“Government Is Broken”: The Collapse of the Public Governing Capacity

Abstract

Contemporary mainstream economics has been a prime factor in the degradation of the public governing capacity in the United States and other western democracies. The marketization of American government, in particular, is the chief reason for its declining ability to reliably deliver goods and services. Market advocates, exploiting neoclassical economic theory, have transformed public goods production in imitation of a market model. This has led to the evisceration of public services and the dismantling of traditions of responsible public administration. The ravaging of government has proceeded largely unhindered because we have no adequate economic theory to explain the public non-market economy, no intellectual infrastructure to explain how its purposes and processes differ crucially from those of the market, and no effective conceptual model that demonstrates why such differences matter.