Hacker News Reader

I’ve increasingly found the characterization that most government employees are lazy or inefficient to be remarkably untrue.

Yeah, I've never understood that characterization. The government as a system is inefficient, precisely because it doesn't operate on a profit motive.

But that's a systemic problem, not an individual one. Most of the people I know who work in government do so at a substantial pay cut compared to private sector work, and precisely because they're engaged and driven.

Why do people still believe that profit motive = efficient? My employer is plenty profit-driven, but a coworker just spent five days dicking around doing nothing because his computer broke and we’re too incompetent to provide adequate spare resources. Don’t tell me the profit motive makes organizations efficient.

It's ultimately simple.

The government has a fiat printing press.

Microsoft does not.

If Microsoft loses $33 billion per year for ten years (equivalent to ~1/3 of sales), it will go bankrupt. In fact, if it loses money like that for just four years, it will likely go bankrupt.

If the US Government bleeds $1 trillion per year for ten years (equivalent to ~1/3 of its tax revenue), it will tax you more and or print away some of your standard of living. See: Japan's budget deficit versus tax revenue the last decade. Nothing stopped the Japanese Government from being fiscally wildly irresponsible, then debasing the Yen and stealing the standard of living of the Japanese people to pay for it all (still continuing now).

The need to not lose money perpetually, enforces at worst a minimum required level of efficiency by the vast majority of private businesses. There are very few exceptions to that, even in quasi protected monopoly situations such as railroads, telecom or airlines.

The US Government has no inherent efficiency enforcement mechanism. As witnessed by the public debt going from $5.6 trillion to $21 trillion in just 17 years or so.

If you want to talk about required efficiency, trying running a manufacturing business with a 6% profit margin, or Walmart with a 2.x% net income margin, or a liquor store or convenience store with a 5% profit margin. You'll instantly learn how brutal and unforgiving the private sphere tends to be versus the more typically spendthrift ways of government.

Most of the time if you think something is that simple, you're leaving something out.

It's a myth that the private sector is inherently more efficient than public sector. You only need to compare healthcare systems across developed countries to find an enormous counterexample.

Government has a different system of accountability than private industry, sometimes it's less efficient, but sometimes it's more efficient. It depends--there's nothing simple about it.

Healthcare is an obvious exception, and religiously fundamentalist capitalists won't admit to that, but the reason is simple. Healthcare has virtually infinite demand, and the demand for more expensive solutions is intense. It is one of the few sectors of the economy where traditional capitalist price optimization algorithms don't function properly. I wish people would admit this and move towards more rational healthcare considerations, but I also wish people would stop using obvious exceptions to argue against rules.

(Healthcare is also an ethical battleground in a sense that many industries never can be. Should a hospital administrator be willing to spend a million dollars to save one life, or should that money go to equipment that could save more lives? The answer seems obvious, but most people react with a sort of justifiable horror at the thought of letting some poor child die so the hospital can buy some new machines.)

Defense, transportation infrastructure, and scientific research are just a few other areas were the rules fall apart.

There are many more. Maybe there aren't any near univeral rules and we should look at thinks on a case by case basis.

Defense and infrastructure are inherently the responsibility of the state. I'm not a small-government libertarian. Market forces should be used here whenever possible (military-industrial complex, etc) but there obviously can't be competing national militaries or competing national highway systems.

Scientific research: maybe, it depends. Innovation is complicated and there's no linear investment-to-payoff in research. People concerned with profit at least are discouraged by the profit motive from dumping huge amounts of money into failed research. At the same time, some critical research isn't market-profitable.

Universal rules definitely exist in the form of things like supply/demand curves. I would rather live in a hardcore capitalist hellhole than in the shambles of a failed society that would result from the alternative. We should be wary of assuming that non-market intervention is necessary, but we shouldn't shy away from acting when that intervention is necessary.

>Universal rules definitely exist in the form of things like supply/demand curves.

There are no universal rules for economics in reality. There are generally useful models, that often fail spectacularly. All the universal rules you can think of depend on simplifications that never actually hold--rational actors, perfect information, perfect competition etc...

>I would rather live in a hardcore capitalist hellhole than in the shambles of a failed society that would result from the alternative.

