[luckylion]

> Despite, of course, almost everything working almost all of the time. And, of course, of almost everyone involved acting in good faith.

That depends on the definition of "working", I think. I don't doubt the good faith of those involved, but "some form of train service between two locations" is a very low hurdle for "working" if that train is late, slower then advertised, only half the size it was announced to be, or running it costs three times as much as trains elsewhere. If you consider quality and price, not just binary functionality, "working" becomes a lot fuzzier.

It's hard to compare public services and government actions because we don't have competing government in the same locations, but "something happens" isn't necessarily "everything working almost all of the time".

[mjburgess]

The trains run. Given human history, and every other undeveloped country, this is working.

It is incredibly difficult for a society to function as smoothly as any western country does. It is miraculous to people in many nations that there can be such things as timetables at all.

[luckylion]

> The trains run. Given human history, and every other undeveloped country, this is working.

Sure, and in the context of any single country it might not be working. Is a train running at 3mph "working" because there were no trains on earth during all those years of human history before the invention of trains? I don't think that's a useful definition of "working".

I do absolutely agree that advanced societies are miraculous, though I wouldn't call them functioning smoothly (there's a lot of overhead). Still, there's plenty of things that aren't working at all or aren't working as well as they should (a thousand dollar burger should taste crazy delicious), and government (or more general: a large bureaucracy, of which government is the largest) is often involved.

[mjburgess]

your definition of "work" is a moral/aesethic one, rather than a functional one

there is no sense in which a $1k dollar burger weighs on whether a society is functioning

your moral distaste at the marginal value of $1k to different people, doesnt strike me, as very relevant to the issue

indeed, that, people have different marginal values for $1k is precisely a symptom of how profoundly well rich societies function

[luckylion]

> your definition of "work" is a moral/aesethic one, rather than a functional one

Do you think that a power plant that produces energy at $10000/kwh "works" next to one that produces energy at $0.1/kwh?

I don't see "works" as a binary, I consider it relative to expectations and possibilities. I hoped the burger example would illustrate that, but maybe it was too close to reality since it probably exists.

Let me try another way: it's great to have clean water, but if you spend all X on providing clean water while others create the same with X/1000, whatever you're doing to produce clean water is not working. But of course it "working" as in "okay, there's clean water", but it's not working in a societal sense, we cannot sustain doing that, we must look for another option.

[mjburgess]

Sure, I misread your point. Such burgers do exist, and I thought you were talking about those.

For sure, efficiency is part of "working". I guess my baseline for "working" is a far lower level of efficiency than yours.

Yours is certainly contextually-relevant to our society (ie., we should always hope for better efficiency). But I think when taking a step back to answer the binary question "does government work?" our baseline has to be against governments which dont (rather than some minor local inefficiency).

Governments which don't work produce civil wars, mafias, mob patronage structures, impoverished citizens, etc.

It is those governments we shouldn't trust, rather than a somewhat incompetent western bureaucracy which should mostly get the benefit of the doubt towards "working".