[FRIAM] What would be the goals of a large state?

[David Eric Smith]

There’s an article in Foreign Affairs that discusses this question from a perspective that mirrors very many dimensions of what I have come to think is right over the years:
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-10-02/capitalism-after-covid-19-pandemic <https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-10-02/capitalism-after-covid-19-pandemic>
Shame if there weren’t anybody to whom I could forward it.  

To talk about big or little state as an abstraction seems to lead to unhelpful conversation.  But an operational study of what jobs need doing, who can do them, and how they are being done wrongly now, grounds that discussion much better. 

I am struck that she uses several after-the-fact evaluations of what would be good to do, which I think reflect a quite distributed effort by investigative journalists, academics, lawyers and agencies.  To have made those decisions correctly on the input end looks very knowledge-intensive.  But it is knowledge of a kind we actually have, and this list likes to envision using.  The limiting factor really has been coordination among the many sectors that would need to interact to support really good decision-making by a state.  Envisioning what that might look like, and how it could be built, sounds worth-while.

Eric


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