There was a Subway station called Runnymede that took about 5-7 years and when completely you couldn't tell they did anything. I am sure it cost 10's of millions of dollars and could have been completely started and finished by a private contractor in a couple months.
The city has never been manage properly because there are no consequences to the ineptness of the Politicians and bureaucracy that run it. You could complain (a lawyer friend did) and they basically either ignore or make up some story how difficult it is to lay 200 sq/ft of tile and clean an escalator...These things take years of hard work and planning....
Surprised the city doesn't come crashing down under it's own weight of dysfunction but they seem to prop it up by the endless tax or fee increases.
If an escalator/elevator is shut down for a few months (or years) due to refurbishment, it's because worn, but vital, parts of it have been removed for use as reference materials so replacements can be made. It is also possible that vital parts could be too worn for the escalator/elevator to operate safely until new parts have been made and installed.
I'll also point out that published information on the Runnymede project indicates that the current round of construction started at the end of 2018, involved the addition of three underground elevator shafts, and is expected to be completed at the end of 2020[0]. Unless you are referring to earlier work, your '5-7 year' timeline to 'clean an escalator' is a vast exaggeration.
[0] http://ttc.ca/Service_Advisories/Construction/Runnymede_EA.j...
Pretty much every part of the west is having problems with long elevator/escalator outages these days because so many escalators/elevators were installed in the infrastructure boom of the 1960s/1970s. They're now all reaching the end of their useful lives at the same time and they all need major overhaul and/or replacement.
I’m sure there’s bureaucratic inefficiency. But there’s always so much nonsense that gets appended to the criticism.
If you use the station everyday, you notice these things.
In my 25-floor condo, the company that did our elevator renovation was able to replace 3 elevators over the course of 1 year. They were done in sequence, not parallel, so we had full use of 2 elevators the entire duration.
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/265+Runnymede+Rd,+Toronto,...
* Opposite end: https://www.google.com/maps/place/260+Kennedy+Ave,+Toronto,+...
The subway in that area was built in the 1960s using (AFAIK) a cut-and-cover method, so it's not every deep below the surface:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_2_Bloor–Danforth#Subway_c...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel#Cut-and-cover
The original criticizing GP also assumes that it was a "simple renovation": is this a valid assumption? For example, how do you get a bunch of new elevators installed:
* https://ttc.ca/Service_Advisories/Construction/Runnymede_EA....
Drilling multiple elevator shafts seems more than a "simple renovation".
5-7 years remind me of the Sofia metro (Bulgaria) during the Soviet Bloc era. It was officially under construction for like 20 years but in practice, the budget just wasn't there so the works went forward veeeeeery slowly, in some years literally nothing was done.
My criticism is purely: we don’t know better so let’s avoid throwing numbers out there.
Drilling shafts and installing new elevator is a bit more than a "simple renovation" IMHO.
https://ttc.ca/Service_Advisories/Construction/Runnymede_EA....
And that assumes that they're not doing structural fixes for a station that was built >50 years ago (Line 2, B-D, opened in 1966).
The question is how to remove the corruption and waste.
Public buildings and infrastructure, on the other hand, have other considerations in play. Durability, civic pride, long term safety ...
I travel around the US a lot and always marvel at the stuff that was built by/during the WPA. It is incredible - absurdly overbuilt by any current standards, but that very fact is at the heart of why they are still standing, still enjoyed, still viable.
Nobody will be saying that about any Walmart building in 90 years.
That entire system has since been discredited, because there is no actual need to allocate the labor inefficiently on purpose to reduce unemployment instead of still being as efficient as possible and just e.g. increasing the number or projects. Or even better, stimulating demand for labor by giving money directly to the general population.
But the problem in this case isn't high unemployment, it's high inefficiency. A program designed to reduce unemployment by increasing inefficiency is obviously not a solution for that.
I was talking about what they built and comparing it to contemporary big box store architecture.
You're making an implicit claim that the labor was used inefficiently, which may be true. But unless that takes longevity and less easily measured attributes into account, I'm not sure you can prove that.
Moreover, longevity is often a cost. How many overbuilt old post offices and municipal buildings are we now effectively stuck with in places where they're no longer an appropriate size for the locality? The city's needs are going to be different in twenty or thirty years than they are now, so there is no point in designing ordinary structures to last longer than that when it so often makes more sense to build a new one after that period of time consistent with the needs of today rather than a generation ago.
There's also an assumption that the cost of have an imperfectly adapated building is higher than the cost of multiple building efforts over time. Since both costs are rather variable, it's hard to assess if that is true.
Claiming that private entities are immune (or at least, less susceptible) to the same problems of temporal discounting that clearly affects both individuals and many north American governments seems without foundation to me. There are many incentives in play for private entities to favor short term gain over long term gain, and significant evidence that this affects their behavior just as much as it affects individuals and governments.
