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Comment by Bratmon | Hacker News Reader

It's weird that this article doesn't even attempt to grapple with the reason why governments can't run big policies as experiments and cancel them if they fail:

Every time the government hires a group of people to do X, that automatically creates a class of people who:

1. Depend on the government continuing to do X for their livelihoods

2. Are experts in X and know far more about it than any government official

This creates an automatic constituency that will fight tooth and nail to keep X going no matter what. And step one of that fighting will be to make sure that the official report answering the original research question "Did X work?" will never be a clear "No."

And God help any politician that ignores the official report and cancels X anyway. Now the problem that X was intended to solve is entirely their fault, and there's an army of X experts running to every media outlet in the country making sure the general public knows it!

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Just because an 'automatic consistency' for something exists doesn't mean they automatically get their way on everything. And for most X that group is not big enough to direct federal policy.

Yes Amtrak exist and people inside Amtrak want it to continue to exist, and yet tons of reports the government does shows issues with Amtrak. Not to mention many groups outside of Amtrak, civil society, journalists and so on.

Many government institutions have existed for 100s of years have no managed to capture government to such an extend as to make them be able to monopolize any analysis of them. And there are plenty of government programs that don't exist anymore as well.

You are only looking at 1 side of this issue. You have given 0 consideration if X was actually solved or not.

Do you remember the movie "Good Will Hunting". The Therapist says "You can never do anything because you see every possible bad thing down the road" but that also misses also the opportunity for all possible good things.

In Switzerland we have SBB, a almost universally popular government owned institution that has existed for well over 100 years and has solved a problem about as good as anybody in the world. So X was solved, and we still have very objective discussion on improving X and we get reports about issues with X and so on.

In your view it would be good if Switzerland canceled the SBB? No matter if reports indicate that its beneficial or not?

I don't see how your attitude is not just defeatism and depression.

Please give examples of these agencies. What you list seems more like how business captures control via 'knowing more than government officials' then how technocrats do. At least that's what conservative politicians tell us as they defer all oversight/domain knowledge to private industry and private industry 'best' practices. Are you also saying that government should stop that practice and that is is also a trap of some kind? Or is it just a trap when it's for the betterment of society?

Your argument hinges on deciding what "works" means.

You're saying it "works" for some people but maybe not in a way or scale that was originally intended for it to "work".

But isn't that how all learning in a complex system takes place? Doesn't mean you need to rush to cancel something?

What's wrong in saying it doesn't do what we thought it would but it does do something useful? Maybe adjust further investment based on results obtained. Ignore sunk cost.

Ironically, that's exactly the argument the X experts make to keep themselves around

this is based more on assumption than anything else i think. this is something i hear folks yell very loudly about all the time but actual examples seem to be harder to come by.

The most obvious (to me) example is the San Francisco anti-homelessness program. The city government of San Francisco understood that

1. Homelessness is a massive problem, far larger here than most cities 2. For political reasons, the obvious solution of "Double the number of homes in the city to take people off the streets at the margin" is off the table.

As a result, they started giving massive contracts to a wide variety of NGOs that promised a wide variety of novel solutions to the homelessness tragedy.

As it turned out, the effect of basically all of those experiments was either nothing or counterproductive. But the NGOs ended up being so numerous that they have political power of their own, and are now at the same level as "teachers" as a major expense and powerful constituency for the city.

If you're one of those people who needs an opposite-political-valence example, a good one is the TSA. Totally worthless at stopping terrorists, but totally skilled at keeping itself funded.

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