A useful frame for thinking about late-stage developed economies is to ask: what does the state mostly produce? The honest answer, in the United States and most of Western Europe, is permits, reviews, and litigation rights — and the products that flow downstream from those: housing units delayed twelve years, transmission lines never built, nuclear reactors that cost five times what they did in 1980.
The standard response is to call this “regulatory capture” or “NIMBYism” and treat it as a pathology to be reformed away. This essay argues something stronger: the friction is the system. It is what the modern governance machine is optimised to produce, and the actors inside it are responding rationally to the incentives they face.
This argument is developed at length in Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works. The book treats institutional friction as the steady-state output, not the bug. The full citation is in the Sources block below.
What the system actually produces
Look at any major American or European democracy circa 2026 and count what the state’s machinery emits in volume. It is not roads, housing units, or operating capacity. It is process artefacts: hearing notices, comment periods, environmental impact statements, judicial review opportunities.
“The friction is not a bug. It is the principal product of the system, emergent from the optimisation pressures faced by every actor inside it.”
The reform paradox
Each individual veto point was added by reformers who wanted to protect something specific — minority neighbourhoods from highway demolition, ecosystems from pollution, taxpayers from boondoggle. None of these actors wanted the aggregate.
This is a placeholder draft. Replace with the long form.