[mercer]

As a programmer / software engineer, I've found that I often look for equivalency with policy and whatnot, because it seems like there are lots of similarities.

The impression that I get from my country (The Netherlands) is that we are doing a bit better than the UK for reasons that nobody quite understands yet. The best I can guess is that we ultimately make 'bigger' choices comparatively, even though compared to many other EU countries we're not doing particularly well despite being one of the richer ones.

The way I see it, our country is run by technocrats who are faced with something very different and new. Like with projects I've worked on as a programmer, the best solution often involved going way off course. And like with projects I've worked on, this usually didn't happen.

Solutions were conservative, even if something more drastic seemed prudent to almost everyone involved. It's really fucking hard to rewrite some of the core code. So instead we address things further away from that core with all sorts of special cases.

If anything, the pandemic has shown that our current way of doing things isn't quite equipped to deal with big upsets, and considering the future this is something we should probably prioritize dealing with somehow.