Oppenheimer and state capacity
They couldn't make the Manhattan project in today's America, but they could make a movie about it.
A view of American culture: Like most modern countries, its modern identity crystallized in the aftermath of World War 2. This was right when the America hit its peak state capacity - Big things like winning the war, the Manhattan Project, the Apollo project, but also lesser-known things like developing titanium. Even some uglier things, like the FBI harassing random communist sympathizers and japanese internment, required the kind of state capacity that would be impossible today. It was when the phrase “good enough for government work” got its original, non-ironic meaning of “excellent work”. And since this era created modern american culture, we developed expectations that this was what the government should be capable of.
And then the generation passed, and America reverted to its historic status of relatively low state capacity. But unfortunately we kept the expectations of high state capacity. Which created a lot of unfortunate mismatches. Some examples:
Anarcho-tyranny: At the extreme, the concept is a government that has a lot of laws and regulations that don’t get enforced1, so you both make life hard for law-abiding people while not really preventing crime or disorder. This gets caused by a mismatch between expectations and reality of state capacity: You expect that laws will be well-thought out and enforced, so you try to solve problems by passing laws, which are then poorly-thought out (meaning they have more costs for honest people) and unenforced (so they don’t prevent actual crime). America isn’t at the negative extreme of this, but it has issues with it (for example, legal gun ownership in major cities but illegal guns are common)
Infrastructure: It’s well-documented that America has the highest infrastructure costs in the world by an order of magnitude (famously for public transit projects, but this is just as true for things like highways and sewers). Focusing on transit, it’s noteworthy that the modern US has no profitable private transit projects (except for escooter rentals, in cities that haven’t banned them): In that it follows the traditional european model of centralized transit agencies run by politicians and subsidized by tax money instead of the model seen in some places in East Asia, where transit is more reliant on fares (and real estate revenues)2. The European model makes more sense for european countries that have had high state capacity for centuries. It makes less sense for the US, which briefly had high state capacity for a single generation around WW2 and promptly lost it again in the late sixties3.
Planning: The 1935 - 1965 era was roughly when America got its modern city planning era, which can be roughly summed up as “you need explicit discretionary permits to build anything anywhere ever”. This probably seems like a reasonable idea if you think planners are competent and have reasonable turnaround time. It stopped being a feasible idea once that stopped. Immigration has similar issues - America got its modern restrictive immigration policy at around the same time, which makes sense if you assume comppetent immigration officials and policymakers, but stops making sense once it takes years to decades to decide every immigration case4.
Without getting into specific causes of this decline in capacity, Oppenheimer does a good job of showing the symptoms: During the war, the government cares about results above all: Both in small things (they just go ahead and build Los Alamos in a month), and big things (They’re willing to compromise their ideals so far as to hire immigrants and communist sympathizers to work on their top-secret military project because they need to get the top physicists on it). And because they genuinely care about results, they put the personally-difficult Oppenheimer in charge of it, because they’re convinced that he’s the most competent person to run it, and because they actually care about the results.
Then later, Oppenheimer loses his security clearance. And sure, part of that is interpersonal issues and the red scare getting scarier, but a lot of that is just that his actual competence doesn’t matter anymore. The most important thing about the hearing isn’t the interpersonal drama that matters in it; it’s the fact that no one ever says “yes, but we need the best physicists we can get on the AEC, because it’s important for it to work well”.
Finally, IT’s worth comparing to today: The Manhattan Project’s 2.2 billion dollar budget is about 47 billion dollars in today’s money, almost exactly the $50 billion of Biden’s CHIPS act. But while the Manhattan project created the nuclear age, the CHIPS act is expected to get almost no actual results, because the people implementing it don’t care about results enough to compromise their ideology. Compare “you’re a communist sympathizer and you’re a bunch of Jewish Hungarian immigrants, but we need you, welcome aboard” with the CHIPS act requiring everything from childcare subsidies to mandating minority contractors".
The actual extreme of this is Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch. “It wasn't that the city was lawless. It had plenty of laws. It just didn't offer many opportunities not to break them.”
This is one reason I’m so optimistic about Brightline.
This makes me wonder if post-napoleon France had similar issues. If Napoleon suddenly increased government competence and then the new government suddenly lost it after Waterloo, did France experience sudden decline? Or was the industrial revolution changing so much anyway that ti didn’t matter much? How much did his reforms stick around after he was personally out of power?
One example of how absurd this gets: A Green Card application filed during flu season requires you to have flu shots as part of your vaccination record. The application then takes about two years to process, by which time multiple flu seasons after the current one will already be over. Again, this makes sense if you assume paperwork is processed in reasonable time and becomes ridiculous once it doesn’t.