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Comment by wanghq | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like there are lots of opportunities...for startups, to improve these areas.

Startups do well when they improve things for people who vote with their wallets (buying this or that service).

Bureaucracies though are a completely different beast. Better value? Happier customers? They care not a bit. You need different levers to (sloooowly) move them.

What are those levers? Are you aware of any examples where an effort to move them was successful?

I think one common way is to get a high ranking bureaucrat to mandate the change. It is not a guarantee, but a good enabler. I suspect pride, shame (you still use paper receipts for this?), media or even bribes are used.

For examples, I would look at automating standard government functions (e.g., car registrations, toll collections, etc.). Putting those online leaves some clerks unemployed and is thus often resisted by default, so someone found a working path for each of those

I think competition among countries actually helps. Case in point: this visa program. They are trying to make it more streamlined and more attractive with a longer expiration. It is improvement in the right direction.

Exactly. You can't enter the market and provide better service for "government administration." You could offer a service to help a person, but the person still has to go through it all.

Absolutely not. The reason things are like described ( although it's not as bad today), is because many sectors are heavily regulated, and belong to a few actors abusing their monopolistic position. There's a reason the european union gave a 500millions fine to the french bank a decade ago ( but things didn't move a lot).

As an example, all the online banking start ups belong ( or were created as subsidiaries of) big banks. All of them.

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