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Comment by robin_reala | Hacker News Reader

Slightly unfashionable to say this here, but this problem isn’t necessarily something the private sector should be routing around but one that the public sector should be fixing from within.

At GDS (GOV.UK etc) we’re working on a programme called GaaP: Government as a Platform. This aims to provide components to radically simplify the difficulty of building services focused on user needs for the rest of government.

Tom Loosemoore (now ex-GDS but hey) gave this talk at Code For America last year: https://youtube.com/watch?v=VjE_zj-7A7A . It’s obviously quite long (and in my opinion worth watching the lot) but the topic relevant part comes at ~28 minutes in. Here Tom demonstrates how pulling together the pieces of GaaP could potentially lead to registering s company in 3.5 minutes.

That a private sector company could do the same thing is great, but sometimes you need to refactor the root inefficiency rather than patch the symptom.

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> sometimes you need to refactor the root inefficiency rather than patch the symptom.

This is also my view on a lot of fintech.

However... if the incumbents aren't doing something, then eating away at the edges may eventually either overcome the incumbents or force them into change.

I don't think Stripe could replace what govts do, but I can certainly see that Stripe being successful will put them at the table to influence or direct the which the way govts do things.

If innovation is motivated by competition, then the government having a monopoly in governmental services means they never need to innovate, unless they receive some competition.

Because barriers to emigration are so high, countries don't have to compete with each other for quality of governance, and so it turns out that only the private sector can do it.

If innovation is motivated by competition

Your implication is that competition has to be with external agents. It’s perfectly possible to compete with the status quo.

The private sector has a profit motive at its core: make more money for shareholders. The public sector also has a profit motive: save more money and be more effective for tax-payers. They’re both examples of efficiency, two sides of the same coin.

I don't think the public sector has the motive you claim they do. I think that in practice, the actual motivation of each department of government on every scale is to draw more funding to their own budget in a massive power struggle for slices of the societal pie. There aren't shareholders in the private sense, but the profit motive is still to grow revenues/power and get them assigned to yourself.

Taxpayers don't want efficient use of funds either. From the point of view of a taxpayer, the most effective use of funds is to have them all benefit yourself. Everyone wants to maximize the piece of the pie that is assigned to them. Politicians use this as an excuse to grow the scope of government, regardless of what side you vote for. As a result, the voting apparatus does not serve to optimize government efficiency.

All I can say is that from within my department, and from a lower-than-senior-civil-servant level, the ground looks very different. It’s not for nothing that we have our design principles[1] that have ‘user needs’ and ‘do less’ as points 1 and 2. We absolutely need to have funding to do that, but specifically at GDS we’re part of the UK Cabinet Office’s Efficiency and Reform Group - a primary mission for us is to do more with less on a pan-government scale.

To argue your second point, tax payers want an easy life. If we can cut minutes or hours off your interactions with government year on year then you’ll be happier, regardless of whether your overall burden goes up or down.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/design-principles

From my experience public sector has little motivation for any kind of competition.

I'd tend to agree. But the private sector has show an unreasonable effectiveness at improving lots of industries.

Believe me, I don't sleep well at night, knowing you've got to motivate people to generate huge profit, so they can create great companies like Stripe. But it appears to be an ongoing trend.

Even the recents efforts made by GDS or USDS will be overshadowed by new, hip, fintech (and govtech?) startups.

I wish there was an industry called "Don't do with people's data what they never gave you explicit permission to do". Here, both public and private sectors fail badly because they wish to perpetuate their existence, but the public sector's existence could at least somewhat nominally be justified as something people usually want. You may want the existence of a private sector as a whole to perpetuate, but probably not at the cost of a specific entity doing unexpected things with your data.

Edit: added last sentence.

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