That really depends on the alternative. USSR?, North Korea?, Cuba?, Feudalism? I can think of some pretty bad failure states for capitalist hellholes.

> We should be wary of assuming that non-market intervention is necessary, but we shouldn't shy away from acting when that intervention is necessary.

Sounds rational to me.

> It's a myth that the private sector is inherently more efficient than public sector.

Stating it, doesn't make it so. You've provided zero argument for your position. You haven't even provided a logic basis for your claim.

Healthcare systems across developed nations? Ok. Germany, Japan and Switzerland all have highly successful private segments to their healthcare systems. They're all as efficient, or more efficient, than comparable overwhelmingly public systems such as in France, Britain or Canada.

How do you define efficiency?

Germany, Switzerland have higher per capital costs than France Britain and Canada.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

Your assertion is that profit motive leads to greater efficiency than any of the motives that drive government agencies.

Just because you state it doesn't make it so.

If you're honest with yourself, I think you can come up with some problems where a public agency would be more efficient/effective than a private company.

They've provided the same amount of logic basis and argument for their claim as you have for yours.

It's a misleading simplification. Profit motive (or "private sector") is not equal to efficiency. But it's a strong motivator for it. Not perfect though, and the further you are from getting outcompeted and dying, the more space you have for inefficiencies to creep in.

One of the big sources of inefficiency affects governments and companies the same - the difficulty of keeping an organization functioning grows superlinearly with the number of people in it. That's why in a small company, if your computer breaks, you can just borrow the company card and go to the nearest store to buy a new one, while in a large company, you'd be dealing with procurement and five layers of management approvals. A large company looks not quite unlike a government organization.

(Also worth mentioning that absolute efficiency is not a good thing either, when it comes to dealing with people.)

I agree.

But a government has (self-imposed) financial constraints as well.

Besides, if you decide mostly or only based on financial constraints and not based on reason and good ideas then you should not be in the position to decide what to do.

Resources might be wasted on purpose to avoid tighter financial constraints in the next year that takes into account the spending of the current year.

It's likely the complexity at fault. The government is much more complex than the average mid-sized company.

If government were operating on a profit motive it wouldn't be doing the things it should be doing.

Government should focus on exactly those things where a profit motive doesn't make sense, i.e. areas where maximising total well-being does not correlate with the ability to extract a profit.

EDIT: So efficiency as applied to government services should really be based on very different criteria than profitability. Though to a lesser extent that is also the case for private companies.

Yes, agree completely. Efficacy is the standard for government.

I'll take a wild guess as to why.

Because you are young.

Most people working for government you know are also young. So you hear about the crazy amount of work they do. But here is the thing: they have to work this much because old government employees do nothing. And after 5 or 10 years busting their asses while they see lazy people not getting fired and getting their raises they'll start putting 2 and 2 together and cut back on work to focus on their family and hobbies. Or work at office politics as it is the best way to get a better pay.

One part is true: I am relatively young. But I have very rarely met government employees my age. If I had to guess, standard would be 35, but have met plenty of folks who are 50+ working in government (something I don’t see in the startup scene at all). Most of them are likely underpaid; however, to be fair, that’s often made up in health benefits and likely somewhat in retirement benefits. And while I don’t doubt there are lazy government employees, the presumption that they outnumber or even match the private sector in this regard rings as false.

There's actually surprisingly little overtime claimed in Korea for all the >40 hour weeks being worked.

The simple answer is that Korea (and Japan) have a cultural norm where showing dedication to your job/company by working long hours is vastly more important for career advancement (or even continued employment!) than the actual work you get done.

Govt workers that you meet in person (DMV, permitting office, etc.) are a tiny drop in the bucket and don't accurately represent the whole.

The American government workers I meet tend be software developers, or developers who've moved into management. They work at least as hard as private sector workers, usually for less pay, and they really believe in their work (science/biology).

The American meme of the dysfunctional DMV seems almost self-reinforcing. The equivalent offices I use in Denmark or the UK are efficient, they have targets to meet and a good working culture.

Every DMV I've ever been in was fast, helpful, and reliable. I don't understand DMV jokes. This experiences include outrageously underfunded rural towns and the biggest city in our state.