What did governments get right? Gotta list them all!

We operate in an environment of government basically functioning to such a degree that we don't notice it. Why is news about government dominated by government breaking? The nature of the role of government is usually to prevent bad things. So, when it does extra-well, no one can tell. If we note these actions, what do we get? Focusing on what has affected me personally:

Police can probably take some credit for the following:

• I have gone 3369 days since I was last robbed; my family has not been robbed.
• I have gone 7960 days since I was last assaulted; my family has not been assaulted.

• The police and fire departments assist the (non-governmental) rescue squad
• Though annoying when it must be done, the roads and rails around me are maintained. (I do not count utility work since that is not controlled by the government here)
• My daughter is receiving an acceptably good level of education
• There are nice parks available to us
• A nearby fire did not grow and consume our house
• The sciences are supported
• Something I left on the train was kept and I was able to recover it.

Of course, it could do better. In some cases, a lot better. But you were asking about the positive.

I'm the first person to explicitly call out public sanitation? Wow, ok.

Wherever humans gather together, big piles of human shit will inevitably follow. Cities are great, but if you want to live in one you have to solve the feces management problem. The traditional solution, rediscovered in widely disparate times and places throughout human history, is to poop in a pot and dump it in the river. You can get farther with that strategy than you'd probably think, but sooner or later everyone starts getting cholera and you have to switch paradigms.

The exact solution depends on the available technology; I happen to think ours (ubiquitous yet unobtrusive pipes which converge on chemical treatment plants) is especially nice. But somebody needs to build the aqueducts or lay the pipes or whatever, and then force absolutely everybody to use them (because recall that our goal is not the convenient flush toilet, it's to eradicate cholera).

And so we have. Probably every sidewalk you've ever walked on had a sewage pipe underneath it. In fact, it's likely that you're less than 100 feet from human feces at this very second, but you don't have to care because an infrastructure of staggering complexity and robustness exists to handle it for you. And if it breaks down, you can call a person who's made it their life's work to solve this sort of problem. Those things exist because we as a society now believe, with the kind of religious fanaticism that would make L. Ron Hubbard explode with envy, that shitting in the river is for animals. And we believe that because our ancestors created that world ex nihilo, their children grew up in it, and their grandchildren knew nothing else. Sometimes you can get that kind of paradigm shift out of private industry--just look at the automobile. But sometimes you don't.

More concretely, the leaded gasoline thing was pretty good.

In general, I think the purpose of government is to solve collective action problems. It'll succeed at insofar as 1) everyone agrees that that it's an actual problem, and 2) the solution is well-understood. To get #1 you have to build your government out of people whose understanding of reality is fairly well-aligned (the way everyone understands that it's bad for the tribe downstream to get cholera, for example). #2 does not generalize as well.

Less formally, one might say that government is for solving the problems about which everyone says "Ugh, yeah, someone should do something about that".

7 years from discovery of nuclear fission to creation of atomic bombs.

68 years after creation of atomic bombs without the world ending.

I think the containment of the SARS epidemic in 2003 is a under-appreciated success story. SARS spread fairly easily and had a 9% mortality rate, so it could well have killed millions, but it was contained thanks to the WHO and to the quarantine efforts of various governments. Their wasn't much coverage in the vein of "hooray! one of the worst catastrophes in human history has been averted!" afterwards.

Here is a short list of the most emblematic ones I can think about right now, there are many more but it would require more digging. And I'll try to avoid the most subjective ones, I would include things like minimal wage and paid holidays, but I know some will speak against them, and I don't want to start that debate right now.

1. Scientific research : the whole "space conquest" (Sputnik, Apollo mission, ...), CERN, DARPA fallouts (like the Internet), ...

2. Universal healthcare. Countries like France spend less per person (and a lower share in GDP) in healthcare than the USA, and yet we have a higher life expectancy, and no one is denied treatment because of money issue.

3. The whole French civilian nuclear power program, which worked fast, with no significant accident, and delivers us cheap, clean, reliable electricity.

4. The French train network, especially TGV (high-speed train) which carries millions of passenger a year between the main French city, with high speed, safety, reliability and reasonable cost.

5. Eradication of smallpox (but you already spoke of vaccination).

6. Literacy campaigns in Latin America (Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador).

7. Mision Milagro (joint operation of Cuba and Venezuela that treated sight-related issues of more than one million of third world (mostly latam) inhabitants, for many of them allowing them to recover sight).

