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Feels like this is hefty hyperbole or you are taking a very narrow view of state capacity. States in the 1800s were much, much simpler; even 100 years ago, the populations of western European nations were considerably smaller than they are now. Universal healthcare, pensions and wider welfare were all post-WW2 inventions. Regardless of whether these are good things, they are absolutely colossal administrative tasks.
In transport, 19th century nations were able to quickly roll out train and canal infrastructure, but they were building over nothing and there was very little in terms of good road networks and air traffic was yet to exist. Modern nations are running much larger transport networks with far more participants.
In infrastructure, national electricity networks were pretty much not a thing until post-WW1. Now there are grids crisis crossing nations with far more complex load balancing and generation mixes.
Universal education was another thing that didn't exist until the late 19th/early 20th century, and even once it was introduced the years spent and scale of schools needed were much smaller than today.
I think the reason for the poor view of modern state capacity can be mapped to a divergence in capacity and complexity. If you took 1800 as a starting point, you would see capacity grow with basically constant, linear growth, whereas complexity is exponential. Thus, there was a long period where capacity had a healthy gap to complexity, but eventually complexity surpassed state capacity and the gap has only grown. So even though absolute capacity is higher than it ever was, it looks like governments are incapable as the scale of challenges has grown a lot faster.
Ok, lot of countries were quite primitive in 1800. But ability of states to get things done has taken a big nosedive since WW2 at the very least.
These are not good things. Pensions are basically declaring "we don't care about the future, we're going to bleed reproductive age people". They were invented in an age of rapid population growth. Now they're eating up state finances. The entire European social state model is hardly sustainable. Also pensions are.. much older..
Bismarck started with it in late 1880s, when the average person died 2 years before they could collect any, and there were cca 8x more young people than old.
I don't know where you live, but I don't expect to get any pension other than symbolic, and wouldn't expect it even if I were paying lot more taxes. Government debt is always increasing and economic growth is unlikely or impossible. AI is something to be regulated, not used, industry is a dirty word and energy is supposed to be expensive to "save the planet".
Look at the tempo of railway construction in 19th century. A feat like that is unimaginable today. Or how much of Europe was built then. Now much of Europe has unaffordable cost of housing because we can't or won't build.
Seeing as vast majority of university graduates use nothing whatsoever from their degrees, and it's purely a credential proving they can sit down & study, a lot of it is pure inefficiency. Same for universal high school.
The capacity of a state is orthogonal to the merit of its actions. A lot of people would say that wars and the ability to conduct military actions are a bad thing, but everyone understands that a strong military is indicative of state capacity. Likewise welfare and education. These are massive administrative challenges that modern governments handle fairly well.
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