[majormajor]

Yes, he asks if we would say government is working better now than 60 years ago, and given (just for starters) the huge difference in opportunities available for women and minorities, I'm not seeing why I shouldn't say that.

The whole thing rests on a premise that, in some vague and mostly-unspecified way, "things used to be better," or at least "people used to think things were better." But this doesn't seem backed up by anything. And on the contrary, one of the more interesting things I learned in one of my history electives in college was that people have been cynical about their leaders for a long, long time, including at the very start of the US.

Personally, my hunch is that we simply have quicker/more effective means of disseminating information about corruption now.

[ericd]

There are a many, many more axes for government performance than just equality of opportunity for people under it, though. Simply comparing the reaction of the government to the recent financial crisis to the past reactions makes it easy to see that something has been lost. In previous financial crises, significant regulations were brought to bear to patch the bugs. This time, despite some extremely significant structural problems that are easy to identify (complete regulatory capture of the ratings agencies and the SEC, for example), relatively little has been done.

[majormajor]

I agree that more should be done with regard to the financial crisis and corruption, but I'm also very skeptical of comparisons made in the middle of it, trying to answer the question of "how did the government perform during it" before the final outcome is known. I realize that that's an unsatisfactory answer in many ways, but government often moves slowly and I'm not sure that's a bad thing—i.e., I don't want the outcome of this whole mess to be the TSA of the financial industry.

[Spooky23]

I'd argue that government is more pervasively corrupt today because it pretends to be clean. We aggressively try to stamp out "transactional" corruption, but pretend that systemic corruption doesn't exist.

In 1960, a salesman would give a government buyer a bottle of whisky for Christmas. That's a serious crime these days. But today, we eliminated to a large extent the "upfront" influence and instead launder it through "lobbying" firms. A $30 bottle is a crime, $30,000,000 of advertising through a PAC is ok.

[crusso]

What you describe is the unintended consequence of thinking that we can legislate ethics by continuing to pile on detailed proscriptions or requirements within our laws.

As the number and detail of laws has increased, the fragility of the system has decreased. It's like software, the more special-case tightly-coupled components you have; the less robust the system.

Our laws could use a good refactoring.

[anamax]

> Personally, my hunch is that we simply have quicker/more effective means of disseminating information about corruption now.

Corruption matters more now.

When govt is only 3% of GDP and has little regulatory power, corruption can't affect much.