Incompetence is the Norm

People have been justly anguished by the recent gross mishandling of the Ebola patients in Texas and Spain and the risible lapse in security at the White House. The conventional wisdom is that these demonstrations of incompetence are a recent phenomenon signifying a breakdown in governmental competence. However, I think that incompetence has always been the norm; any semblance of competence in the past is due mostly to luck and the fact that people do not exploit incompetent governance because of a general tendency towards docile cooperativity (as well as incompetence of bad actors). In many ways, it is quite amazing at how reliably citizens of the US and other OECD members respect traffic laws, pay their bills and service their debts on time. This is a huge boon to an economy since excessive resources do not need to be spent on enforcing rules. This does not hold in some if not many developing nations where corruption is a major problem (c.f. this op-ed in the Times today). In fact, it is still an evolutionary puzzle as to why agents cooperate for the benefit of the group even though it is an advantage for an individual to defect. Cooperativity is also not likely to be all genetic since immigrants tend to follow the social norm of their adopted country, although there could be a self-selection effect here. However, the social pressure to cooperate could evaporate quickly if there is the perception of the lack of enforcement as evidenced by looting following natural disasters or the abundance of insider trading in the finance industry. Perhaps, as suggested by the work of Karl Sigmund and other evolutionary theorists, cooperativity is a transient phenomenon and will be eventually be replaced by the evolutionarily more stable state of noncooperativity. In that sense, perceived incompetence could be rising but not because we are less able but because we are less cooperative.