I don't agree that it's straightforward to compare "net present value". Go and visit the WPA constructions at many national parks. Nobody would agree to them being built today, so even if you could establish the cost to rebuild them, the fact that there's no way we would ever end up replacing them makes it extremely hard to establish their value to us as a society.
But I don't want to defend those old energy inefficient, hard-to-maintain structures to much. I'm thinking more about what their construction actually represented in terms of a society's willingess to invest (inefficiently!) in the future, and in a more-than-barebones aesthetic.
But that assumption is, by and large, true. If you look at hundred year old buildings, by modern standards they're extremely flawed. The insulation is typically poor or non-existent. They often had higher ceilings due to the limitations of contemporary lighting and HVAC systems, which are now a liability with respect to heating and cooling.
There is little reason to suspect that progress in building design has been discontinued, so a building from today would be expected to be similarly deficient by the standards of a hundred years from now, which means there is little reason to design it to last that long.
But the biggest flaw is often that the building is the wrong size. Decades ago you needed five stories and now you need ten. Or you needed five stories and now you need one. The obvious solution to that is to move to a bigger or smaller building as the need arises.
> There's also an assumption that the cost of have an imperfectly adapated building is higher than the cost of multiple building efforts over time.
Not at all, because the replacement building doesn't have to be on the same lot. You don't have to knock it down to build a new one consistent with your current needs. You can build a new one and then sell the existing one to someone who may be able to make productive use of it as it is. But then it's not the state reaping the benefits of any unusual longevity.
And that assumption may still be true in many cases regardless. If you have a five story building which over time comes to be surrounded by skyscrapers, it could easily be cost effective to remove it and make the lot available for another skyscraper, or for the new owner to do so and in so doing yield two dividends to the local government -- one from the sale of a lot with a high property value, and then another from the increased property tax revenue from the taller building.
> Claiming that private entities are immune (or at least, less susceptible) to the same problems of temporal discounting that clearly affects both individuals and many north American governments seems without foundation to me.
Temporal discounting isn't a problem, it's what you're supposed to do. An expense today is much more costly than the same dollar value expense in 50 years, because if you don't spend the money today, you get 50 years worth of interest on it (or don't have to pay 50 years in interest on having borrowed it).
> I'm thinking more about what their construction actually represented in terms of a society's willingess to invest (inefficiently!) in the future, and in a more-than-barebones aesthetic.
In which case you're essentially asking for the state to fund architecture as art with tax money. But if that's what the taxpayers want, why don't the buy it directly?
More saliently, spending tens of millions of dollars to re-tile a subway station isn't doing that anyway.
You're assuming a certain type of climate. Hundred year old buildings with huge levels of thermal mass in year-round warm climates are exactly what you want, not insulation. The high ceilings are also extremely practical in such environments.
>There is little reason to suspect that progress in building design has been discontinued
Building design: no question that we've got new stuff that in the right conditions is better than what we had 100 years ago. We have some new stuff (e.g. insulated glazing) that is just better always. But there are many aspects of actual building construction that could be argued to have gone backwards in the last 100 years, mostly because of the rise of developer-led construction and the economics that this implies.
> the replacement building doesn't have to be on the same lot.
Fair point.
> An expense today is much more costly than the same dollar value expense in 50 years, because if you don't spend the money today, you get 50 years worth of interest on it
That assumes that you don't gain anything of value from the expense today. If what you are saying was so simplistically true, there would no point in investing in anything at all. If I put money into blue chip stocks with the expectation of earning profits, I do so with the idea in mind that these profits will exceed any interest I might have earned by saving it. If we collectively put money into a beautiful city hall or park lodge, we do with the idea in mind that what we will gain over the life of the building is worth more to us that the interest we might have earned by saving the cost instead.
> In which case you're essentially asking for the state to fund architecture as art with tax money
If you can't differentiate or acknowledge the concept or utility of public investment in public places, then I'm certainly not going to persuade you that this is not what I'm asking for.
Who's paying? I can't express within the confines of the rules here how livid this sort of "we should spend taxpayer money on looking good to fluff our own egos" thinking is. The public is best served a vinyl tiled "Walmart subway" where the lightbulbs work and the trains run. Not a billion dollar marble monstrosity. Any bureaucrat opting to condone the latter is shirking their duty to use the resources at their disposal to deliver maximum results to the taxpayers.
I'm not advocating for "a billion dollar marble monstrosity". I'm advocating for the difference between a well built city hall and a Walmart store.
How many companies build large bridges, airports, subways, railroads, tunnels, etc? Not many.
