[9] Why Government Fails So Often: Peter Schuck - Preview

I honestly didn't finish this book and don't know if I'm going to be able to. I recently read an article tweeted by Steven Pinker entitled The Source of Bad Writing. You should read that link before attempting this book.

Maybe just see how delicately Jon Stewart treats talking about it.

The strategy is to lay out an assessment of federal government programs and provide an assessment of whether or not they were successful. The problem is that in doing so every inch of the theory and methodology for doing so is stated over and again. It reads like an academic paper that goes on way too long. It comes across as a high school paper that's trying to sound too smart for what it's doing.

Example:

"Finally, I provide the prescriptive context for applying CBA (cost-benefit analysis) to actual policy decisions by elaborating fourteen normative guidelines or principles for policy makers and those who would assess their decisions."

Oh boy! Fourteen normative guidelines! It's not that the sentence doesn't make sense, it's that I had to quote it and re-read it to even start to lay out what I'm going to eventually run into 20 pages later in the chapter. Ironically, government probably fails because people like Schuck are so smart and regimented that they can't convey what it is they're actually wanting to do to "normal" people. And in the interest of honesty and accuracy, there isn't a colloquial way to break that down to keep the point

I, at least, was motivated to skip over paragraphs, found it extremely hard to digest even a few lines at a time, and felt wanting of like a graph or analogy that could create a picture. This is a 400 page book, the first 40 of which go "I'm about to do x in the context of y and over chapters blah you'll see p, q, and enough r to make you reconsider what you want to believe about this very specific definition of 'federal,' whilst keeping in mind the extra paragraph of footnotes I give you on literally every other page."

The bobbing up and down doesn't break the monotony, it just makes an already cumbersome book feel that much heavier. I imagine if you have a ton of patience, or really want to argue about specific federal programs over the last 8 or so years, this will be an awesome read. I may take a few swings at it a chapter or so at a time and provide more as I'm sure it's filled with good information, just, damn.