Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

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> [...] It took another seven years of legal battles and two more referendums before Massena flipped the switch to a new, city-owned utility. When it finally happened, in May 1981, utility bills dropped by a quarter. The town hasn’t looked back since. [...]

> “That’s what makes Massena so unique — that we saw it through,” said Andrew McMahon, superintendent of the city-owned Massena Electric Department. Others have tried only to see the effort fall apart, he said. In Massena, “the town hung together.”

What's far more special about Massena is that they've kept their municipal electric utility going since then. Similar to start-ups, successfully doing this is 1% idea, 99% execution.

Flip-side - one of my uncles spent 50 years managing a small municipal electric utility. But after he retired, there were too few locals who understood that their cheap & reliable electricity didn't come from Santa. Politicians short-changed maintenance 'till something complex & expensive broke - and Big Electric Co. bought up the whole system for pennies. Because "keep shivering in the dark" was the only other bidder.

It bugs me no end because in every debate about public/private ownership people maintain these wild fantasies that governments can handle long term thinking and capitalists can't. But frequently the story is like this one, it turns out the institutions of capitalism have longer planning time horizons than the public does. Turns out that low-bandwidth-low-expertise systems like public voting doesn't lead to focused technical excellence.

I'm not dead set against municipal utilities because a municipality is so small reasonably motivated people can actually make a big impact. But a competitive free market is still better because if the incumbent is so incompetent that a total system failure is likely there is the biggest opportunity for someone to head the crisis off before it eventuates.

> But a competitive free market is still better

emphasis on competitive there, which these types of things tend not to be

Particularly when incumbents are able to lobby government bodies to grant them monopolies, see the electric and internet markets, and formerly the telephone market.

Politicians are notorious for only seeing as far as the next election.

Shareholders are notorious for only the seeing the business as a speculative asset to be flipped for a profit.

Governments clearly can handle long-term thinking, as can private companies. But only if they're left alone to do that.

You mean, bureaucracies: without the politicians or shareholders you want to leave them alone, they aren’t governments or companies, just blind bureaucracies, with no long term goal to plan for but the perpetuation of the bureaucracy.

I like to think there's a middle ground somewhere between speculators and bureaucracies; a group of people who are actually interested and incentivised to serve the customer and perform the function of the organisation to the best of their ability. I may be too naive.

The existence of such people isn't (I don't think) in question, the question is how you organize a system so that their being in a position to run an organization isn't an unstable, non-equilibrium state.

It is not just bad luck or accident that businesses at scale, while they may temporarily be run by idealists of that or other stripes, either fail or end up run by people whose interests is in having the organization run as an optimized profit-returning (either directly or by increasing stock value so that investors can realize gains by liquidating some part of their holdings) machine above all else. It is the structural incentives of the system in which they operate.

You've missed the key stakeholder group - shareholders have to find a Buyer to flip something for a profit, who cares about the longer term prospects of the business.

The buyer is not prefect, but they're better incentivised than anyone else.

Unless of course the Buyer is another speculator who is only interested in flipping the business for a short-term profit

> governments can handle long term thinking and capitalists can't

I don't think anyone is arguing against the long term planning capabilities of capitalists. The disagreement is about whether their plans are beneficial to society.

For example, take the case of the aggressive marketing for baby formula that nestle carried out in the third world. Very forward thinking long term strategy, and innovative too: Other baby formula vendors were not focussing on these nations. The outcome was twofold. On the one hand, higher profits for nestle, and on the other, increased infant mortality in the targeted nations.

Now, whether that outcome was desirable is entirely up for debate. Me, personally, I'm not a huge fan of infant mortality, but to each their own. What is not up for debate is that nestle engaged in some effective long term strategizing.

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