Hacker News Reader

Comment by WorkerBee | Hacker News Reader

Well, the UK is currently testing the opposite ridiculous notion - that by laying off lots of government workers (when there already lots of people looking for jobs), reducing benefits to everyone (which hits the poor far harder, of course), and cutting funding to education and research, you'll somehow help the country recover from a recession faster and better.

View on HN

In fairness to the current administration, this was because the previous one had tested the equally ridiculous notion that if you stimulated the economy when things were going extremely well then debt would never become a problem

Edit: you can downvote me all you like, but that won't change the fact that the previous government ran up public sector borrowing deficits throughout the decade even whilst trumpeting their proud record of uninterrupted economic growth, and the only real disagreement in the political mainstream is over the _speed_ with which it needs to be returned to balance.

I totally agree with your analysis of how the UK got into the current mess. That doesn't really say anything about the best way out of it.

2 wrongs don't make a right

Laying off people who weren't and aren't contributing anything productive, because the country has run up gigantic debts.

There's not any easy answer to this problem (except not to have run up the debts in the first place).

Public sector spending and working practices had been out of control for years - it was clear to anyone with any knowledge of how the public sector worked that it couldn't go on for ever and when it stopped things would be ugly.

There is no doubt that there are a lot of people in the public sector who deliver a lot of value. However, there are also a lot of organisations and people who clearly aren't - a tidy out was long overdue.

You assume that this tidy out will get rid of more of the latter (the unproductive ones) than the former (the value-producing ones).

Indeed, a politically astute friend point out that the first reaction of managers would be to cut productive first line services first. The so called "Washington Monument Syndrome":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome

Of course, managers who act this way should be the first ones kicked out...

Laying off people who weren't and aren't contributing anything productive

Saying that UK public services are inefficient is one thing, probably true.

Saying that the layoffs can be confined to people who "aren't contributing anything productive" and be extension health, policing, education, research etc will not get worse at all is an entirely different thing, and I don't think it's true.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com