Culture eats policy
niskanencenter.org
niskanencenter.org
Big projects are hard. They're expensive. With large budgets comes lots of oversight, endless second guessing, and a zillion rules, perfected over years, to ensure money is not wasted or stolen.
I once pitched an off-the-shelf program to a corporate, which would have cost 10k to roll out company wide. But the procurement process demanded a proper evaluation first, which eould cost about 5 times that. Better that than letting someone later claim that 10k was wasted.
Large business wastes just as much money as govt, but when a business makes a mistake they just stop talking about it. In govt it ends up on CSPAN. When it's not your money, it's easy to spend. Reputation (and blame doging) is far more valuable than cash.
Which brings us back to well resourced, small teams, of competent people.
The other difference is that the business has to compete with other businesses and turn a profit (or convince investors it will eventually turn a profit) to survive. In any given year they might get away with waste. If you’re a mega corp in an oligopolistic business, maybe even a decade or two. But eventually, you live or die by the bottom line. By contrast, a government keeps existing no matter how poorly it manages its finances. Look at Zimbabwe, Argentina, Venezuela, South Africa, Greece, etc.
Those are not the financials of zombies running on money from the public market.
But it’s also a 100-year oligopoly, it will take more time to die.
It’s also a golf company - its main activity is channeling golf courses to government members and management teams. You wouldn’t classify ClearQuest or DrWatson are serious pieces of software. DrWatson can be reproduced with a small python script, that’s why it sells so well: You sell the idea of AI to the press since 1995 and it gives a good image.
The business of IBM is mainly funneling money from governments to government members; from corporations to higher managers. It makes corruption legal. This kind of businesses thrive well in general.
That's just survivorship bias. Some counterexamples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Berlin_Wall
Ah, good example.
It is refreshing to see someone else say this. John Ralston Saul wrote about it, completely changing my view of the supposed efficiency of big business - and explain why neoliberal shibboleths like privatisation don’t result in improved efficiency.
> Big projects are hard. They're expensive. With large budgets comes lots of oversight, endless second guessing, and a zillion rules, perfected over years, to ensure money is not wasted or stolen.
Not really perfected. According to the Standish Group only 1% of “very large” software projects succeed. This would be unacceptable to most reasonable people. But the processes they use enable so many excuses for failure that accountability goes out the window. Basically, all the money is spent on risk mitigation to the point that the project fails because all the money is spent before it actually starts.
There is a huge amount of crazy that goes on when there is a crazy amount of money to play with.
Meanwhile, government organizations cannot be 'run like a business' because they have to follow the laws that created them, which often preclude competition with the private sector.
What did he write? Link please.
https://www.amazon.com/Unconscious-Civilization-John-Ralston...
"In this intellectual tour de force John Ralston Saul argues that our society is only superficially based on the individual and democracy, and the West now toils unconsciously in the grip of a stifling “corporatist” structure that serves the needs of business managers and technocrats as it promotes the segmentation of society into competing interest groups and ethnic blocks."
Published in 1999, so not quit pre-internet. But I still bought paper books back then!
The kinds of experimentation and wild re-orgs constantly in private sector have substantial costs and so many of them are not so much product driven as they are investor fad driven it’s a ton of capital waste. Yet somehow market proponents see that as healthy and by design. Like uh, then by design public sector is supposed to be more stable and they have different kinds of capital inefficiencies systemically and we are spreading out risk as a society similar to a long term financial portfolio.
That's the problem.
> I once pitched an off-the-shelf program to a corporate, which would have cost 10k to roll out company wide.
$10k, plus the effort to actually deploy, train, etc. And what happens if you need to roll back? What criteria are you checking against? So many questions.
> Better that than letting someone later claim that 10k was wasted.
Listen, I don't disagree with the idea of small, qualified teams being great. But I've also seen a good number of people who think they are qualified push things through that were really just bad ideas. This comes from smart people, too. Smart at what they do, but not at the specific thing they are trying to get done. It's just outside of their wheelhouse.
> Which brings us back to well resourced, small teams, of competent people.
Yep. Easier said than done.
Normally, the cost of COTS software is many times the sticker price. Deployment, ongoing training (of existing and new staff), adjusting policies, security monitoring, upgrades, etc., etc., all have costs.
Even if this was a "use once only and throw away" program, the cost of deployment (timetabling, writing and distributing instructions for use, etc.) and of ensuring deletion would be more than $10k in even a small organisation.
Proper evaluations take these costs into account. Bureaucracy is the worst form of management, except for all the others that have been tried.
Delineating them is a fools errand from the start.
There's perverse incentive at work, too. When you get to manage a project, your status rises, even if you fuck it up. Because the next time they need someone, they will look for someone with experience. "Surely, (s)he has learned a lot since then." So it actually can be good for your career to waste money.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/12/indian-edtech-giant-byjus-...
Perhaps also dictatorial governments: they would have the authority to sweep things under the rug and make sure no one talks about them.
That's one of the "problems" of more open societies: the dirty laundry is there for all to see. This makes it possible to bike shed on many (perhaps trivial) things.
>No one wants to be in the video clip as a stone-faced bureaucrat with no good answers, being yelled at by a righteous—or self-righteous—politician fighting the good fight on behalf of the aggrieved public. In front of the cameras, you can’t say things like “it doesn’t work because we were forced to use an ESB.” You would look like you were trying to throw someone else under the bus, and the legislators wouldn’t understand what you were talking about anyway. Your job is simply to endure the hearing, produce as few viral sound bites as possible, and not incriminate others.