It is part of the racket that discourages innovation.
Of course past experience is still a logical thing to consider when judging the overall risks of a project. But if you look for creative solutions you can get away from "look, this entrenched legacy business is the only one meeting out experience requirements".
https://secure.lni.wa.gov/wagelookup/ApprenticeWageLookup.as...
This most likely happens because of insufficient government funding for maintenance.
Government budgets reset every year; governments can't take unspent program money at the end on one fiscal year and bank it for next year. There is no way to "save up" for big expenses aside from directly allocating sufficient funds in the funding legislation.
That sort of lump allocation is a lot easier to get for new work. The main reason is, new work has better optics--you go from nothing to something. Maintenance, unless it changes the cosmetics, looks about the same at the end as it did in the beginning. Boring! "What did we get for all that money??" citizens ask.
And maintenance is harder to budget for in a lump sum because you don't know how bad things are until you actually start the work. This is generally true of maintenance--anyone who has renovated an old home knows this. Until you open the wall, you don't know how much work needs to be done.
So what you do in government is start the maintenance projects you have at highest priority, find out how bad things are, and then do as much as you can with the budget you have. It it's not enough to complete an atomic unit of work, you just sit on partially-done work until more money becomes available.
And ironically, the irritation caused by unfinished work can help get you the money to finish the work.
If maintenance was properly budgeted, then the subway system could afford to do a full refresh all in one continuous go. Usually it's not, so usually they can't.
Most of the housing in smaller cities is getting very old, built to very poor standards. Requiring constant maintenance. The owners often still stuck in 25 year mortgages, fixing houses that will fall apart in less time than that.
Many of Schools haven't been updated in decades, despite having asbestos insulation.
I visited a former Eastern Block country this past summer. New roads, infrastructure and buildings everywhere. Built to a much higher standard too. Much better food in Restaurants too. Thinking of moving back to Europe.
Considering the 300 billion deficit this year alone, declining credit ratting, higher taxes. The money for infrastructure will be hard to come by in the next decade.
To be slightly simplistic, that’s probably more of a reflection on the generosity of Western European taxpayers than an inherent standard of the country you visited
Not saying it always works.
I wonder if you have never seen waste at work?
There's a long list of ways it can go wrong.
Cost of land is a surprisingly high factor.
I'm generally against eminent domain. Because it's abused so easily and so often. But I would also like the option to build our way out of our messes.
Failing to make the real estate more affordable, maybe we'll innovate our way out. Some combination of telework, The Boring Company, and cheap personal transportation options.
The answer is always the same for local governments. ~70% of expenditure is for operations, and 60% of that is for cops and fire.
There are many large cities with hugely underfunded pension plans.
Usually state plans mandate contributions to some degree -- in my state (NY) the year after a stock market crash is always a mess for schools and localities because the state requires increased contributions to make up for investment target misses.
Even where the state isn't a good or responsible pension administrator, the pension system membership usually takes the obligation off of the city/county balance sheet. States have sovereign immunity, so at the end of the day, the pensioners will take a haircut.
Source? There is no shortage of articles online describing cities’ budget woes due to underfunded pensions needing increased contributions.
Jacksonville, Dallas, San Diego, San Bernardino, Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago, the list goes on and on. The state government has a pension fund for state employees, cities can have one for city employees, counties can have one for county employees.
Illinois actually codifies in its state constitution the fact that the government may NOT alter pension benefits.
Here are some links about the obligations of individual cities:
https://www.truthinaccounting.org/news/detail/2020-financial...
Counties, corporations, charters, port authorities, states. I couldn't guess at all the structures and financing schemes that have been concocted.
For instance, Port Authority of NY and NJ builds, owns, and operates a massive amount of infrastructure. Completely apart from NYC. The Port Authority in my own region is its own separate nominally democratic fiefdom with its own powers to raise taxes, fees, etc.
"The problem" is whatever the problem always is. Maybe its Capitalism. Maybe its "kickbacks, overregulation, collusion in bidding, and simple "match the budget" bids" It's probably whatever your worldview always points to.
How is a strong opinion a democratic duty?
The winner completed it far faster than similar projects, and under projected budget, taking it all in from the bonus. Every day he was slow, he lost money. So the incentives were great, and the winning contractor did a great job. So we have the construction technology and we have the policy technology.
But similar projects frequently take forever. Why is that? We know how to make them fast, cheap, and good, clearly. We know how to set up the incentives on a per-task basis so we will do that as well. So I suspect it is because they actually aren't crucial. So you sell the buyer (the populace) on the price tag based on the supposed importance, but you actually do the work on the real importance. The gap between the two allows for profit for politically connected contractors like Tutor Perini and also for make-work for powerful groups like construction unions. What we don't know is how to set up the incentives such that good per-task incentives will be put in place.
