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Comment by dominotw | Hacker News Reader

because the machine not driven by checks and balances enforced by investors.

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.

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>>"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.

I my experience working for both government organizations and large private ones, the problem is noticeably worse and more pervasive in the government.

the problem is noticeably worse and more pervasive in the government

The hard limit on it in a private company is it going bust but there is no such constraint in the public sector

I have asked myself about this calculation sometimes. If a lot of private companies go bust, we compare governments that not go bust with the surviving companies.

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.

I don’t think we should be lumping those not showing up to work at ALL together with those who do participate but in a harmful, egocentric (whatever) way

One is still arguably fulfilling their responsibilities under their employment contract, the other is very blatantly not

When running a government department there's no way to become more powerful except by getting more people. If you run your department efficiently you don't get to expand and take over other markets, instead you'd lose employees under your command and get a smaller budget, the incentives are wrong

This is spot on. I have worked as a consultant doing reviews of a handful of diverse government departments, and leadership's priorities were always identical: justify headcount increases. Every one will have a presentation about the changing nature of their work, new legislation, the decline in staff vs some past golden age etc etc that shows they need more people.

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.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law#Formula for an example of this.

I can only assume that you guys have not worked for big private companies.

What you are saying is typical of almost any big organization, public or private.

The only difference is that in companies the people being harmed are the owners of the company, and they are the ones with the power to do something about it, either by firing the CEO, or divesting of the c9mpany and investing in its rivals.

In government we all get harmed, and the only way to exit the situation is by abandoning ones homeland.

I suppose that's true for some countries, but in most countries you can do something about it, even if it takes a lot of work. You can vote different, join transparency organizations and so on.

Small stock owners have not more power than voters, even less in some cases.

> You can vote different

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.

">>Why would someone vote the same if system is clearly corrupt."

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 just have to strive to improve it.

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.

I think we are talking pass other.

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.

Voting seems unlikely to affect this matter. Federal employees are three times less likely than those in the private sector to be fired. Elected officials come and go, but the permanent bureaucracy lives on. In many places it is essentially impossible to fire a teacher or police officer outside of egregious wrongdoing.

Once you are large enough to control the government then you are the government, you can eliminate competition and thus have no incentive to be efficient.

It is large organizations, not govt vs corps/investors.

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

Large organizations can fail though, so there is an upper limit to inefficiency; governments can't, so the limit to inefficiency (and corruption) is virtually non-existing.

Nonsense, governments fail all the time

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.

> Also notice that the events in TFA occurred in the area of Italy that is roughly the birthplace of their organized crime syndicates.

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.

Incompetence is incompetence, regardless of its source.

And re: the investors, don't governments issue bonds? i.e. all governments that issue bonds have investors.

I'd go further and say everyone owns bonds in the common good. Private organizations don't have a monopoly on interdependence, or public ones on incompetence.

That kind of behavior is also pretty much the default in the public sector in the third world country where I live. No wonder everyone's dream down here is to have a job in the public sector.

> How do proponents of govt run services and production units address this core flaw

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.

This sounds like universal basic income but with more steps....

You misidentify the problem. You grew up in an authoritarian country. Authoritarian capitalist countries do exist and are also rife with corruption and cronyism and inefficiencies.

A democracy provides those "checks and balances", in a better way than opaque and undemocratic "investors".

> A democracy provides those "checks and balances"

Italy is a democracy. What explains this particular case ?

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