The Homework We Forgot

Reclaiming the state's duty to plan

This year of grace of 2026 is likely to end much differently than it began, and this is not related to some specific issue in one or two or three countries. No! It’s global. From Portugal to Bangladesh, from Hungary to USA, from Brasil to Cyprus, from Colombia to Congo and Gambia.

Many elections are in the radar and will happen this year throughout the western world. More than 40 countries have just held or will hold major elections, with nearly two billion people (some 25% of the world population) going to the polls. Hungary, as a matter of fact, just held presidential elections and started the badly needed “adjustments”.

It’s a chance to fix the machines, adjust course and change whatever and whoever has to be changed for the sake of our social and political healthiness, not to mention our democracies.

We have first and foremost to admit that our democracies have not been healthy for the latter years. This is well known and has been extensively analysed. Secondly, let’s not fall into the trap of comparing a state (and the government in charge) to a private company. This is a category error; very popular but a gross mistake. A private firm has a clear, focused and narrow mandate: maximize profit and shareholder value. It can fire slow performers, refuse service to unprofitable customers, select specific markets to the detriment of others etc. It’s the game. Its “efficiency” is often connected to ignoring complexity and the real needs of a society. There is no criticism here; this is the normal function of private enterprises.

The state, by contrast, cannot fire its citizens. It cannot refuse service to the elderly, the remote, the ill. It must treat similar cases similarly, which requires documented procedures, that we use to call bureaucracy. That sluggishness is often the price of fairness, due process, and stability. A private company can be a modern jet plane: fast, fragile and built for one purpose. The state is more like a city’s water or sewage system: invisible when working, catastrophic when broken, and impossible to redesign on a caprice.

But we, the people, have to refuse to let the state off the hook of performance evaluation. Its “Leviathan” role; keeping order, delivering education, making proper use of public force, aplying criminal investigation, arrest, detention, counterterrorism operations, granting concessions for roads, highways, metro, water and sanitation, electricity generation and transmission, telecommunications, banks, stock exchanges, airline companies etc. etc., enforcing contracts, protecting borders; protecting the national currency as its last resource guarantor etc. etc., are nothing more than basic requirements although extremely complex.

The deeper, noblest obligation is to plan, to think about the future, predict the future, deliver the future. Not the totalitarian variety that crushes markets and individual initiative, but something more subtle: long-term strategic planning that no private actor can do alone. In fact, the entire menu summarized above (the “Leviathan” role) requires careful, complex planning.

Think of a simple example: decarbonizing an economy. No single company will build the grid upgrades, the EV charging network, the battery recycling facilities simultaneously. That requires a state that maps the gaps, sets the horizon, and uses every tool - taxes, standards, public investment - to pull the future into the present. That is central planning as homework, not as tyranny. It is the state saying: “Let’s go this way, we will not drift into disaster. We will steer.” Planning is the grandest duty of a state, the most difficult and the most important.

Well, what we see today is a good number of states defaulting on this homework. Sluggishness that once protected fairness now serves paralysis. Bureaucracy that ensured due process now often enables capture by vested interests. States have forgotten that their legitimacy rests not just on keeping order and ensuring social cohesion but on delivering the future. Proper and competent planning is the most precious tool to deliver the future. And we, the people, need to wake up in the morning dreaming of a promising future for us and for our kids. The promising future may even not arrive but we deserve to dream with it. This is what we can proudly call civilization.

So let us forgive the state for not being a unicorn startup. Let us stop demanding it sprint when its job is to carry the whole community on its back. But let us also refuse to excuse its indolence and the wrong paths it takes. The state is not a machine for efficiency; it is a maintenance workshop which fix the many machines of society and also produces the future, an orchard, a garden for flowers and fruits. And every garden requires a gardener who plans for the seasons, not one who merely harvest the fruits.

As emphasized by Miguel Lago, a young and brilliant Brazilian political scientist, in his book A Construção de Um Estado, “the public sector regulation and the rules to which the administration is subject are infinitely more burdensome and paralyzing than those that regulate the private sector”.

The question, therefore, is not how to make the state like one of these famous big techs. The question is how to make it more like a cathedral builder: slow, careful, deliberate, not too worried about quarterly results, yet driven by a vision that will outlive everyone in the room. That is a herculean task. Convincing the citizen that this grand, complex duty, often invisible to the naked eye, falls inescapably in the hands of the state is a callenging task. Yet, it is the homework we have to pursue. And the year of grace of 2026, which will end differently than it began, may well bring us the opportunity to (re)start planning again for the sake of the people.

Abraham Lincoln, a public figure of the highest caliber, understood that government’s proper role is to do collectively what no individual can do alone, not to mimic private business nor to retreat into the misleading concept of minimum state passivity. He argued that “the legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all ... for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.”