Patrick McKenzie

It had the most desirable object in the history of the world.

And rather than adopting any sensible strategy for getting it into people's arms was bickering over who should get it first.

We should be outraged about this, and we're mostly not.

One of the things that America used to do is when the federal government lacked state capacity for something, it would say, who in civil society or private industry has capacity for this?

And then say, congratulations, by order of the president, you are now a colonel in the United States Army.

Like, what do you need to get it done, sir?

And that was an option.

That was an option that was not taken.

But, you know.

I will play no fights in either of the two administrations that both individually made terrible decisions, but plausibly some more enlightened counterfactual administration could have gone to Google and said, who is literally your best person for solving the data problem that we currently find ourselves in?

Great.

Will they accept a commission as Colonel?

Great.

Here's an order from the president.

You have a swearing-in ceremony starting in 30 seconds.

And you will present your project plan tomorrow.

And again, the successful project plan was made by a bunch of

rank amateurs at this topic on Discord in the course of a couple of hours.

And similarly, this is like one part of the huge overall vaccination effort.

But you could imagine going to Amazon and saying like, hey, Amazon, we hear you're pretty good about getting packages between A and B. This package has a really hard thing about it.