The investigation and article focuses too much on "attendance" instead of measuring real work and raising the question as to which other positions are actually useless?
Tons of paper pushing positions exist so that politicians and high level appointed bureaucrats can do favors for people whom they owe favors. Someone (like the deadbeat brother of someone who donated to the governor's campaign or whatever, just making up a reasonable example) who could never hold such a well paying job on their own merits will be given a job and as long as they continue to punch the clock (though per TFA that's not a hard requirement in Italy) the will continue to get paid.
The Vice President launched her career with a position like this, which she received from her married boyfriend, Willie Brown.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/kamala-harris-la...
> Granlund said the appointment seemed brazen at the time because of the relationship between Harris and Brown. “Screwing the speaker has its rewards,” he said. “Stevie Wonder could have seen through that play.”
IMO getting a job by pulling strings isn't as morally dirty as a job existing for no reason other than to transfer money from the taxpayer to someone with connections.
I grew up in a socialist country and this type of stuff was the default and not something newsworthy at all. Everyone did it. All the dads in my residential unit would go sign the attendance sheet and come back home by 11 am and have rest of the day to themselves to garden, grow food, take a nap, play cards ect.
How do proponents of govt run services and production units address this core flaw. I've asked many people but have never gotten a good response.
You are assuming two things that are not true. First, that this always happen in public services. That's false.
Second that this kind of thing doesn't happen in private companies. That's false too. For instance, I have worked in a big private company where some very well payed executives (a lot better payed than the guy in this article) dedicated all their time and effort to office politics. In my personal opinion, in some cases, it would have be better for the company if they just stayed home.
How do you address this? Like everything in society: you create a system of check and balances and work hard to keep them in place.
The hard limit on it in a private company is it going bust but there is no such constraint in the public sector
In terms of resources wasted, how the inefficient of public services would fare against the resources spend in all the companies, not only the surviving ones?
It's something I have never read about, I don't know if some work has been done on this.
One is still arguably fulfilling their responsibilities under their employment contract, the other is very blatantly not
As you say, its 100% a function of the incentives. This is a general flaw with "command" economies where resources are based on who can argue for them best as opposed to demand for the outputs. There is a lot that can be done in terms of SLAs for operational departments and discretion to the operational side on how money gets spent, to try and come closer to a market driven system, but there is no political will for it.
What you are saying is typical of almost any big organization, public or private.
In government we all get harmed, and the only way to exit the situation is by abandoning ones homeland.
Small stock owners have not more power than voters, even less in some cases.
Why would someone vote the same if system is clearly corrupt.
Wouldn't this imply that this guy wouldn't have gotten away had people voted "different". Its peoples fault for indirectly voting for this?
> Small stock owners have not more power than voters, even less in some cases.
I usually simply sell the stocks of company that i no longer believe in. Thats how i vote. What do you mean by have no power. Its not mandatory for me to own certain stocks like it is mandatory for some ppl to go to a govt hospital.
Because the system is not "clearly corrupt", it's just a human organization and it's always going to be some corruption and inefficiency (public or private). You just have to strive to improve it.
">>What do you mean by have no power. Its not mandatory for me to own certain stocks like it is mandatory for some ppl to go to a govt hospital. "
In your analogy, selling stocks is basically leaving the country, that's something that you can do also normally, but probably is better to try to improve it. I believe, that big stockholders practice something called activist investment, where they push for changes.
I don't think there is any country in the world where is mandatory to go to the hospital, but there is some where not hospital is available to part of the population.
You didn't address this in my previous comment and repeated it here. You are implying that this guy getting away for 15 yrs wouldn't have happened had people voted "different" and its their fault for not "striving" enough?
> I don't think there is any country in the world where is mandatory to go to the hospital, but there is some where not hospital is available to part of the population.
I clearly said "for some people" in my comment. Not sure why you are repeating what i just said in my own comment.
"it is mandatory for some ppl to go to a govt hospital."
> In your analogy, selling stocks is basically leaving the country,
This is not an analogy at all. For starters, I can move my money from bad company to a good company. Almost no one in bad countries is allowed to pack up and leave to a better country. Millions of ppl would move to USA in a heartbeat if that was the case.
> better to try to improve it
Ugh. You keep saying this. Are you seriously suggesting that this is the result of people not joining "transparency organizations" (whatever that means). This is such weird circular logic that can never be dis proven. System is not working because we aren't trying hard enough to make it work.
What I'm saying is not so complicated (maybe I complicated it): any human organization will have the same kind of problems. You seem fixated in public vs. private, I don't think that distinction is so important as you do. Can organizations be fixed? Some organizations can be fixed, normally it's hard work.
I will not go beyond that because it would be a pointless discussion here, maybe with a few hours and a few beers we would arrive to some agreement. Obviously I don't have a so good opinion about private markets as the solver of all problems like it seems you do.
See Bullshit Work [1] and empire building [2]. They exist in any large org, since the typical incentives for management to advance are to grow a larger headcount under their 'management'.
Of course this is a similar level to measure progress of designing and building an airplane by how much it weighs. But the fact that this management rule is fundamentally stupid does not prevent executives or politicians from using it because it is easier to measure heads and payroll than actual productivity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire-building
Moreover, in functioning democracies, turnover happens frequently, and there are checks and balances that help keep it in line, including a free press which just loves to expose waste and inefficiency whenever it can.
Also notice that the events in TFA occurred in the area of Italy that is roughly the birthplace of their organized crime syndicates.
This is the kind of thing that happens when governments become dysfunctional, and are captured by authoritarians and/or criminals, not a normally functioning democratic government.
Also note that it is a particularly egregious and spectacular example and makes news, not the ordinary everyday operations.
The country subject of the article - Italy - is extremely inefficient (I don't doubt that there is worse, of course). Absenteism is relatively tolerated; it's not correct that it's a product of organized crime. Sadly, it's a very simple phenomenon of a system without the checks and balances yo mention.
I've observed it first hand, and the absenteist was even open about it - they were actually bragging about it (I'm not joking). I remember another employee waiting to be transferred to another (specific) city, so that he could "do nothing all the day".
> Moreover, in functioning democracies, turnover happens frequently
> This is the kind of thing that happens when governments become dysfunctional, and are captured by authoritarians and/or criminals, not a normally functioning democratic government.
Italy can still be classified as a democracy nonetheless, and it's not going to fail because of inefficiency and corruption.
A company as efficient as the Italian's administration would not survive in a free market, without any doubt.
And re: the investors, don't governments issue bonds? i.e. all governments that issue bonds have investors.
They'd probably first challenge your premise that it is a flaw. A key tenet of socialism is that all are taken care of, including the lazy and incompetent (and their children). Giving such people bullshit jobs to keep them involved in the system, without overly encouraging their lazyness or allowing them to overly disrupt the system, seems like a feature, not a bug.
> have rest of the day to themselves to garden, grow food
Honestly people gardening and growing their own food sounds like a positive for society, more so than sitting in a cubicle pushing papers or pixels of dubious value.
A democracy provides those "checks and balances", in a better way than opaque and undemocratic "investors".
Italy is a democracy. What explains this particular case ?
I suspect this sort of frauds are way more widespread than people realize