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Comment by buellerbueller | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like you are describing capitalism.

He is describing how bidding for publicly funded projects fails, because the bidding process designed to avoid corruption has been poorly designed (or corrupted by lobbying) such that it effectively sidelines honest and qualified bids. I would say this is a typical outcome with well meaning bureaucrats in a democracy, not capitalism

It sounds exactly like how business works in my experience. It’s just the principle agent problem showing up in the government that same way it does in the private sphere.

I mean, if you’re at a place that uses staff aug and managing a project it’s just something you have to watch out from your vendors as table stakes. Whenever a new vendor was hired my fellow low level managers would be making bets on how long before they switched out their best guys with some fresh out of college junior that they’d give a fancy title to.

I understand what gp is nominally describing; I asked the question, after all. I am just pointing out that the exact same pressures/dynamics that were described also underpin capitalism.

What you're missing is the scale and commonality of occurence.

If you fail to take into account that you get into a broken world view of false equivalences.

100% of the time in capitalism vs <100% in the system described? I'd believe that, since (at least in the USA) shareholder value reigns supreme.

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