Nothing wrong with deliberation and listening to stakeholders. Great idea. The issue is the centre-left voters keep asking these institutions to take on more power, channel more funds and veto more projects [0]. I don't see how else they expect large centralised bodies to play out. I'm not sure if the US left even has a collective theory of how to fight institutional rot apart from stuffing institutions with leftists and assuming they do they right thing. Expecting good results from that strategy requires a certain naivete to the sort of people who seek power in government.
[0] Not just them, the centre right also seems to love the idea based on what I've read. Not the brightest crowd.
> Nothing wrong with deliberation and listening to stakeholders. Great idea.
True if you can identify the correct stakeholders and those stakeholders are aligned to the goal.
It becomes unhelpful when the list of stakeholders is so long and disconnected from the goal that listening to stakeholders becomes an endless cycle of meetings and talking about the problem instead of doing anything about it.
In my local experience, initiatives related to homelessness and drug addiction treatment attract a lot of people who like the idea of being involved because it advances their career or sounds good on their resume, but many of them are unqualified to be involved and think the role will involve a lot of delegation and deciding where to send money to other groups, not actually doing any of the work directly.
Basically, a lot of people who want to be in charge and claim leadership but who also don’t want to actually do the hard work.
Isn’t China even more centralized? They complete infrastructure projects in years not decades.
I dunno, is it? In what sense are you comparing the centralisation of the two countries?
The US is pretty centralised. Around 40% of its spending is via the government and of the balance a lot of the decision making is controlled by the government.
China isn't centralized when it comes to boots on the ground policy implementation. The regional governments are extremely important. They direct subsidies and issue loans and have massive balance sheets and their own banks, they decide production capacity and things like factory output targets, they even decide which industries they specialize in, like EVs vs solar panels, etc.
Of course there is a framework from the CCP, and if red lines are crossed the big stick comes out and people are made an example of, but the regionals run the society. Including things like the social safety net. That's all regional and it's different between different regions.
There's a fairly large gap between how China works internally and how the west sees China.
For a more concrete example, the recent Third Plenum planning session was the typical communist style decade long roadmap with loud bullet points and achievement targets. Then there is a multi-month-long gap, all of the politicians go home, they work out how to achieve the goals between themselves, and they present their plans for approval. It's actually not as top down as you would think.
As you may sense, there is a sort of competition at play. If the committee is looking to consolidate key sectors like electric vehicles and increase industrial profits, the leaders who implement this guidance the best that get the acclaim. Likewise, if the central government is doing something like de-risking the regional banks, you so not want to be the region with the problems. Good luck in your career and climbing the ladder if so...
This power play dynamic is also strategically used to play different factions against themselves in a multifaceted way that is sometimes obvious but often has quiet subterfuge, in typical Chinese fashion.
They are mostly stem types in charge though.