Tyler Cowen: preference

Transcript context

…And they’re small, and they don’t have federalism. Sure. Let me give you a weird hypothesis. Tell me what you think of it. If someone argued the US has the highest state capacity in the whole world because the number one feature of state capacity is that you can convince enough of your citizens to fight for your country and die for it, the US does pretty well for that. But to do well on that, your country, in some ways, has to be nutty, a bit militaristic, or maybe you need gun culture or diverse regions. A lot of the military comes from the south, which is a more conservative part of the country, and so on, and that a lot of the other problems we have actually stem from our high state capacity because we’ve decided to emphasize talking people into fighting for their country, being willing to die for it. Maybe Israel is pretty good at that, too. That’s just another way of diagnosing the problem, that we’re doing way better than we think. We prefer to be big and really strong and militarized, and the rest is collateral damage, but we live with it. I’m not sure I agree with the definition of state capacity. I could see that being part of it, but I’d also not accept the notion that because we can convince people to go in the military — though we’re having terrible recruitment problems in the military. We’re doing poorly on that —…

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