While on the flight back from Singapore, I noticed John McQuaid’s essay entitled Can’t Do Nation republished in Singapore’s Strait Times.

The United States seems to have become the superpower that can’t tie its own shoelaces. America is a nation of vast ingenuity and technological capabilities. Its bridges shouldn’t fall down.

And it’s not just bridges. Has there ever been a period in our history when so many American plans and projects have, literally or figuratively, collapsed? In both grand and humble endeavors, the United States can no longer be relied upon to succeed or even muddle through…

Annual polls taken by the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion have found public confidence in the government’s ability to respond to terrorist attacks, natural disasters and health crises such as avian flu dropping steadily…

Meanwhile, a much quieter revolution was brewing: The federal government outsourced more and more of its functions to private contractors, a shift driven partly by the free-market ideology of the Reagan era and partly by necessity. There were now too many tasks for agencies to do by themselves. As Paul C. Light of New York University has shown, the “federal government” we all know — the superstructure of agencies and federal employees — has shrunk while its actual size, including contract and grant employees and projects, is larger than ever…

Here’s the rub: Outsourcing eliminates incentives to perform well and shields contractors from accountability…

The criticisms would be especially damning in the eyes of Singapore, which prides itself on efficiency and infrastructure investments. 

The difference between the approaches to government, security, and infrastructure were dramatically visible in Singapore’s Changi airport as compared with a typical US airport like Seatac.

At Changi, free luggage carts keep everyone moving efficiently. Seatac, meanwhile, has granted a monopoly to Smartcart, which charges extortionate prices that deter usage and result in a luggage clogged aiport.

Changi provides free internet terminals, Seatac outsources internet access to expensive wireless ISPs. 

In this and many other ways, Changi leaves some money on the table, but they more than make up for the losses in terms of goodwill and positive marketing for Singapore as a place to visit and do business with, leading to Singapore’s success as a young nation.

An even more important contrast is the different approaches to security of the two nations.  Remarkably, you almost never wait in line at Changi, whether for passports or security checks. The reason is a distributed screening system that is more secure and more scalable than that practiced in US airports.

Singapore screens carryon baggage in parallel at each gate, rather than in a few massive lines at the entrance to a large “secure” area.  Gate-based screening is more secure because even if contraband finds its way into the airport (e.g. through a corrupt store employee), it will be blocked before entering the plane.  It’s more scalable because it can flexibly distribute screening resources across the different gates rather than creating a single, massive, gridlock-inducing queue. 

Gate-based screening is probably also more expensive in the short term. But in the long run, security failures and intolerable travel lines end up costing us fare more. Real thought and real expertise went into making all these processes working smoothly.  (Don’t even get me started on all of the maddening inefficiences at Seatac!)

At a micro level, these differences reflect fundamentally different attitudes towards infrastructure investments and governmental competence. This isn’t a liberal vs. convervative issue– Singapore’s government is very conservative and supports much less of a social safety net than the US. But the government and the people aren’t afraid to invest in infrastructure that supports the common good, without which markets and the economy can’t work well. 

As McQuaid notes, the divided politics in the US have damaged the basic foundations of government and our ability to deal with complex problems that face us.

In a sense, big government has failed. The bitter disputes over the Great Society-era programs fractured the nation’s rough political consensus, and the purpose of government itself became a battleground. The ongoing political knife fights cumulatively damaged the government agencies that depend on some insulation from the fray — which is to say, most of them…

McQuaid does see some cause for hope:

The 21st century’s problems — climate change, jihadist terrorism, the dislocations of globalization — are complex. But they are manageable. Can-do America can come back if we can again assemble our national will, power, technical expertise and vision. It will take a while to do so. We should get started.