Well then it should dishearten you to know, that the 2024 Economics Nobel, was won by people who showed that good institutions cause nations to be wealthy, not just correlate.
You’re obviously educated and on HN, so you can appreciate how much harder showing causation is.
Sadly, that does mean, the citizens need to get together and make their system more trustworthy. Getting more money in the hands of workers will not result in a better overall system.
Or in simpler terms - Distrust in the government is the enemy, and all the factors that cause it, real and perceived. Corruption, weak information economies, weakened judiciaries, depleted citizen capacity to build consensus.
But we the citizens have very limited possiblities of what to do... we can vote for basically one of two options and that's it, and both options are bad. Newcomers have no chance of breaking through (unless they're cherry picked by one of the options and pumped up by the media... which one side does every 4 years).
The government has the monopoly on violence. We pay the government, we pay the people that should check that they didn't do anything bad/wrong (police, anti-corruption services, etc.), we pay the court system, but they don't do anything. Things that work in every corporation (eg. procurement offices and oversight over them) are broken in many if not all governments, including ours.
If the government wants trust, then they must earn it. So far they haven't. And I'm talking about the whole pyramid, from the top politicians, to the lowest traffic police officer not doing his/her job. And in the system where a politician steals money, the investigators dont investigate and the courts don't prosecute, we can reduce the money they get, because they obviously are not doing the jobs we are paying them for. Jail 10, 20 politicians, and I'll gladly support more investigators (paid by the taxpayers). If they don't, we don't need the ones we already have.
Remember, its citizens that made the country in the first place. These are all systems, and they operate under either stated, or unstated rules.
Either way, no one is coming to save you, other than your own ability to understand the system, its tolerances, and to effect change / build alliances.
You can even achieve this by doing something small, like cleaning up a local spot, or other parts of your daily routine.
We learn how to operate very complex systems regularly.
You’re obviously educated and on HN, so you can appreciate how much harder showing causation is.
Sadly, that does mean, the citizens need to get together and make their system more trustworthy. Getting more money in the hands of workers will not result in a better overall system.
Or in simpler terms - Distrust in the government is the enemy, and all the factors that cause it, real and perceived. Corruption, weak information economies, weakened judiciaries, depleted citizen capacity to build consensus.
We need those systems to work.