KARL MARX dismissed "the executive of the modern state" as nothing more than a "committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." To which the only sensible response from a bourgeois perspective is: if only. These days most businesspeople have to stand in line with other supplicants for an audience with their political masters. And when their time finally comes they discover not a sleek "committee" cunningly representing their interests, but an antiquated shambles. Too many governments cannot cope with 19th-century problems like rail routes let alone 21st-century ones like cyber-security. Bad government is one of business's biggest problems. In the rich world it is too burdensome. In the poor one it is too patchy. And everywhere it is too slow and inflexible, hogtied by vested interests and red tape, or hijacked by ideological zealots. What can be done to turn government into Marx's admirable "committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie"? Business folk have a long list of reforms in their back pockets. But three ideas deserve particular attention. One is to focus on fixing the most dysfunctional institutions, which have a habit of being right at the heart of things. Nicolas Berggruen comes remarkably close to Marx's caricature of a rootless capitalist. He has accumulated a $2.2 billion fortune by buying property and investing in companies such as Karstadt, a German retail group, Prisa, a Spanish media conglomerate, and Burger King, a fast-food chain. But in 2000 he decided to sell his worldly goods ("I felt I was owned by possessions"), including an apartment in Manhattan and an island off the coast of Florida, and become a hotel-hopping nomad (he kept the Gulfstream). He also decided to invest $100m in creating a think-tank, the Berggruen Institute, which focuses on improving government. It is particularly preoccupied with three highly dysfunctional institutions: the state of California, the European Union and the G20, the group of 20 leading economies. Mr Berggruen's work has gone furthest in California. He is rightly outraged that the world's most successful economic cluster, Silicon Valley, co-exists with the world's most dysfunctional political capital, Sacramento. He worries that California's system of popular initiatives allows citizens to vote for whatever takes their fancy (more spending and lower taxes, for example) while its culture of hyper-partisanship entrenches paralysis. He persuaded 15 local heavyweights, including Condoleezza Rice, a former secretary of state, Gray Davis, a former California governor, and Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, to form a Think Long Committee for California and produce a blueprint for sound government. A second approach is to try to learn from what is known as "best practices." Governments have been borrowing ideas from each other ever since one hairy tribe stole the idea of the wheel from another. But the process was a bit hit or miss. McKinsey, a consultancy, has established a Centre for Government in order to make the exchange of best practices as much a part of the life of governments as it is part of the life of multinationals. The centre has identified 40 big successful programmes that governments have implemented over the past 20 years to improve their productivity and rationalise their budgets. It has demonstrated that good ideas are popping up all over the place. Mexico, for instance, has come up with an innovative system of cash transfers, Progresa, that is now being tried in New York City. A third approach is to harness the power of information technology (IT). It is revolutionising everything it touches in the private sector, from book-publishing to video-watching. It will inevitably do the same in the public sector as well. But blueprints for applying IT tend to be disappointing: they often consist of tedious ideas for electronic voting or self-interested plans to hand over chunks of government to IT consultancies. John McGinnis's book "Accelerating Democracy" is an exception. Mr McGinnis, who teaches law at Northwestern University, argues that IT can hugely increase people's power to evaluate the consequences of their collective decisions, dissuading them from making foolish choices and helping them make wise ones. Interest groups have in the past been able to dominate decision-making because they have more information than dispersed citizens. But it is now easier for citizens to accumulate their own information: support for merit-based pay in education has been growing despite fierce opposition from teachers" unions, as data from pilot programmes demonstrate that it works. You bet Mr McGinnis thinks that governments could improve policy-making by allowing people to bet on the results of policies, something that is usually forbidden by the law. Intrade, a web-based betting market, has proved better than polls in predicting the outcome of elections because it taps into the wisdom of crowds and gives people a monetary incentive to think hard about their bets. Prediction markets might do exactly the same thing by getting people to bet on the effect of particular policies, such as the impact of a payroll-tax holiday on the rate of economic growth. There is much to quarrel with in the growing movement to learn from the private sector. Businesspeople tend to forget that government always involves the clash of visions and interests. The government of people can never be reduced to the administration of things. Businesspeople also forget that they are an interest group like any other. But it is nevertheless right to involve as many different voices as possible in the discussion. Governments have no choice but to rethink their core operations in the light of tectonic technological changes and escalating social pressures. They need all the help they can get.