Successful government engineering/research projects:

• The Manhattan Project
• Some subsections of NASA (e.g. programmers)
• DARPA has lots of examples of successful scientific developments- most obviously, the internet
• Possibly government spy agencies- almost everything is non-public, but they're known to have had some notable non-classified successes (e.g. RSA)
• The last generation of USAF aircraft were famously well-designed
• The US Navy has a perfect record of safety on its nuclear reactors (the USSR had 14 known accidents on a smaller fleet; there were also numerous civilian meltdowns)

It seems like most of these successes are due to either throwing money at a problem until they've hired enough smart people and equipment (Manhattan Project, DARPA, NSA) or to the government imposing higher standards and more discipline on its workers than was the norm elsewhere (NASA programmers, nuclear safety.)

Relevant.

This is just a loose impression, but it seems to me that the government is somewhat more consistent at recovering from notable failures; this is arguably because it's (usually) a monopoly, and has no other choice, whereas companies will often simply abandon a product if it fails sufficiently. Examples include military reform after Vietnam and in the middle of Iraq. I have no idea if this experience leads to it becoming better at recovering from failures.

Only the United States fought a war to abolish slavery. Every other nation on Earth abolished it by government passing laws, and most of them within a few generations.

Relevant links from Yvain's excellent Non-libertarian FAQ:

Government Success Stories The Forgotten Achievements of Governments

These are mostly the usual suspects, though.

We can argue about it's long-term sustainability because of the baby boomers retiring and all that, but just in terms of administration and execution, the social security program is incredibly well-run and effective. According to internal reviews, the error rate is amazingly low:

The FY 2011 error rates for RSDI overpayments and underpayments were 0.32 percent and 0.13 percent, respectively

http://www.socialsecurity.gov/improperpayments/documents/AO_Report_2013.pdf

And the administration overhead cost of the program is relatively low as well, considering it's very high accuracy rate. It looks like the overhead and administrative costs of the program has been less then 1% of the total cost of the program every year since 1989.

http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/admin.html

But its very hard to get a valid intuitive picture of government competence.

The topic is complicated.

First, governments are not monolithic but are diverse collections of people and organizations. The variation in competency between them is considerable.

Second, what do you mean by "competence"? Efficiency (measured in what? money?) in pursuing goals? Any goals?

Third, I don't think "future policy responses" have much to do with competence. I would think they will be determined by the goals and interests of politically powerful groups. Governments are mechanisms through which political power is wielded.

Fourth, reading the media is remarkably poor way of estimating pretty much anything. What's wrong with estimating the government's competence by looking at real-life results, long-term data?

Obligatory link to the classic "What have the Romans ever done for us?" scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian.

The US has sufficient checks and balances that Cheney could not, by himself, bomb Russia.

The US no longer uses leaded gasoline, for the most part. Though in fairness to conservatives I should note that the federal government may have deliberately extended its use at one point.

Some answers in this comment of mine.

It seems like someone in the media, at least at some sufficiently high level, should be able to distinguish between those scenarios. It also seems like that level can't realistically be any higher than whoever runs a specific newspaper, for example (rather than the CEO of the company which owns that newspaper as well as ten others and a TV station or two).

http://www.governmentisgood.com/index.php

Good, worthwhile post.

The purpose is not just to train my intuition away from the "governments are intrinsically incompetent" that I currently have (and which is unjustified by objective evidence).

"Incompetent" is too strong perhaps. But I think it is safe to say that bureaucracies are intrinsically prone to certain inefficiences. And a large government, like in the US, would not be exempt.

So I'm asking if commentators want to share government success stories they may have come across.

"Success" is too vague. Success from whose perspective? And by what parameters?

I think what tends to happen in this sort of examination is that we would identify governments as the means of optimizing toward certain ends. Some policies are successful to 51% of the people in a country. Some are successful to all citizens of that country, whille being significantly detrimental to the rest of the world. Some make everybody equally ecstatic right now and doom the whole lot us in the future.

At least in terms of domestic impact, would it make sense to compare and contrast countries with relatively large governments against those with small governments? I posit that you'd see less of an answer to which size/style governement is best, and more a landscape of the sorts of consequences they tend to yield.

Two words: King Asoka.