America's efforts at dealing with COVID-19 have been much less effective than Germany, Denmark, and New Zealand, let alone Asian countries such as South Korea. What accounts for the differences?    

The Wake-Up Call, a book released this week by Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait and Economist columnist Adrian Wooldridge, argues that the operating system of American government is no longer able to make the choices needed to govern effectively, regardless of who is president. It "has been crumbling for decades, overloaded with obligations, undersupplied with talent, and picked apart by special interests." Citing the work of Common Good and others, they conclude that the opaque operating system has become an impenetrable fog, which "confuses everybody who has anything to do with the state" and "distorts every relationship between government and citizen."   

Next Wednesday (September 23) at noon EDT, Common Good is hosting a forum with the authors and Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle to probe the ideas in the book for "making government great again." You can join and participate by registering here.

• Earlier this month, Philip Howard and Adam J. White, Director of George Mason University’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State, discussed how to reboot America's operating system. You can listen to their discussion here. 

• As part of Dartmouth's Political Economy Project, Philip was interviewed by students about The Rule of Nobody. 

• The Mackinac Center for Public Policy hosted a forum this week focused on our Campaign for Common Good and the need to make common sense changes to government regulation.

• The New York Daily News wrote about Philip's efforts to make the 9/11 "Tribute in Light" memorial permanent.