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I would agree with the limits of the term as you describe them, and add to this that 'capacity' is a measure of potential, not utilization. You can have capacity, and be inefficient in doing so. You can have capacity, and choose not to utilize it. You could change capacity by reallocating resources from other competing priorities- and this just broadens the question of what capacity specifically refers to in terms of 'capacity for what?' You can reassign personnel between organizations, but a skilled chemist is probably not going to make for a skilled software engineer even though 'capacity to analyze bioterrorism risks' and 'capacity to counter intercontinental missiles' are both functions of state capacity.
There's also a point that a lot of effective utilization of state capacity is, well, invisible by design and citizen preference. A voting (or non-voting) public doesn't particularly want to be accosted on the streets by policemen doing random searches. A state with sufficient state surveillance capacity doesn't need to- they can just monitor surveillance cameras / communications / informants, and tailor interventions to a narrower degree so that law-abiding people have less to notice. This takes a lot more capacity, and produces far fewer observables.
In a sense, it's comparable to people who complain online that no one builds impressive feats of engineering anymore. On cell phones with more computing power than Cold War space programs, over an internet that reaches over half the global population despite being mostly theoretical 50 years ago, and conveyed on ocean-spanning cable networks hidden beneath the waves. Just because you can walk through or over engineering feats without noticing them doesn't mean they aren't there. The same principle can apply to state capacity.
Very good points! Maybe state capacity is like that old adage about bathroom janitors: you only really notice them if they're not around to do the job. That doesn't mean they're not doing their job in the vast majority of other cases.
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I agree with most of this, but I also think that the financialisation of many Western economies probably has exerted a significant toll on industrial state capacity. My suspicion is that the US couldn’t pull off the same feats it managed in WW2 or much of the Cold War because it simply doesn’t have enough welders, factories, machine shop operators, aeronautical engineers, stevedores, and so on.
Likewise, while I think the narrative that “we don’t build things any more” is largely false, we’ve certainly transitioned into building different kinds of thing, with an emphasis on bits over “its”.
I’m less sure about other forms of state capacity. While the US was able to enforce COVID rules fairly effectively, this doesn’t impress me much; largely the rules were about convincing people to refrain from doing certain things and enforcing this. It’s less clear to me that the US could, for example, mobilise an additional 10 million military personnel as it did over the course of WW2.
If I’m focusing on war scenarios here, it’s because the possibility of a war with China looms large here. While the opening days of any such war will draw on stockpiled munitions, in any prolonged conflict the US will be sorely tested in its ability to rapidly regenerate stockpiles and replace losses, especially of surface combatants.
I’m eager to have my pessimism here overruled, but there are times when the tide goes out and you realise which states have been swimming nude, and I worry the US isn’t wearing trunks.
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