Why are governments increasingly ineffective at running things?

Partly because they are besieged by complexity – every problem turns out to be connected to every other problem, hence there is no way to measure success or failure, hence ever more neurotic official attempts to ‘set targets’.

But they also operate in a context in which the public are unable to discern what is important and what is not. Which is why accelerating media stupidity is such a problem. Not only does bombarding the public with nonsense create confusion. It wastes time and corrupts our available intellectual and actual resources, thereby threatening democracy which has to rely on some sort of Minimal Rationalism.

This captures it all well.