In fact, I'd say that the true importance of any slow project is likely very low. In California, the following projects should not have started:
* CA HSR
* SF Central Line
During their lifetimes they will not yield positive economic utility.
Maybe we can create a marketplace for bidding on infrastructure work job by job and maybe, it could be profitable for everyone. I’m not so sure though.
It's not that easy to ensure that all 3 happen.
>It's not that easy to ensure that all 3 happen.
That raises a couple of questions:
1. Why aren't problems visible?
Is it a failure of local government to disclose how they're spending your money? If so, why do you and your neighbors allow that? It is your money and your town after all. Especially since, even in a medium-sized city, a few hundred people who care about their quality of life can completely upend politics as usual.
2. Why don't people "act on [lack of transparency] and actually vote"?
Again, this seems rather odd to me. I can certainly understand (although I don't agree) that folks may think that Federal, and even some state elections don't give them any say. But local elections are a very different story.
3. Is it really true (as you seem to contend) Is it your contention that overwhelming majorities of people everywhere just don't care about the places they live, or for what purposes their tax dollars are used?
Can you actually see the almost complete failure of garbage disposal and recycling in your community? You cannot, because the failure doesn't happen there (mostly), and because most of us are not interested enough to ask (or research) the questions we would need to in order to understand how badly the people tasked with taking care of this have screwed it up.
> 2. Why don't people "act on [lack of transparency] and actually vote"?
Right now, I live in a mostly rural county in New Mexico. Before that, I lived right on the edge of Philadelphia, 300 yards outside the city line but closer to downtown than most of the city. I've lived in lots of other places too, both in the US and Europe, even Israel. In all of those places, a local vote is vote for someone who will be extremely constrained by the status quo and the larger political entities the surround us. So sure, I could vote for someone who might take some steps to improve a particular aspect of how the county/city/town/village deals with this or that, but it will always be taking place within the context of legislative, economic, energetic and social forces that are much, much harder to change. This can make it challenging to see the virtue of local elections, and thus to care about them in a way the reflects the extent to which we do actualy care about our communities.
These are fundamentally unanswered questions in this thread.
We would have even less visibility than before - I got no idea how Microsoft delivers Windows or how a private hospital is tracking performance wise? But a government gives me some kind of mechanism to see this.
Government acts as an imperfect (as you have carefully detailed) intermediary between those the service provider and service recipient the citizen.
And it is only as imperfect as the system is designed, there are adjustments that can be made, slowly sure, but they can be made.
It is my suspicion that there is actually a lot more talented people than we tend to think and the real problem is educating and managing them well.
There is an interesting case of Florence, Italy, which in the 14th and 15th century produced an incredible set of world class painters. That school is unmatched until today. We think that world class painters must be principially very rare, but maybe not so much. In a relatively short span of time, recruiting mostly students from Northern Italy only, the Florence school could produce quite a significant percentage of artistic heritage of the whole humanity.
Elon Musk, who got his start through his sapphire-mining family is the best example of that, he knows how important access to money and politicians is.
But..
This seems too simplistic a rule to apply to large and complicated projects which likely are the case with creating and maintaining infrastructure.
If private investment can't calculate expected return they don't do it and this often is the case with complicated projects there is often high risk involved and no easily attainable reward (from a financial perspective).
This is why public / government undertakes these projects because they know what the expected benefit is to society and are not driven by ROI in the same way as private enterprise.
Your model needs to take this into account in order to be more persuasive.
You can probably count on one hand the number of governments that have "gone out of business" (so to speak), in the last 40-50 years. You'll need several people to tabulate the set of private enterprises that have gone bankrupt, defunct, or M&A'd out of existence over the same timespan, in the US alone.
If you pick the 20th century, then the number of governments that have “failed” is really large as a proportion of total governments. We think of countries like France as having been around for hundreds of years, but their current constitution is only 62 years old. Romania had three different governments in about 50 years. Japan, China, and Vietnam all replaced their governments. Czechoslovakia came into being and disappeared.
Other than a coup, civil war, or a foreign takeover, there isn't really a way for a government to definitely 'fail', but no-one would say that these events are unheard of.
Losing control of a significant part of a country isn't comparable to private enterprise failure, it's more comparable to the CEO of a company being replaced.
Imagine what retail would have been like if, instead of Sears being essentially replaced, we just elected a different set of leaders to run the same organization.
> No-one would say that Syria or Libya have a single functioning government controlling the country at the moment, and you can throw swathes of central Africa in there as well.
Right, and in general we consider that instability to be a bad thing, and a key goal of UNESCO (and adjacent organizations) is to make African nations as stable as Western democracies. That kind of stability just isn't sought out in the private sector.
