I am a bit aghast that the author does not mention the American robber barons who are intentionally trying to tear down government so they can pay fewer taxes and get to pass their wealth down to their children tax-free. It’s not “the West” that can’t do anything, it’s that we have whole organizations devoted to stopping any progress.

I hate when people complain about government inefficiency or incompetence when the government is being opposed and sabotaged. My county’s DMV has been nothing but a pleasure to work with. When a government system in the west is failing it’s because it’s probably underfunded or weaponized (such as punishing unemployment insurance rules).

With the abysmal reputation of DMVs, even if that were the primary business of government, people would still have a case for reforming government from the ground up.

I think it's ironic that you complain about robber barons preventing the modern equivalent to libraries when Andrew Carnegie built 2000 public libraries in the US alone.

You’re proving OPs point… they aren’t doing this anymore.

>Think about libraries as a concept – the government builds a huge building, buys loads of books from many different authors and allows everyone to just go there and read the books for free or some small fee.

False premise: Most librairies in the United States were funded and built by private philanthropy. See: Carnegie Library

>"Sometimes you can even take the books to your home!"– Now imagine libraries didn’t exist and some politician came around proposing we create libraries exactly as they are. What would you expect to happen? I can tell you what I would expect to happen: Nothing at all: What about the authors and publishers? What about the bookstores! People will just steal and/or destroy the books! People don’t even read anymore! I am quite confident they would never get built in any major western democracy today.

If it's difficult to build libraries today, political will is not a limiting factor. Rather, technology has slowly but surely rendered the storage of dead trees as obsolete in all but a few circumstances (i.e. archival analysis) Just as we stopped using street cars when buses and cars proved to be more maneuverable and efficient, one shouldn't advocate a reinvention of the 19th century library simply because it delivered a unique benefit once upon a time.

Feels like you are missing the point a bit. The author's point could be about libraries, National Parks, infrastructure like bridges, etc. Many things seem locked in place because of only short term thinking and an unwillingness for short term pain to accomplish long term greater good.

Also Carnegie built the libraries under the provision that local governments would sponsor them going forward. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_library Furthermore today libraries have started to adapt by loaning digitally.

I was going to argue street cars were victims of GM but apparently you are mostly right. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_con... and https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c87l40/i_hav...

If we find libraries today, with best effort they’ll be built in 4x longer than initially planned and 10x the original budget. After it launches, it would be overrun by inefficiencies to the point of extreme dysfunction.

See DMV.

>Just as we stopped using street cars when buses and cars proved to be more maneuverable and efficient

Ehh... Cars are something like an order of magnitude less efficient than street cars.

Street cars are definitely more efficient than buses, unless the buses are also electrified.

Libraries are book focused but that is hardly all they do. They are much closer to community centers nowadays, what they provide is closer to; an internet cafe, movie rental store, concert and movie venue, local meeting rooms, 3D printers and a lot I'm sure I've not thought about.

they do too much to be innovated away, perhaps the book part could be but they do digital borrowing too so it's unlikely. Libraries only go away if we lose sight of how much they impact our community and are no longer willing to pay for them as a society.

> Just as we stopped using street cars when buses and cars proved to be more maneuverable and efficient

I think we "stopped" using street cars because cars became more affordable and made less expensive housing around the edge of cities (suburbs) possible. I've lived in a city which never got rid of streetcars, and has a good transit system; and many cities are bringing back such systems.

> because it delivered a unique benefit once upon a time

Do modern libraries not deliver benefits still? Or are you arguing that the benefit of lending paper books is in the past? I think that most libraries are adapting to their users, and have taken on new (digital) pieces in their collections -- but I do think there are still a great need for ordinary paper books for a lot of users.

> Rather, technology has slowly but surely rendered the storage of dead trees as obsolete in all but a few circumstances.

It is my understanding that libraries serve as much more than storage places, but as community hubs. For example for many people the library is the primary place to use computers and access the internet.

It is also that the public is rather happy with the status quo. Working against public opinion is not something that happens easily in democracy. It takes generations to change opinions.

The author says:

>"The status quo provides marginal individual benefit to the person making the decision while also causing marginal harm to society as a whole. Doing the right thing doesn’t really provide much tangible short term benefit."

This explains exactly why the majority of people living in a dictatorship don't try very hard to do all the things that they need to do if they want to change their own government.

They need to do things like finding out what is the truth about their government, and telling other people what that truth is. But doing that requires individual self-sacrifice, and most people, most of the time, don't what to do that.

A commentary about the shortcomings of western civilization from someone that doesn't understand what makes our civilization a success.

All the other civilizations have large powerful governments that intervene in their society. The West's strength comes from the fact that governments are generally restrained, slow, and more power and freedom is given to individuals. Governments are supposed to not be able to get anything done.

The author frames this from the perspective of a government official making a choice, but I think the useful observation here applies to anybody making a choice - that in periods of stability, the weight of the status quo is an impediment to development when the summed benefit of development is great, but the individual benefit is small, we choose the safe default option over the riskier option that might more honestly reflect our desires. Therefore times of (and after) chaos and catastrophe, are periods of rapid development, because the dead weight of the status quo is diminished. This seems a reasonable thing to say, and seems even more appropriate is you're mechanisms for development are decentralised.

The internet, GPS, nuclear energy, novel vaccines, the interstate system, space flight, the Panama Canal, electrification of Appalachia, 99% adult literacy. Yup glad we didn’t need government action to get these done

Most of the highlights of Western Civ have been a result of collective action. If anything the libertarian mythos that was synthesized in the late 70s is our greatest weakness.

