Anyone who's worked in private orgs of comparable sizes can attest to their horrendous inefficiencies and waste. The idea that somehow the private sector is inherently more productive or efficient is simply not bourne out in practice. But it _sounds_ like it ought to be true so the idea won't die. And we're all worse off as a result.
With a private enterprise, you have stakeholders at the top that can single-handedly reallocate resources to/away from endeavors as needed. Within government, that can be a lot more difficult as resource allocation is more complex with many more stakeholders and layers of bureaucracy. This is especially true in democracies where changes have to be approved by either the citizens or partisan groups within congress whose goals may be in direct contradiction to the success of your organization.
1. they have a profit motive, and if they don't show a profit, they die
2. smaller companies continually replace large, bureaucratic organizations
> simply not bourne out in practice
SpaceX can launch rockets at what, 10% of the cost of NASA?
> we're all worse off as a result
How so?
It has gotten to the point that, rather than seeking to build a great product or provide a great service and make a good profit for doing so, far, far too many companies are seeking to make as much profit as conceivably possible, and making the product or providing the service is simply a necessary evil toward that end. That is part of what has led to the catastrophic financialization of so much of our economy.
Money is not the end. Money is a tool. The end goal should always have been better products and services, a better society, and happier people.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
Capitalism is founded upon the idea that the amount the market is willing to pay for something is a good measure of its true value. Which used to be a pretty good measure (and to an extent still is - for now). But deregulation has increased our dependence on this measure, which in turn has lead to an increase in it is being gamed. And over time an increasing share of financially successful businesses are those that exploit failures in the metric rather than those providing genuine value.
Upon reflection, I think that this is also a significant aspect of one major part of the problem today.
In the general case, yes: retail products, for instance, are still subject to market forces such that the price you pay bears some reasonable resemblance to what society considers the value of the product.
But what about ad-supported services? The people consuming the services are not, in fact, paying with money. They have no way of gauging how much the services cost, nor how much they personally are giving up in terms of personal data to indirectly pay that cost.
The personal data sector of the economy is, I believe, a perfect example of a place where Goodhart's Law has run rampant, with the only measures available being "how many users" and "how much annual recurring revenue", and both of these being hopelessly complicated—the former to determine just what is a user, and the latter to determine how the value of the service to its users actually translates into profit.
Not sure how coherent this is, but it seems very relevant.
They have radically different ways of doing launches. These are directly threatening to NASA people wedded to the old ways. In order for NASA to adopt their methods wholesale, they'd have to reorganize completely and probably fire a lot of people. And still do an inferior job, because it would take them years.
Wait 20 years and SpaceX will be just as wedded to the methods of 2022 as NASA's wedded to 1969.
What I said about The Innovator's Dilemma is not the whole story. Governments are inherently more risk-adverse, so they'd prefer to take three times as long if it's perceived as safer.
USPS First Class mail volume is down substantially, because no one writes letters anymore.
You're right that you can't drive them out of business, and they get a texpayer subsidy. I sold over 100 vinyl records via Discogs, and I used USPS because they have Media Mail, which is much cheaper than the private services.
There's not really any such thing as the best of both worlds IMHO. What exact benefits are delivered by being run by the government? The best arguments are in cases of natural monopolies, but even there, there's benefits to just issuing licenses to sub-contractors (the result is a sort of quasi half private half public business of the type you suggest but nobody claims this model is one to use when not strictly necessary).
If I can play devil's advocate for a moment: there are some businesses (passenger rail, universal postal system) that are not attractive to any private entity unless they're heavily subsidized. Nonetheless, there's a public interest in providing them.
As for SpaceX: the tech boom's brought us some people with billions at their disposal, and space exploration IS within reach for them. I don't think there was anyone in the 60s with the money and the inclination to do that.
SpaceX exists because there's now lots of use cases for going into space. In the 60s indeed going into space wasn't so useful and it happened so early just because of the space race.
It's also true that freight is a much more attractive business for a railroad, AFAICT. If you fuck up, you just compensate the owners; no one gets killed (most of the time). But the railroads don't have the option of just giving up passenger service, so they can make it so crappy that people leave
There are plenty of individual examples in both directions. Instead of SpaceX, compare private insurance companies to medicaire. Medicaire is far more efficient.
As someone noted above, both can be true- govt can be incredibly inefficient but so can businesses.
My mother hated working with/for the govt as it made 'firing someone an act of congress'. As if to say neigh impossible.
I'd argue we have all incentives misaligned and that is what causes both govt and private business to become shit-shows.
We have government agencies maxing out their spending every year to keep their budgets growing. We have businesses engaging in moral hazard knowing the government (taxpayers) will bail them out.
We need reform from the top down, inside and out.
What's wrong with that? Companies trying to get started and establish themselves operate at a loss, burning their investors' capital. Most companies take many years before eking out a profit.
I used Amazon as a counter-point. Uber still isn't profitable. So if companies can run for over a decade without making a profit, I'd again say the entire system is broken.
Zombie companies burning capital while driving out possibly profitable competitors is a symptom of rot, not a successful financial system.
Again, my point is that for profit companies are every bit as bad if not worse than government agencies who at least pretend to have oversight.
Also you get what you pay for and governments generally are not paying at the top of the scale. Giant + middle of the road pay is going to get you the same results in a private org!