>As painful and sometimes humiliating as these hearings are, if you’re a career civil servant, it is the second system of accountability that matters more to you. The legislature can’t fire or officially reprimand you, no matter how bad a job they think you did (although they can put political pressure on the administration to do so). They can’t make you ineligible for promotions and raises. On the other hand, violations of policy, process, and procedure—real or perceived—can do all of that, even if there is no hearing.
The legendary Pete Worden touched on this in 1992's "On Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones"[0]. Not all his examples have aged well. Hubble was resurrected and the massive early problems (and costs) forgotten. He also confuses operational systems (EOS, GOES, etc.) with tech demonstrators (Clementine, etc.). Despite that, his comments on organizational behavior are well made.
[0] PDF at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234554226_On_Self-L...
This is the crux of the article, and it is an excellent point.
I believe that there is a fundamental difference between a being a rule-follower and being a judgment-exerciser. Situational awareness can provide clues as to what mode of operation is appropriate. However, choosing a mode of operation is itself an exercise in judgment.
If you design a rule-based system, and hire people based exclusively on their ability to follow and enforce rules, you should not be surprised when that system selects for the kind of people who copy job postings verbatim into their resumes and proclaims them to be "most qualified".
I'll counter that fake or self-serving cultures are more toxic and destructive in an organization than bureaucratic policies. Mandated perspectives through culture manipulation feels more like group think and design by committee than genuine empowerment.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/podcasts/transcript-ezra-...
- Timothy S. Goeglein
God save us from effective government.
Like Guantanamo or what the GOP is currently doing (e.g., not giving Garland hearings "because it is too close to the election")?
Government, and political opportunists, can be effective in both good and bad policies/actions.
Obama even had the opportunity to close Guantanamo. Didn't consider it important enough to waste the political capital on. Was more concerned about his team retaining power than doing the right thing.
> Government, and political opportunists, can be effective in both good and bad policies/actions.
Effectiveness is only ever used with bad policies. I don't know that I've even come close to figuring out the mechanism for it, but there is one that inevitably tips effectiveness towards ends malevolent. If you were to plot out historical leaders for how effective they were on some sort of spectrum, and then plot them out for how evil they were, it'd be the same spectrum.
FDR also had to deal with things like state's rights... But why worry about nuance?
The USSR rapidly went from a relatively backwards nation that had been devastated by WW2 to a highly industrialized world superpower. That's a lot of success even if the costs weren't worth it.
Cuba has been hamstrung by US embargoes.
Unfortunately I'm not knowledgeable enough about Venezuela to say.
Imperial Russia was one of the most powerful countries in the world prior to WW1 and industrialising very rapidly. One of the reasons the Germans went for it when they did was because they knew that any later they could not beat the Russian Empire. To manage to become a “highly industrialised world superpower” starting with the Russian Empire of 1913 is not an achievement.
> Cuba has been hamstrung by US embargoes.
No other countries embargo the US and oceanic transport is so cheap they transport onions to Ireland from Australia at a profit. Cuba is a dump because of its government, not because of the US.
> Unfortunately I’m not knowledgeable enough about Venezuela to say.
Pretty standard communist story. Secret police, middle class and educated flee in their millions, economy collapses.
Same thing, west can not go in and occupy current Russia either, but that does not make the country any less dysfunctional mess comparatively. Same with imperial Russia.
Inequality is skyrocketing, many working people lack access to medical care or financial security, many people have no choice but to work jobs that mistreat & demean them, global warming is ravaging the world, etc.
Really? When? When has the government not put its thumb on the scale in thousands of different ways?
For example, someone downthread mentioned the ACA, as though before it was passed health care was "privatized" in the US. It was no such thing. Health care in the US has not been "privatized" at the very least since World War II, when the government prohibited private companies from competing for employees on wages and so the companies had to compete on benefits instead, with health insurance being the biggest benefit. Then the government started regulating the health care industry, and the whole mess evolved to what we have now.
To really find "privatized" health care in the US you have to to back to before WW II. What you will find is that, given the knowledge of the time, health care worked better in the US then. And even then it wasn't completely privatized: for example, the government still regulated the supply of doctors and other health care workers with licensing, which drives up costs and drives down accessibility to care.
Agreed. But:
> Any problem solving after that should be on us, as citizens and using private means, not government fiat.
That's just a libertarian ideological trope, and doesn't follow from the premise. Another way of avoiding top-down control is to devolve decision-making; to have a truly multi-polar government, where those exercising subsidiary powers can't be bullied (or sacked) by those at the centre.
In the UK, for example, it has become fashionable for an incoming government to try to rebuild the Civil Service in its own image. C.f. Truss firing Scholar, head of the Treasury, as her first act.
The first paragraph and already a misinformed position of the role of representatives (hint, it’s in their name). Congress (or the other branches) was never about controlling a country, rather ensuring freedom.
Government policy meant to control will always backfire because, again, that’s not their job.
Here's a hint though, albeit at the risk of committing the etymological fallacy: the word "government" comes from the Greek "kubernétés" (κυβερνήτης), meaning "steersman". This is where the "steering the ship" metaphor comes from.
It's literally the job of government to "[steer] the ship of our country".
Well, Hey now!