To some extent, this is by design. The inaction of liberal western democracies is because it is ambiguous as it what should be done. Yes, this leads to stagnation, but also minimizes massive mistakes. When it becomes clear what needs to be done western democracies can spring into action, such as with, as the author pointed out, the pandemic.

Look at Russia - The government, but more specifically Putin, just set the country back 20-30 years with one bad decision. China is on a hot streak, but the same could happen to them. What happens when Xi looses his mind? Or dies? Or when the economy takes a prolonged downturn?

Democracies win over the long term because they bet small and lose small.

Libraries aren’t being built because, A. We already have a lot of them in the west, and B. Typically they begin as part of a major philanthropic gift but right now our philanthropist class is focused on eradicating diseases and going to space.

this is overly reductive. the post didnt ask why we aren't building more libraries, it's asking whether we would build them today if they didn't exist.

just like it's not ambiguous that libraries are a net positive, it's not ambiguous whether we need more housing and infrastructure. it's not ambiguous that we should deal with climate change. the inaction is not because of ambiguity, it's because we are unwilling to make short-term sacrifices. it's because there is no shared belief in a greater good.

these are the kinds of decisions that were, for whatever reason, more easily made in the past than now. Look at the New Deal.

I don’t think the ambiguity is what the challenges are, but how to solve the problems. And yes, we are unwilling to make sacrifices until the effects are already being strongly felt. This is not a good thing, just a reality of democracy not in chaos.

Climate change is a good one. The threat is real. It is at the door, but unfortunately democracies and capitalism will not really react until it is kicking the door down.

Europe avoided the Hitler problem until they invaded. US avoided Hitler and Japan until Pearl Harbor.

I am agreeing with the author. Democracies need to be stoked into action. Other forms of government are more likely to act quickly, but perhaps rashly. That is my point.

Getting involved in a war, trade war, or campaign of human rights abuse is a completely separate category from, say, spending 100 billion on some project.

You might upset the economy a bit. Maybe someone will call you an idiot. But at any rate you made some jobs and nobody died. Nobody is going to demand sanctions unless someone is being badly abused.

We did not spring into action with the pandemic. The only thing we did was make the vaccine, and we can't even keep up with the variants with that.

If we really "Sprang into action" we would have small thermal cameras in our phones by now that would warn us of fevers.

We would have grates in the floor making a constant downward airflow, and vents blowing HEPA air in the ceiling in major public spaces.

Cashiers would have barriers and small filters making walls of clean air indefinitely, not just "Till the worst of the pandemic is over" It would be such a big industry they'd have advertising projections on the acrylic.

Busses would have the same thing.

We would have "Trying to get your employees to work sick" become a 10 year sentence kind of felony.

We'd have subsidized masks that actually do something, with battery powered fans.

We don't do these things because we accept infectious disease as part of life, and there's basically no interest in actually stopping it with any kind of sustainable long term technical evolution like we did with sanitary sewers.

It seems the current system is considered good enough.

It seems fairly unreasonable to suggest that it was a mistake to not or that it would be reasonable to have retrofitted all public buildings to have underfloor (sometimes underground) HVAC ducting added. Think about the typical large slab-on-grade grocery store, Target, Home Depot, Walmart, etc., which is the majority of the places I’ve had to go in the last two years.

Given where we are with COVID, that seems like it would have been a massively wasteful over-reaction.

> Think about the typical large slab-on-grade grocery store

You can raise the floor, just like you can drop the ceiling.

> that seems like it would have been a massively wasteful over-reaction

At least this person has some creative ideas for saving lives and actually evolving our society, so that we don't lose a million people to the next airborne virus, which I have little reason to believe won't happen next time.

Could we have built raised floors in all the grocery stores and big box stores while simultaneously serving the needs of a country in pandemic in two years?

That seems beyond optimistic.

We're not talking about perpetual motion engines.

I think you've demonstrated the above commenter's point that

> there's basically no interest in actually stopping it with any kind of sustainable long term technical evolution

I for one am not looking forward to the next killer airborne virus.

Gotta admit I read this one expecting to find some extremely libertarian critique of libraries per se, something about how "intellectual property" is being violated, etc etc etc.

Instead, I found all the talking points to refute such extremist critiques, and a thoughtful expansion to problems afflicting western liberal democracies. Good read, very thoughtful.

In this day and age (at least in my country, a Western Democracy) libraries are not being built, rather closed, or converted to some other uses. And the majority of the vast inventories of books that was once the property of said libraries to keep for posterity's sake has literally been burned, as regulations forbade any kind of recirculation, donation, or sale.

Really? I know this is a US article -- but in Canada as a kid my library used to sell "old books" that were too worn to keep in circulation for a nominal fee. Often sold garage sale style once a year. You could get a $10 book for $0.25 or something. As a kid I'd always make a list of books I read and wanted and wait each year to see if I could find some of them there.

Have you been tempted to speed up the "worn out"-factor a bit? It's (was) same here in germany, and I thought of doing so as a kid, but then didn't because books shall be treated well :)

Haha, I don't think I was that enterprising yet at that age -- but I did "forget" to return one or two I was fond of.

Hands off the libraries, pal. If you need a straw-they for your 'thought exercise', go ahead and use 'sports stadiums', I don't care then. Of course 'the west' IS still building lots of stadiums. [https://buffalonews.com/sports/bills/the-10-newest-stadiums-... ] Panem et circenses. (Dick was right.)

Did you read the article? If anything, the author is arguing in favor of libraries. I may be misinterpreting your comment, though.

Libraries were just an example of why the author thinks the West can't build anything anymore. I think we can, and I think we will be rebuilding a lot soon as a demonstration of that.