicans. ”
Barry, E.D. Kaine has made a profession of missing this. He keeps saying that places “that have a free market do wonderfully”, but his stats always point out that strongly-controlled and regulated markets do better. And yet he keeps insisting on “free markets” being great, using examples of places that they really don’t exist.
RobW
Oh yeah, “homogeneity.” Kain and Bailey seem to think this is a significant factor.
Y’all have never been to Singapore, have you?
Skippy-san
I’ll echo RobW’s comment above-except to point out that Singapore is homogenius on one point-only the Chinese matter.
Every one else moves to the back of the bus. Including Europeans. And I hate to burst anyone’s bubble-that includes Americans are far as they are concerned.
American or European, they are all stinking Gweilos.
Nathanael
@Anne Laurie (#70): The fact is that most of the glibertarians — and most Republicans and most right-wingers, period — are *still* trying to recreate the McKinley era. Bush was as close to McKinley as we’ve had in 100 years, and they flock after anyone who’s as hypocritical, lying, self-dealing, and corrupt as McKinley.
It’s an improvement to have someone start saying that goo-goos are a good idea. We got some good stuff out of goo-goos (civil service, anyone?). Scott Sumner wouldn’t recognize good government if it bit him, but at least he’s awakened to the concept….