Sir, I am still curious: How the archived stories that get dredged up and e-mailed to us get chosen? Sometimes, they seem pretty random. This one seems pretty random. Other times, they seem far more chosen. Like the series on Tiebout-related posts that were dredged up in adjacent days. I am really curious about your "algorithm". Or am I just seeing patterns where there are none?
“First, a high capacity state must be able to enforce its rules across the entirety of the territory it claims to rule (legal capacity).” This is a useless notion, because the ability of a government to enforce a rule varies so much with the rule. A rule against theft or assault will be relatively easy to enforce, because the people will view it as a good rule. A rule against selling some product without a license or without paying a tax will be harder to enforce. There is no *general* “ability to enforce.”
Well, yes and no, but the no version makes your argument stronger :)
You are perfectly correct that good laws that people agree with, the kind of thing that you call the police when you observe it, are rather easy to enforce and require little capacity. They also tend to line up with what "good governance" looks like.
Bad laws that are difficult to enforce can be an indicator of high state capacity if they are in fact enforced. If a state managed to forcibly collectivize all the farms in the country against the will of the farmers that would be an amazing flex of state capacity. It would also be awful governance.
Which is another problem with the state capacity story, it assumes that states want to do good things and the only question is whether or not they can manage to do it. The possibility that the state might have the capacity to force stupid or evil policies on the people never seems to enter the discussion.
And, by starting from an organizational lens the question of how much of the variation in capability is due to generic "country" level factors (like history or culture and legal system) and how much is task or organization or design features is open. I wrote about a paper about India as a "flailing state" that emphasized that India did and does some amazing things, like hold pretty free and fair elections in a huge, poor and uneducated country, has never had an episode of high inflation etc. but at the same time is a dismal failure at other things, like publicly provided schooling or health facilities. That said, general indicators of "state capability" do have empirical traction in explaining outcomes on wellbeing, even conditional on GDP per capita and being a "democracy" (again which is not saying a vague notion of "state capacity" as some country specific, independent causal explanatory factor makes any sense).
I have worked quite a bit on "state capability" and I take a very different approach. My approach is that policy is a mapping from facts about the world to authorized actions by an agent of the state who works for an organization. An organization's capability is the extent to which the agents of the organization take the fact contingent actions consistent with advancing the organizations stated public purpose(s). Some police forces are just organizers of crime, some are ineffective, some are tolerably effective. Same with armed forces, education systems (schools), public health facilities, environmental regulators, etc. This is not vague or circular. And it is mostly consistent with your thinking as (a) we as economists should have a workable positive theory about what government organizations actually will do, contingent on policy and (b) generally people are overly optimistic about state capability (or just assume it will be there) and task governments with doing things on the assumptions they will be efficacious (even if not efficient) and (c) people often encourage the adoption of policies that will actually undermine organizational capability by being too ambitious (e.g. like sending a weak army into a war they cannot win, you both lose the army and the war). I had never heard of these guys you criticize so you are probably right about them, but the general idea that government organizations can be better or worse at accomplishing public purposes is neither circular nor trivial.
Sir, I am still curious: How the archived stories that get dredged up and e-mailed to us get chosen? Sometimes, they seem pretty random. This one seems pretty random. Other times, they seem far more chosen. Like the series on Tiebout-related posts that were dredged up in adjacent days. I am really curious about your "algorithm". Or am I just seeing patterns where there are none?
“First, a high capacity state must be able to enforce its rules across the entirety of the territory it claims to rule (legal capacity).” This is a useless notion, because the ability of a government to enforce a rule varies so much with the rule. A rule against theft or assault will be relatively easy to enforce, because the people will view it as a good rule. A rule against selling some product without a license or without paying a tax will be harder to enforce. There is no *general* “ability to enforce.”
Well, yes and no, but the no version makes your argument stronger :)
You are perfectly correct that good laws that people agree with, the kind of thing that you call the police when you observe it, are rather easy to enforce and require little capacity. They also tend to line up with what "good governance" looks like.
Bad laws that are difficult to enforce can be an indicator of high state capacity if they are in fact enforced. If a state managed to forcibly collectivize all the farms in the country against the will of the farmers that would be an amazing flex of state capacity. It would also be awful governance.
Which is another problem with the state capacity story, it assumes that states want to do good things and the only question is whether or not they can manage to do it. The possibility that the state might have the capacity to force stupid or evil policies on the people never seems to enter the discussion.
And, by starting from an organizational lens the question of how much of the variation in capability is due to generic "country" level factors (like history or culture and legal system) and how much is task or organization or design features is open. I wrote about a paper about India as a "flailing state" that emphasized that India did and does some amazing things, like hold pretty free and fair elections in a huge, poor and uneducated country, has never had an episode of high inflation etc. but at the same time is a dismal failure at other things, like publicly provided schooling or health facilities. That said, general indicators of "state capability" do have empirical traction in explaining outcomes on wellbeing, even conditional on GDP per capita and being a "democracy" (again which is not saying a vague notion of "state capacity" as some country specific, independent causal explanatory factor makes any sense).
I have worked quite a bit on "state capability" and I take a very different approach. My approach is that policy is a mapping from facts about the world to authorized actions by an agent of the state who works for an organization. An organization's capability is the extent to which the agents of the organization take the fact contingent actions consistent with advancing the organizations stated public purpose(s). Some police forces are just organizers of crime, some are ineffective, some are tolerably effective. Same with armed forces, education systems (schools), public health facilities, environmental regulators, etc. This is not vague or circular. And it is mostly consistent with your thinking as (a) we as economists should have a workable positive theory about what government organizations actually will do, contingent on policy and (b) generally people are overly optimistic about state capability (or just assume it will be there) and task governments with doing things on the assumptions they will be efficacious (even if not efficient) and (c) people often encourage the adoption of policies that will actually undermine organizational capability by being too ambitious (e.g. like sending a weak army into a war they cannot win, you both lose the army and the war). I had never heard of these guys you criticize so you are probably right about them, but the general idea that government organizations can be better or worse at accomplishing public purposes is neither circular nor trivial.
Maybe clarify that it is social capacity for cooperation.