It's /really/ hard to manage the world's largest GDP effectively. Governmental gridlock tends towards the status quo and institutional inertia is huge. This is Vernon Vinge's 'to scale, you need complexity, but complexity inevitably leads to collapse' theories in action.
It's /really/ hard to manage the world's largest GDP effectively.
If any country can do it, it's the US. The universities attract the smartest students from all over the world, and have the best faculty in the world by a large margin. The government simply needs to figure out how to harness all the brainpower to solve real-world problems.
But you're assuming that all the smartest students in the world go to work for the government. They never do- salaries would have to go up a ton before that happens. And tax payers would never allow that.
For about every aspect of the US federal government, you're right: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/us-government-blows-20000...
It's /really/ hard to manage the world's largest GDP effectively. Governmental gridlock tends towards the status quo and institutional inertia is huge. This is Vernon Vinge's 'to scale, you need complexity, but complexity inevitably leads to collapse' theories in action.