> Other than a coup, civil war, or a foreign takeover, there isn't really a way for a government to definitely 'fail', but no-one would say that these events are unheard of.
If you were to ask me to pick a system where change happens through violence and bloodshed (civil wars, coups) vs peaceful financial transactions (M&A, bankruptcy) — I would choose the latter any day of the week.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_constitutio...
In contrast, peaceful restructuring of private enterprise (via startup incorporation, bankruptcy, or M&A) is just a way of life. People didn't die when PanAm, TWA, and Circuit City went out of business. People didn’t die when GM was restructured.
And 2008 has killed plenty of people, by rendering them homeless, hungy, and unable to afford healthcare.
It's really not. We have more than enough history to corroborate.
> And 2008 has killed plenty of people, by rendering them homeless, hungy, and unable to afford healthcare.
Right, and these events are rare and noteworthy also — the only other time that had happened before that was during the 1930's. The same cannot be said for structural changes in government. In addition, if you think the scale and severity of economic deaths of despair caused by 2008 can be compared with the civil wars in the Middle East, the Balkan Kosovo War, the World Wars (and Holocaust), or what's going on in Central Africa...I really don't know what to say.
There's more people dying each year due to lack of health care access in the US alone than multiples of the Kosovo War.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-fin...
Add to that all the drug overdoses in the US for just 2019:
> Drug overdose deaths in the United States rose 4.6% in 2019 to 70,980
https://www.aha.org/news/headline/2020-07-16-cdc-drug-overdo...
That's over 100k deaths per year that's definitely strongly linked to economic despair.
2. Even if indirect/preventable deaths were somehow comparable to war/revolution/genocide, this is pretty much unique to the US, whose government inefficiently allocates welfare. Canada, Germany, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Taiwan, Belgium, Netherlands etc etc etc all rely on the private sector to deliver the majority of their goods & services. The fact that the US has an inefficient welfare system is somewhat orthogonal to the issue at hand: whether the (peaceful) creative destruction yields more efficient outcomes than structural rigidity and institutional sclerosis.
If the US instituted a UBI or more efficiently allocated its public health spending to include those that may be unable to afford healthcare, it doesn't change the fact that in the majority of liberal democracies that rely predominately on the private sector, structural change doesn't need to be brought about through violence, even if the governments and their institutions remain rigid.
2. It's hard to deny that the cause of this is not fundamentally caused by an over emphasis on free market ideology.
Yes, in fact the upper, upper-middle, and largely the (prudish) middle class of society isn't as impacted by drug overdose deaths as they are about the threat of genocide and war. The latter impacts everyone more or less equally. The former impacts a very narrow segment of society. It should then not come as a surprise that society assesses the risk (and devastation) of the two in different ways.
You need to remember that the median American is NOT an opioid addict. In fact the median American is fairly rich -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c.... While it is truly sad that there exists poor people that are addicted to opioids (and dying as a result), we have to remember that it's a small minority of society as a whole, and the risk of becoming a drug addict isn't uniform.
> It's hard to deny that the cause of this is not fundamentally caused by an over emphasis on free market ideology.
"Free market ideology" is entirely orthogonal to the issue, because the issue you pointed out is isolated in the US, but "free market ideology" is the predominant ideology of the liberal world where the issue you pointed out is notably absent.
In every single comparably wealthy country, the public sector makes up a (stark) minority of the workforce -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_se...
The OECD average is 21%. There are countries that have lower public sector size than the US (Netherlands, Germany, South Korea, New Zealand, Japan, Austria) that have comparable (if not higher) human well-being. You cannot compare life in those countries to life in Syria/Iraq/Afghanistan, Kosovo, Central Africa, etc etc.
In the countries devoid of the kind of opioid deaths you speak of, economic freedom is among the highest, many even higher than the US -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_...
Since you can't reproduce that causation in other countries, you cannot conclude that there exists such a causation. It's very much a "US" problem. Put simply, the safety net in the US has some holes in it.
I wrote "over emphasis". Then you just go on about some irrelevant stats regarding the size of the public sector etc. While other countries realise that the "free market" needs to be curtailed in many spheres to not do too much damage, the US have decided that this isn't an issue and people need to take care of themselves on the "free market". Hence the lack of proper welfare and universal health care (and we can go on to worker benefits if you'd like, or perhaps higher education?).
Yes, that is exactly the point I'm making. Strictly from a utilitarian perspective, civil war/genocide affects more people, more uniformly than drug addiction. Attacking that from "won't you think of the poors?" angle isn't a constructive argument to be made.
