The breakdown of trust and the resulting inefficiency that exist in US systems aren't happening everywhere.
Again, it's true that the US has fallen farther (consider the federal coordination of industry in WWII and compare to the disaster today). But no one is doing "well" here.
[1] I despise that I have to euphemize that here on HN, but those seem to be the rules the community enforces.
Germany is apparently doing 500k tests a week, not that shabby especially if they keep increasing that number.
It's not "decay". Call it like it is -- it's deliberate and directed erosion, backed by propaganda.
And this feeling that actions that were once unremarkable now seem impossible.
By the way Neil Ferguson is a mathematical biologist at Imperial College, London who was instrumental in getting the UK government to change directions.
Niall Ferguson (also from the UK though currently at Harvard) is a historian. He is an excellent and insightful observer (especially his earlier work) but like you I often find he ends up drawing the wrong conclusions.
I think the West's democratic model of loosely fitting parts (yes, even in a country like France) permits greater resilience against various threats....but permits is not the same as guarantees!
The other thread of the creeping problems in the West - that it is growth of government rather than decay of government - has some evidence to show here.
Institutional IQ isn't the issue. The DHS was never clever and the FBI has been a corrupt mess for a long time. See also J. Edgar Hoover and imagine him as a current president.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ho...
Here in Aotearoa things are not going too badly. The state institutions seem to have functioned well and people cooperating.
I fear it is a fluke, but whatever, I'd rather be good, but I will take lucky.
Are there other noteworthy measures taken by your government that explain the success?
Lack of institutional IQ/leadership manifests in myriad of ways, such as the dismantling of California's emergency medical supply reserve in 2011 [0], defunding of organizations that address the current risks [1], and so on.
Addressing potential systemic risks through domestic production is only one potential way that leadership can handle them. Creating reserves and funding preparedness are some of the other ways to handle such risks.
[0] https://revealnews.org/article/california-created-a-massive-... [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0...
During normal times, the US may use several million masks per week. During epidemics, we may need more than 2 billion masks per week (1 per citizen per day).
We can't financially maintain 1000x production capacity for every potential emergency item. Businesses get screwed when they try to provide surplus capacity for our nation that it doesn't need the other 99% of the time: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2020/04/03/if-you-i... Even if we could it would be cost wasteful vs. stockpiles.
People talk about bringing all the production home, but that may be like getting rid of all your off-site backups and doing all backups onsite. It concentrates risk. What if there's a fire/pandemic/regional event that makes it so you need the emergency supplies, but also knocks out your plants that produce those emergency supplies? At least with some plants here, some plants there...if one country gets sick before the other, the currently-not-sick country can provide some supplies to the now-sick country, and vice versa when the pandemic ends in that place and moves to the other.
We probably need at least a 90 day supply of this stuff for the next pandemic. For n95 masks, I guess that's potentially 350 million * 90 days = 31 billion N95 masks. If they expire in 5 years, then we only need to manufacture 500 million per month to keep them up-to-date, and can pay maintainers to keep the supply rotating. We don't have to throw out soon-to-expire masks, we can sell them from the back of the stockpile at a small discount to end-users who need them regularly, like normal hospital or industrial use.
> building out the production capacity to actually be able to make PPE in sufficient quantities
as you put it, would require us to be able to make 10 billion masks per month (350 million * 30days), instead of just half a billion per month. Thats way more expensive. And those plants would sit idle for decades - who knows if they'd even turn on again? A rotating stockpile can be sold to hospitals for regular use, so we could constantly validate that the goods are good.
Also, if countries bring their production home with some surge capacity, then this actually gives really great redundancy compared to the status quo because all the countries which do this end up with production capacity that can be used to sell supplies to other countries in the case of some regional crisis there. It's much better than centralizing it in the lowest-cost country as often happens now.
Taiwan had a huge stockpile, and that let them increase their production from 100,000 N95 masks per day to 20 million per day while drawing down the stockpile. Asia has had success building these factories in ~14 days from pouring cement to startup, USA might need a bit more time of course.
This is exactly the way the Czech Republic is going, with several companies now churning out such masks and the government being the bigger buyer. Stockpiling billions of expiration-sensitive disposable masks is more expensive, compared to pre-distributing one reusable mask to every citizen.
And what, precisely, are the "essential social institutes" to which you refer?
I hope this would finally be a rude awakening moment for countries in the West. The decay of essential social institutes in the West has reached the point when issues begin to snowball uncontrollably.
I don't like many points of that guy called Neil Fergusson makes, but he is 100% on the spot pointing that the West is loosing the "institutional IQ" after 20 to 30 years of "ultrapopulism" in government.
Just look at the level of organisation being exhibited now, and how emergency response was handled few decades ago. Quarantines were not so unheard of in the West even for things like bad flu outbreaks in the 20th century, but, nowadays, some countries can't quarantine even a single city.