Nonprofits are sapping the progressive project
noahpinion.blog
noahpinion.blog
> As for why the city didn’t simply install a standard bus shelter combined with a (much more powerful) standard lamppost, the city explained that this would cost over $50,000
Amazing. I have some friends who work diligently at a non-profit that is doing some actual needed work as cost effectively as possible. It's a struggle for them to gather funds and get things done. Watching initiatives like this take $200K of government money and turn it into a nearly useless vanity project for those involved is infuriating.
How easily problems such as child hunger and homelessness could be solved but the reality is that often it isn't simple, in the US requiring federal initiatives that the current state of our government has enabled this corruption. I don't intend on going political but often it becomes a problem of the commons where people believe they deserve more than others and often you'll see this prop up on forums like this. Where people who make more on average, often due to working in tech, think their opinions on matters are worth more even without the expertise or knowledge to come with it.
That aside, funding for programs is often non-uniform based on what cities actively need to deal with and often the friendships of individuals rather than on any real form of reasoning. We live in a plutocracy and these are just the side effects.
As much as it sucks to waste $200k, it's a drop in the bucket. American charity giving is close to half a trillion dollars per year. We are awash in so much money that it's counterproductive to think, "Well, if they're just gonna waste some of it, we shouldn't do it at all."
As I said, that's not any kind of comfort. It's right to be infuriated when something could easily have been better. But I've seen too many people insist that avoiding that negative emotion is the absolute top priority, and that causes a lot of suffering.
For what it's worth, my neighbours up in Glen Park haven't been nabbed by the lawkeepers, flouting the law for years now.
The closest thing to a good reason for this instead of a bus shelter is that ADA rules make it difficult to install bus shelters - they might make the sidewalk too narrow for a wheelchair to move around them. Essentially everything else going on here is bad though; basically, if you wanted to design LA government bureaucracy to maximize people dying in car accidents, you'd come up with what it has now.
The basic moral intuition of the progressive world view is that there is good in everyone, we should empower that goodness, and those with the most good in them should be most empowered to make the biggest changes, as that will improve the world the most.*
As long as nonprofits appear to have “more of the good in them” than governments do**, the progressive world view will tend to favour empowering nonprofits over empowering governments.
*: Conversely, the basic moral intuition of the conservative world view is that there is evil in everyone, we should put up guard rails to restrict that evil, and those with the most evil in them should be most restricted, as that will preserve the world the most.
**: You can get a pretty good taxonomy of different progressive views just by looking at how much “good” is thought to be in various powerful entities. For example, the capital-P Progressive might think “nonprofit > government >>> corporation”, the liberal might think “government > nonprofit > corporation”, and the neoliberal might think “government > corporation > nonprofit”. Has Noahpinion been accused of being a neoliberal? Just on the basis of this blog post I would bet he has, since he appears to rate nonprofits lower than government.
This is nothing but infantilizing how others think to make yourself feel better. Anyone reasonably intelligent is perfectly aware that there are good and bad examples from each category -- and not only that, but that different problem domains can inherently favor one category over another.
Great way to make me blacklist the author.
There is a problem here with perverse incentives. I don't know about this specific project's funding trajectory, but it could arise from (1) The city wanting bus shelters and drawing in unrelated priorities like gender equity, or (2) a city project manager trying to kill two birds with one stone and grant funding to a gender equity project that also advances another city priority. Maybe neither one is happening here, but imagine that the nonprofit ecosystem is saturated with bad decisionmaking and mixed priorities on both axes. This gives rise to a cadre of nonprofits who can pitch any angle to get their project/office funded.
I have personally represented a nonprofit in meetings where a potential donor has added some sort of priority (e.g. "but how will this advance economic mobility?"), and you cannot fail to answer the question if you want to get funded.
In the funding process, you might assume that the donor is checking off a criteria pro forma (and that might even be the original intention). For example there are government donors that require all nonprofits or contractors do some level of gender equity analysis. The problem is that you can't control how you are held to this promise later. Sometimes the government donor is satisfied with the original gender equity analysis, sometimes the political exigencies have changed or the donor's project team has turned over and suddenly you are holding a women's rights press conference at a lamp post.
Here is a cartoon on point: https://nonprofitaf.com/2017/06/imagine-if-apple-had-to-run-...
While this project is clearly somewhere between incompetent and full blown rort, I feel the bigger issue is privatisation.
To me it seems every beneficial example I see of privatisation of core government services there are endless example of where it goes wrong.