And lest we forget, the original point of argument was that peaceful restructuring of corporation is preferable to violent restructuring through wars, coups, and genocide. "What about the drug overdoses?" is an odd argument because I don't know anyone that would say "I prefer peaceful creative destruction over war, except if there are opioid overdoses, in which case I prefer civil war and violent coups, yes."
> I wrote "over emphasis". Then you just go on about some irrelevant stats regarding the size of the public sector etc.
Isn't that exactly what "free market" means? Economic freedom and the size of the private sector?
> Hence the lack of proper welfare and universal health care (and we can go on to worker benefits if you'd like, or perhaps higher education?).
Yes, and this is a failure of government policy. The US healthcare system is the least free market there is. I write software for claims processing and healthcare pricing systems for a living, and I can tell you right now that the US's healthcare system is a byzantine nightmare. The only thing remotely "market-like" about the system is that there are an obscene amount of profits...but that's all downstream of asinine incentives brought about by policy. It isn't some grand accident of the free market.
I'm in agreement with you that this needs to be fixed. However the fact that these problems exist in the US but not elsewhere suggests that it also has very little to do with "free market ideologies", and your insistence to the contrary regardless of the empirical evidence suggests that your approach to this is purely driven by ideology.
This is absurd. That the US is a country where business, markets, profits have been prioritized over people is blatantly obvious for everyone that's not a free market fundamentalist where every single instance of a negative outcome needs to be excused by either "it's not free enough" or "other's are actually also rather free", or ofc, put the blame on the government.
You also jump onto the wording of course. I mean it in a general sense, free market, capitalist, market oriented society that applies it to much more spheres of society than other countries. So give me a break that I'm the one "purely driven by ideology" when you're writing with a convert's fervour.
> regardless of the empirical evidence
And the differences in worker benefits and welfare (etc...) is not empirical evidence of a society that's gotten way too hooked on capitalism?
> I write software for claims processing and healthcare pricing systems for a living
In a well functioning society your job should not exist.
This is a bit of word salad, but 1) these traits exist in so many other advanced wealthy countries that pointing it out is irrelevant, and 2) the US is a mixed economy -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States
> I mean it in a general sense, free market, capitalist, market oriented society that applies it to much more spheres of society than other countries.
Yes, and all of those countries I listed out are "free market" "capitalist" "market oriented" societies.
Switzerland -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Switzerland
Singapore -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Singapore
Taiwan -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Taiwan
Japan -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Japan
New Zealand -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_New_Zealand
Australia -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Australia
Belgium -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Belgium
Canada -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Canada
etc
> And the differences in worker benefits and welfare (etc...) is not empirical evidence of a society that's gotten way too hooked on capitalism?
Many countries with strong unions have seen a similar or even greater decline in labor share of income than the US. The US is not really much different than any other advanced economy on that front: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/featured%20insight... (page 5). In the US, labor’s share of income is less than France, about the same as Germany, and more than Spain. It’s significantly higher than Sweden, which has robust unions. Moreover, nearly all the decline in labor’s share of income happened between 2000 and today (page 6). The decrease was very slight from 1947 to 2000. But unions stopped being a significant force in the US long before 2000.
> In a well functioning society your job should not exist.
This reaction of yours is illuminating, because it shows how little you know about how healthcare even works. I don't work for an insurance company, I write software that's used by insurance companies to process claims and price fees. This is an abstract actuarial function that's necessary regardless of whether a private entity or a public entity is the insurer. Public government insurers do not manually process claims by hand one-by-one. Ditto pricing, I work on generating fee schedules. You know where else fee schedules are used? Medicare and Medicaid. Their actuaries use software similar to what I work on to model risk and determine what premiums (or tax contributions) should be, and how much physicians should be paid.
I make a statement that countries have realized that the free market is harmful in certain spheres and you go on about the economy as a whole instead, which I have never claimed to not be capitalist/market economies.
I make a statement about the vast difference in worker benefits and welfare and you go on about the labor's share of income instead, which I have never claimed to be higher.
> I write software that's used by insurance companies to process claims and price fees
Insurance companies should play no role in healthcare, and they certainly don't where I live.
When you’re backed into a corner, you appear to resort to name calling and hostility, as always.
I’m directly addressing your arguments by showing you that reality is a lot more complicated than you seem to think, by the numbers. Your entire world view neatly fits into a packaged ideology that only seems to reconcile with a warped version of how the US actually works (as well as other countries).
> Insurance companies should play no role in healthcare, and they certainly don't where I live.
I understand you feel that way. What I’m saying is that my software is used by your government. My job will exist regardless of who is actually paying for healthcare, because I’m not in the business of financing, I’m in the business of claims processing, provider payment, and automated price generation. These are functions that government payers also use to pay physicians and to drive their per capita costs down also. It will always be a part of the value chain.
