There really aren't that many big problems that government can solve without massive tradeoffs

From Big Problems, Little Ideas by Megan McArdle. An interesting list of major problems facing virtually all nations in the OECD today. I'll add some of my own.

Loss of worker power
Declining productivity
Demographic aging
Familial collapse
Societal fragmentation
Education expense and ineffectiveness

As McArdle points out, these are large, systemic, complex, dynamic and self-adjusting issues which do not lend themselves to comprehensive solutions. You can do things, with hope in your heart, that might affect the outcomes in a positive way, but that is based on hope and not confidence.

Political Economist makes the comment:

The issue, at this point in the evolution of government and society, is that there really aren't that many big problems that government can solve without massive tradeoffs.

Take the disruption in the labor markets. Yes, it's disruptive but the reality is that the only viable solutions are solutions with massive tradeoffs. Your choices more or less boil down to trade barriers or massive wage subsidies (regulatory or financial). Neither of these is without substantial tradeoffs and neither is likely to happen.

So the reality is that government has done much of what it can, that we have gotten to the point where we are truly working on the margins, where the cost of marginal improvement is far higher than at any point in the past.

Neither side is willing to admit this because both have a large stake in the myth that government can make things better (if only you let me control it). Shattering that myth should be one of our highest goals but nobody in the process, politicians, opinion writers or journalists, has any issue in doing that.

I see S-curves everywhere and am sure they apply to government policies as well, and more broadly to government effectiveness. I am not sure that we have quite reached the top of the S-curve yet, but I suspect that Political Economist is right, "there really aren't that many big problems that government can solve without massive tradeoffs" and Lord knows we hate trade-offs.

In the absence of broadly useful societal policies, I think it forces us back to the stage where we are reliant on a lot of distributed decision-making to tackle these endemic issues. Our policies choices are not about how much to spend or how to make schools more effective, etc. Our choices are about what actions can be taken so that more people become more effective at solving local problems.