Good Yglesias has a nice rundown of how the government does a poor job accumulating and managing data. We live in a world where data is everywhere and levers great power in our economy. Yet we don't know how many people are murdered every year, not precisely. We have no real idea how many vaccines have been given.
I've argued that a central focus of the Biden Administration has to be government capacity. We need to hire good people to do good work. The Reagan Regression created a slow war of attrition on governmental competency. While the argument "government is incompetent" is largely false, it could certainly be MORE competent.
The CDC that Yglesias begins with is a great example. For various reasons, the CDC has been stripped of capacity over time. That - combined with a certain hesitancy to get ahead of the evidence - is why we have had such mind-boggling confusion over masks in the spring of 2020. That confusion is the wedge for the conspiratorial to infect the discourse with a series of whataboutism and false equivalencies.
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