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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

> Services can often be run more efficiently in private hands

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an example where “efficiency” wasn’t just giving up on social obligations (either by screwing employees, or screwing customers, often both).

I’m looking around and see postal services (it still breaks me that “going postal” means what it means), roads, railways, energy production. I don’t see any of them having gotten meaningfully cheaper or providing better service or handling their employees better through privatization.

As an hybrid, splitting into nationalized infra management and privatized customer facing service potentially worked for ISPs. That’s the only mildly positive example I can come up with.

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One example is the privatization of telecommunication sector in India. They now have some of the cheapest data in the world and have brought on tens of millions of new users in recent years. Competition has been a force for good.

An additional one that comes to mind is following the privatization of airlines in many countries, air travel got much cheaper. India is also a glaring example, there are instances in Europe as well. (The US was never a monopoly but it was highly regulated up until the Carter admin in the 1970s. Deregulation produced a similar positive result)

Going further back there are numerous academic examples. The classic figure is that private farms in the soviet union worked only 3% of the total sown land, but produced 66% of the eggs, 64% of the potatoes, 40% of the meat, and 39% of the milk. China had similar figures.

In general I think privatization works best where that force of competition can influence things. I'm not sure exactly how Chicago parking meters companies could compete with each other or improve 'service', but for industries prone to competition, privatization makes a lot of sense to me over government monopoly.

> brought on tens of millions of new users in recent years. Competition has been a force for good.

This is the problem, your example is too new. Give it a decade or two for amalgamation to occur and let's see where things are once 2-3 companies own the market.

Then don’t allow the amalgamation. Governments can veto mergers and takeovers.

Telecoms used to be a natural monopoly when it was based on land lines to every house. It made no sense to lay competing infrastructure for that. Now with mobile networks the infrastructure is a fraction of the cost and competing networks can coexist seamlessly, so a competitive marketplace for services makes sense.

I can't speak for India, but having seen the effect of telecom in multiple Asian and African countries, I think you underestimate how incompetent/corrupt the government can be.

Waiting years to get a phone line was the norm for most people I knew there. I've known several folks where the wait list for getting a land line was over a decade - and we're not talking some remote rural village. If we project how long it would take to get the country connected at the pace they were going vs the progress private companies made with cell phones, it is several orders of magnitude. The number of people in the former category who would have died before having a chance at merely having a phone is in the millions.

The reverse exists in spades where after decades the private ISP make no network improvements and the town has to foot the bill to get decent internet.

It comes down to who can get away with what: do you have more leverage on your officials or on your local conpanies? If your local companies are monopolies that benefit more from not serving you, you'll be in the same situation as you descibre.

> The reverse exists in spades where after decades the private ISP make no network improvements and the town has to foot the bill to get decent internet.

As opposed to simply not having the service for all those decades, and continuing to not have it?

Keep in mind that these governments have a longer history of not delivering, and not maintaining existing infrastructure than most of these private companies. By a margin of decades. There is more data on their inability to deliver than there is on the private companies' malfeasance.

> do you have more leverage on your officials or on your local conpanies? If your local companies are monopolies that benefit more from not serving you, you'll be in the same situation as you descibre.

The difference being local monopolies still provide service to those with resources to pay, whereas the local governments wouldn't.

If there is a market, they will continue to provide service. If they leave, another company will take its place.

I'm not a believer in the free market. But this is one of the classic examples where in corrupt countries international private companies really were way, way better. When the lowly street vendor can afford a cell phone, everyone's life is way better.

> Cerro Verde

As it’s mining, I was kind of expecting the gov to just have laundered the env impacts to a private company, but it seems it actually has positive developments at this point: https://share.america.gov/peruvian-copper-mine-also-produces...

Kudos.

> Telecom in India

I don’t know much about India, from a quick it looked to me like they refused to privatize the low level (cable lying) infra for a long time, and are now in the process of looking into it: https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/telecom-...

I must be missing something

> airlines

There was competition happening before the privatization though ? I only followed the european ones, but the quality of service and reliability mostly went down after the privatizations. The more interesting part to me is how much this industry resisted unleaded gas because of the costs associated. Could gov regulation be an answer to force a better direction when it makes no economic sense ?

> competition

100% agree on not keeping blocking competition for non critical, lifeline services. I think gov managed infra is inherently prone to bloat and corruption, but that’s a price we pay to keep that infra working (postal service costing 20% more is better to me than 20% of the country losing access to postal service). That calculus doesn’t make sense when it comes to fields were other players are thriving and/or lower service quality isn’t life or death issues.

This. I literally can't think of a single time where something public was privatized and it got better. Usually, it just gets more expensive and a bit worse.

I can.

They privatize the registry services (driving, business, birth certificates) in Alberta, Canada.

It went from a US DMV experience - shitty attitudes, bankers hours, two locations in the city

To…

Dozens of small businesses around the city, hours that cater to people that work, lower prices (they all competed with each other) and good attitudes (because you could always go somewhere else).

A massive jump in quality of services that took it from time wasting drudgery to a simple, easy process that was cheaper.

Nice! Yes, once again I forgot to add "in the US" to my comment.

Private UPS and FedEx deliver packages right to my door. I have to go to the post office for USPS packages.

None of the private couriers will come within 50 km of my parents house, only the government AusPost delivers. Private couriers want them to pick the packages up at a distribution center 100 km, in a pinch they'll leave the packages at some random convenience store (not even an official pickup point) 50km away.

AusPost is semi-private though

It is? I thought it was owned by the Australian Government, similar to the ABC or the Australian Rail Track Corporation.

Australia Post is wholly owned by the Australian Government represented by two Shareholder Ministers, the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Communications, Urban Infrastructure, Cities and the Arts.[1]

[1] https://www.finance.gov.au/government/government-business-en...

Ah sorry - corporatised rather than privatised. Not subsidised by the govt in any way.

My dad talks about how the wait to get a new phone line put in went from a month to the next day, virtually overnight, when privatisation happened, since the company now had a profit motive to get you using your phone as fast as possible. But I haven't seen anything like that personally.

Private post is much better than USPS. I don't even get half the mail that's sent my way.

The Swedish postal service was great until it was privatized, now it's a shambles and delivery rate has taken a shocking downturn.

Austinite here. We have one of those "efficient" power grids. Works great. /s

As I recall, overnight ‘mail’ delivery was innovated by private enterprise (FedEx) not the USPS.

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