Also, private insurance companies play a role in healthcare in many prosperous countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand.
Don't flatter yourself.
> I’m directly addressing your arguments
You haven't directly addressed anything. I just gave you two very clear examples where you just change the subject to something I've never claimed instead of answering the questions/arguments.
> It will always be a part of the value chain.
Alright, fair enough. Good for you.
How did you come to the conclusions that, life for life, a drug user's death is any better than someone getting shot in Afganistan?
Do you have anything to backup this strange idea?
Because getting shot in Afghanistan (especially during a war) is a random event, and the risk is spread evenly among society. The risk of drug overdose is concentrated. You don't accidentally trip on heroine, it takes a set of (largely predictable) circumstances to get there.
Society correctly assesses this risk, which is why solving the opioid epidemic polls a lot less favorably than policing and defense. The idea that society (writ large) cares more about preventing genocide and war than preventing isolated drug deaths isn't really that controversial.
Is the Lebanese government "in business" or no? That is a question with fuzzy answer, but if no government is 0 and competent government is 1, Lebanese government right now may be 0.02 or so.
Czechoslovakia, where I was born, disintegrated in 1992. The transition was peaceful, but the federal government simply is no more.
I mean, in theory, democracy ensures that inefficient leaders lose office, except that reality rarely lives up to theory.
IRL, the business models of most major tech companies are pretty impervious to most inefficiency. Most of their leadership is beyond the reach of shareholder discipline too. Monopoly makes a good moat.
Banks aren't accountable for their own losses. How many more examples do we need? Large company bankruptcies are a rarity, and when they do happen (eg american airlines) the resulting mess just enforces the bailouts mentality. Dealing with them is an exercise in kafkaesque patience and it is impossible to work out where their mindless bureaucracy starts and regulation begins.
In 2020, an anti-bureaucracy worldview that sees the dividing line as public/private is foolishly anachronistic.
Sure "some" mechanism exists for them to go out of business. That's about as useful as the ballot for creating efficiency.
It's not just replacing inefficient leaders that's an important mechanism for "efficiency", it's also restructuring organizations. Democracy, at best, just means that you have different leaders, but the mostly the same set of bureaucrats operating the same programs. Private enterprises, on the other hand, allow us to whole-sale replace entire purveyors of goods & services with entirely different structures of organization in a manner that's difficult to reproduce for a monolithic public monopoly.
Imagine what retail would have been like if, instead of Sears being essentially replaced, we just elected a different set of leaders to run the same organization.
> IRL, the business models of most major tech companies are pretty impervious to most inefficiency.
When a business is unable to collect enough money to continue operating, it goes out of business. Almost no major tech company has been able to continue operating without either sustaining themselves, or collecting investment.
> Most of their leadership is beyond the reach of shareholder discipline too. Monopoly makes a good moat.
Sure, and monopolies are bad for the same reason. But most industries aren't run by monopolies. You only hear about the ones that are, because they're so noteworthy.
> Sure "some" mechanism exists for them to go out of business. That's about as useful as the ballot for creating efficiency.
I don't think that's true at all. You can count on one hand the government programs that have gone defunct in the last 60 years. The number of private enterprises that have gone bankrupt, defunct, or M&A’d out of existence over the same timespan is almost countless.
You're 100% right about the banks and bailouts, though. That's not a private enterprise problem, though — that's a "our government is doing a stupid thing" problem.
Mineral exploration & refining, media, technology, finance & banking, military industry, online retail... what % of the economy are we at with just these?
Market discipline, creative destruction and such work to full effect for restaurants, hairdressers, landscaping... It's a small part of the economy, but good. Pretty unbureaucratic and efficient. Well functioning markets are great when you have them, they just aren't most of the economy.
Some industries (eg FMCGs, shipping) are concentrated, but a degree of market discipline still operates. Not like hairdressing, but there is at least price competition within a limited frame. Some private industries are just impossible to pick apart from government: Health and pharmaceuticals, all government contracting, real estate, etc. Most market mechanisms don't apply here either. They certainly don't apply in "systemic" situations.
It is a fact that a lot (arguably most) of the economy is very far from the market ideal that restaurants operate within. It's not totally black and white, but thinking of these issues in a 1970s frame is silly.
That doesn't mean private and public are identical, but a Smithian pin factory is as bad a model for most of the economy as a local fire department.
Mineral exploration: https://www.manta.com/mb_35_E31F37VC_000/mineral_exploration
Refining: https://www.mckinseyenergyinsights.com/resources/refinery-re...
Technology: https://medium.com/@progressivepolicyinstitute/10-things-you...
Military industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defense_contractors
Finance & Banking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_banks_in_the_U...
