The ferocious riots in Paris made me revise my opinion that France is a well-governed country. But then came a second thought. Which country does deserve that compliment? None of the mainland EU states need apply. Japan is only now heaving itself out of a multi-year man-made economic hole. The US government has revealed its incompetence shamefully by the mishandling of the Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans and beyond: and that comes on top of other calamities, led by the appalling decision to go to war against Iraq, compounded by the grotesque mishandling of the war’s aftermath.
The former super-power, Russia, is making a mighty mess out of the former USSR’s one-time captive states. Britain’s government, of course, shares the Bush Adminstration’s (or maladministration’s) guilt over Iraq, but the Blair regime has also achieved a whole, amazingly long string of governmental disasters all its own.
Is there some thread binding all these incompetents together? I believe there is. It lies in the greatly increased complexity of all human societies, both at the global heights (e.g global warming) and at the personal level, where growing demands for better lives conflict with mounting difficulties of financing, control and delivery. The myriad issues can only be resolved at local level by highly trained experts acting under expert leadership. But government after government tries to deal with needs by centralised intervention directed by non-expert politicians and their bureaucratic accomplices.
In business management, we learnt long ago that this is a recipe for failure (which doesn’t, naturally, prevent managers from repeating the recipe). Governments haven’t even begun to recognise the lesson, let alone learn it, We are all paying the price of the resulting and mounting incompetence.
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