State Capacity is a terrible model for understanding COVID outcomes

Tyler Cowen has this idea of State Capacity Libertarianism. The ideology is a bit woolly, but is a mixture of market primacy with a strong decisive government. The key element is that a country/government has some amount of “State Capacity”.

Paraphrasing Tyler Cowen, State Capacity is defined as the ability to:

Address climate change, improve education and healthcare, improve spending decision making, invest in infrastructure, support markets, build institutions, and set standards for immigration

Bit of a mouthful.

Some people have said that we can use the idea of “State Capacity” to explain the different COVID outcomes for countries. I think this is a TERRIBLE way to think about how successful different countries have responded to COVID.

There is no way to measure State Capacity

Before COVID there was this table about which countries were best prepared for a pandemic. Looking at the table now we can see it measured nothing of use. The best performing countries are nowhere to be seen and two of the worst performers are at the top.

Even if State Capacity made sense as a concept we don’t seem able to identify and measure it.

Definitions of State Capacity changes country to country

Israel’s State Capacity allows it to inject vaccines but not do lockdowns or conduct the research for a vaccine.

The UK’s State Capacity allows it to research and inject vaccines but not do lockdowns.

China’s State Capacity allows it to do lockdowns (and likely inject vaccines if it wanted to) but not research world class vaccines.

Sure, I can make an ad hoc argument about research capacity vs manufacturing capacity vs logistic capacity. But at this stage we are begging the data to save the theory.

State Capacity seems to disappear suddenly

One implied point of State Capacity is that it takes time to build up, and doesn’t disappear overnight. You can’t build up institutions overnight, and once built up it takes time for tacit knowledge to decay.

Yet looking at these graphs of Slovenia and Ireland State Capacity seems to work fine for a while and then suddenly collapse overnight.

So what is the answer?

I don’t know, and no else does either. But I can say that the nebulous concept of State Capacity does not explain anything about COVID outcomes.

It is also likely that State Capacity doesn’t explain anything more generally, and is a substitute for doing the hard work of analysing the detail of what things a government is good at and why.