In 1651, a gentleman scholar who readily admitted that “fear and I were born twins” published one of the great books on government. Thomas Hobbes had survived the notoriously bloody English Civil War by fleeing to France — and his great philosophical concern was personal safety. Life in a state of nature was, he observed, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” because people were always fighting. So, he argued, citizens should contractually give up their freedoms to a ruler who could offer them protection. The state’s legitimacy depended on it fulfilling that contract and keeping its citizens safe, a revolutionary idea at a time when kings, like his former pupil Charles II, claimed their position came by divine right. For Hobbes, who also managed to survive the Great Plague in 1665-66 and died in his bed at 91, our contract with “Leviathan,” as he called his book, depended on its ability to keep us safe.
If Hobbes were alive today, he would feel vindicated. Around the world, fear is on the march — and, in order to be protected from this terrible virus, we are willingly surrendering basic rights, even the freedom to leave our own homes, to Leviathan. The Covid-19 pandemic has made government important again. Not just powerful again (look at those once-mighty companies begging for help), but also vital again: It matters enormously whether your country has a good health service, competent bureaucrats and sound finances. Good government is the difference between living and dying.
The West’s governmental advantage is now questionable: Simply ask yourself whether you would feel safer today in New York and London or in Singapore and Seoul? Asia is catching up with the West, and in some smaller countries has overtaken it, in large part because Confucian Asia in particular has taken government seriously over the past few decades while the West has allowed it to ossify.
The public sector in the West is decades behind its private sector in terms of efficiency and dynamism. Lenin once said that “there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” The coronavirus crisis is exactly such a history-accelerating event. If Western governments respond creatively to the crisis, they will have a chance of reversing decades of decline; if they dither and delay while Asia continues to improve, the prospect of a new Eastern-dominated world order will surely increase.
Instead, in so far as it’s done anything, the West has turned to what might be described as big-government nationalism, typified by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and US President Donald Trump; reform has taken a backseat to rage. In continental Europe, there has been no change: The European Union has survived both the euro crisis and then Brexit without any serious attempt at self-improvement.
Will the Covid-19 crisis be the spur? At first glance, the omens are not good. Everywhere you look, you see our Leviathans in a sorry state — overstretched and inefficient, driven by panic rather than careful planning. Hospitals reached capacity with terrifying speed: In New York City, the epicenter of global capitalism, doctors wear ski goggles instead of masks, and nurses use garbage bags rather than protective gowns. The EU wasted days wrangling about what to do and, as usual, was bailed out by the European Central Bank printing money.
Across the West, tests that would allow us to discover who has had the virus are in short supply.
But look more closely, and there are more positive signs. Countries that have rethought government, like Denmark, or valorized good government traditions, like Germany, are doing better at dealing with the virus not just than those Western countries that have not done so, like the US and Italy, but also better than authoritarian secretive China.
As late as the 1960s, many people in the West still believed that government could secure ever more benefits: America was aiming for the moon (and getting there) while continental Europe was being rebuilt. People trusted experts to fix things. But after the debacle of Vietnam (brought to us by America’s best and brightest) and the disaster of the energy crisis, faith in government began to pall.
Policy makers began to turn to libertarian thinkers, like F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, who trusted the market rather than enlightened bureaucrats to fix things, and who had long argued that people were handing over too many freedoms for only marginal gains in well-being.
In the 1980s, these ideas spawned a half-revolution, when Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US challenged the welfare state. Some chunks of Leviathan were duly privatized, and taxes were cut. But the numbers show that Leviathan was simply pausing to digest rather than going on a diet. Nowadays, the state consumes about 40% of gross domestic product in the West, compared with 10% at the beginning of the 20th century. The regulatory state exploded on both sides of the Atlantic: You need a license to become a hairdresser in Florida; in the European Union, Brussels sits like a spider in a web of red tape.
When the state regulates something, we complain; when it stands pat and allows something to go wrong, we complain louder. And the gulf between it and the more dynamic private sector yawns ever wider: For instance, productivity in the public sector in Britain fell by 1% between 1999 and 2010 at a time when the productivity of the private sector increased by 14%.
The relative performance of Asia and the West in coping with coronavirus should be a warning to the West. Many of the most impressive government responses have been in East and Southeast Asia. While the West dawdled, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore all developed their own tests for Covid-19, ramped up production of the materials needed for the tests and made money available so that people could pay for tests and treatment. South Korea even installed booths in the streets in Seoul where you can get walk-by tests from masked health-care workers sitting behind protective glass. The fact that, having done everything right, Singapore was eventually forced to introduce a lockdown, or “circuit-breaker” as it calls it, on April 7 is testimony to the virulence of the virus. Fewer than 10 people have died there.
The most interesting lessons from the crisis concern two things that are seldom discussed together: the efficiency of the government apparatus and the purpose of government in general. The West needs a wholesale program of modernization in government and a new theory of government to accompany it. Even if the West does not come up with another Hobbes, it can do a great deal to re-engineer the working of government just by updating it from the agricultural era — by harnessing technology more effectively, learning from best practices in public and private sectors around the world, and by finally getting rid of out-of-date privileges.
There is no doubt that the West faces as big a crisis as it has since the Second World War not just because of the damage that is being inflicted by Covid-19 but also because the crisis coincides with a weakening of America’s power and a strengthening of China’s. The great geopolitical question facing the world is whether the West can rise to the challenge as it has so many times before and rethink the theory and practice of government — or whether it will fumble about, leaving China to reclaim the global leadership it had when that frightened old tutor sat down to write “Leviathan.”
Bloomberg