Online retail: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2019/12/amazons-mark...
None of these are monopolies. These are all concentrated, but not monopolized. To your later point, market discipline still functions in concentrated industries.
> Market discipline, creative destruction and such work to full effect for restaurants, hairdressers, landscaping... It's a small part of the economy.
The vast majority of industries are either operated by many small players, or a few large players (concentration). Actual monopolies are extraordinarily rare.
> Health and pharmaceuticals, all government contracting, Real Estate, etc. No market mechanism here either
This is also untrue.
Health & pharmaceuticals: Same story. concentration? Perhaps. Monopoly? Not by a long shot. You have major players like Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Merck, GSK, Amgen BV, Abbott, McKesson, etc etc.
Ditto real estate: https://www.propertymanagerinsider.com/the-biggest-u-s-based...
The private sector isn't a silver bullet, and there's always a place for democracy and governments. But we have to be real about what works where, and what doesn't.
We we speaking in a context. If we can't agree that any of these industries are monopolized... If we have to start by assuming that the market dynamics of a pin factory are at play in commercial banking... IDK where to go exactly.
Besides that, the other examples I gave were explicitly of non monopolies. Market dynamics like competition, creative destruction and such are not in operation. Monopoly (extreme concentration, trusts, oligopoly, monopsony, oligopsony, captive bottlenecks... do we really have to do this or can we just use "monopoly" as shorthand like normal people?)
>> we have to be real about what works where, and what doesn't.
We have to be real about what is a market, in the Smithian sense is, and what isn't. Military industry is not a market. There are a few big players with most of the market. One buyer. Political dynamics are many times more important than market dynamics. Same for commercial banking, pharmaceuticals etc.
In 2020 it is simply trite to look to the relative efficiency of government vs private (non-market) as the lens through which everything is seen. If we have to look through that lens, lets at least look through it honestly. Private vs Public has nothing to do with market discipline because market discipline doesn't exist for most of the economy... particularly if you measure it by market cap. Monopolism (using the term widely) is just one of the reasons, but there are others. The world is complicated and commercial banking is not subject to the same dynamics as local plumbing businesses. Pretending that they are is madness.
BTW, Adam Smith would have been on my side of this debate, as would have most of the old liberals. Market ideology has gone so far that people don't even need a market to apply it to.
Sum($Z) >> Sum($Y) with $X paid for my subsidies.
We need construction robots.
[1] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-c...
https://secure.lni.wa.gov/wagelookup/ApprenticeWageLookup.as...
What do you mean by this?
Much of American infrastructure provision is like that hypothetical person - the goal is never to to spend less. Political and organizational goals are to increase budget, increase headcount, deliver ribbon cutting ceremonies, avoid affecting neighborhoods with powerful constituents, hit service coverage goals, create construction and operations jobs, etc. There’s no one whose job evaluation and advancement is based on reducing costs.
But how they get the money and from who is a factor too.
This always happens when real property is taxed rather than commerce, and the amount of land available for development is limited or fixed.
To start with all land is taxed according to its initial assessment, after that revenues can not increase without raising rates and/or further developing parcels to increase their taxable value.
Both of which are unsustainable in the face of any inflation at all.
Each of which have their staunch supporters at odds with the other.
If only rate increases are considered, rate increases will have to outpace inflation or the taxing authority will go bankrupt.
The taxing authority can not be allowed to fail especially since the original purpose of this type tax is for the taxpayer to go bankrupt before the nobility does.
Eventually the _landowner_ will be assessed more tax than the land itself brings in, and will require _owners_ having outsized wealth from other sources, often only multigenerational prosperity will be sufficient.
At the other extreme where revenue growth comes only from further property development, pressure is greatest on undeveloped properties having the biggest upside potential.
New infrastructure is built at the expense of the old, spread more widely, and naturally not yet having future inflated maintenance costs incurred.
Little hand-waving is needed when a tax payer & collector are all prospering over the deal in the short term and there is some plausibility to behave as if future prosperity for all taxpayers will increase at the rate enjoyed by those involved with the development. Surely making costly things easier by then.
Inflation makes it impossible to know for sure anyway.
Mix and match these growing costs across citizenry which is not becoming more prosperous, and eventually there is no discretionary wealth except among the few who overcame the inflationary toll.
Taxing commerce instead of property allows revenue to grow at the rate of real prosperity unlimited. With the risk that revenue will drop when prosperity drops, or the authority will go bankrupt at the same time as the general citizenry in such a case.
Not a realistic risk since the authority will have enough credit to delay its own bankruptcy until after the majority of the citizens are ruined.
I guess the point of view about what kind of tax could ideally fund infrastructure indefinitely depends on whether you are a lowly taxable subject or a high-born guv'nor.