Governments 'too inefficient' for future Moon landings | Hacker News Reader

Governments 'too inefficient' for future Moon landings

bbc.co.uk

51 pointsequilibrium41 comments

In my libertarian college days it seemed like bureaucracy was a horrible waste of resources, but the more and more I think about it, the more and more it seems like our social institutions are "memes" of a sort; a military which does not use bureaucracy loses wars to ones that do. A bureaucracy is thus seen as a natural consequence of marshalling very large quantities of resources. That is, a bureaucracy allows you to "ignore" details of the collective -- at Microsoft you don't need to know what Janet from down the hall is working on -- but then you don't feel like "part of" the collective per se, and so we have to have a system of managers to both protect you from the collective and to protect the collective from you (i.e. corruption & free rider problems).

If you're less of a manager and more of a programmer then it's actually really nice to think about how we might use this to architect software and/or to collect nodes together. Capitalism might have an analogue for example in developing the same software multiple times, and taking the simplest and most elegant result.

Haha, that sounds like the perfect competition for a startup country :P.

Agreed. To some extend bureaucracy exchanges negative liberty (freedom from constraint) for positive liberty (the enabling force). The exchange has some overhead not only in terms of money, but we also seem to pay more negative liberty to obtain the ``same'' amount of positive liberty.

Bureaucracy's strength is in getting repeatable results out of large numbers of unreliable human beings. There are places where that's the best strategy.

But as soon as you're trying to do something unique or one-off or under-specified, bureaucracy impedes more than it helps. Which is probably why large bureaucratic organizations often get out-innovated by small organizations with far less resources at their disposal.

Bureaucracy is a solution to a coordination problem that I would argue doesn't really exist anymore. Software is, in one sense, bureaucracy codified in mechanical form. It replaces and obsoletes human bureaucracy. The classic bureaucrat essentially applies a rulebook to his input information and passes output information to someone else. He is a human computer.

Even the evolution of war leaves open the question whether bureaucracy is an asset or a liability going forward. War is getting faster and more targeted.

At least with a human there's the possibility they could be persuaded, reasoned with, or even corrupted.

A computer on the other hand is utterly intractable. I'm not sure how that would help with unique, one off or under-specified problems.

If you want your bureaucracy to be more adaptable, I'd argue you need to give it more flexibility not less.

>> A computer on the other hand is utterly intractable

I'm sure several people on here would disagree with that, as there are plenty of people good at "convincing" computers to do things they shouldn't be doing, or to do things that their owners don't want them to. You just have to be more of a black hat, less of a schmmoozer....

Yeah, should've probably put a caveat in that!

I'd argue that even a hacked system is intractable though, as it still rigidly follows the rules no matter the outcome. That's usually what black hats are exploiting in the first place.

If the problem with bureaucracy is rigidity, then replacing human agency with computed agency would only exacerbate that in my opinion.

For a fictional point of reference to the above sentiment: remember HAL 9000 in 2001: a Space Odyssey, and the explanation of why it went homicidal as given in 2010: Odyssey Two. It had two directives: preserving human life and the mission; the first conflicted with its ability to ensure the other's success once the humans started plotting to turn HAL off. In the movie (at least), it was implied that the mission's importance was imparted by Presidential authority, and was given a higher priority than anything else.

I disagree. Bureaucracy is inherently a job of managing people, in all their imperfect emotional people-like glory. Bureaucrats don't just put numbers into a spreadsheet and get out an answer, they balance the needs and wants of competing stakeholders to allow society to function effectively a collective.

Someone balancing needs without numbers to back up their costly actions is why higher-order bureaucracies exist.

A (governmental) bureau is responsible for a delegated area of licensing (pre-emptive control), regulatory oversight (ongoing control), and "criminal" investigation (retributive action for violation), as granted by its enabling authority.

Bureaucracy is the discipline/science/art of managing a bureau, which isn't producing competitive market-action revenue (profits), so can only control efficiency by containing costs, which itself is an action that doesn't produce market revenue.

Oversight of a bureau (ascendant bureaucracy) exists solely to make sure some metric of cost containment and compliance with enabling authority is maintained within each bureau itself.

In short, bureaucracy is the regulatory management of regulatory management.

And yet, the (modern) classic symbol of intractable bureaucratic hell is the green screen.

Bureaucracy is a solution to a very difficult scaling problem. Dunbar's number is around the limit to the largest group that can naturally work together. Above that you need something else to scale, and bureaucracy is one of these things.

The main problem with a bureaucracy is that they appear to have a tendency to almost always decrease in efficiency over time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

Von Mises analyzed Bureaucracy in a book aptly named (in English translation): Bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is a mechanism used to control costs in an enterprise absent measurable economic profitability (cost/revenue efficiency). In private profit-seeking enterprises with sufficient scale to have division of labor, subsets of the organization may be deemed "cost centers", these are the ones that get the most bureaucratic over time. Even regulatory compliance departments main goal is to constrain the costs of fines from non-compliance.

The omni-present danger in bureaucratic management is that the mechanisms to maintain and manage the bureaucracy are themselves non-profit seeking, and tend to motivate growth in the bureaucracy. In private enterprises (barring regulatory compliance requirements), the overall cost of its bureaucratic functions impedes its profitability, and should tend to limit the size of the "cost center" budgets to maintain market profitability (or a failed enterprise).

For government functions, the overall cost of the bureaucracy can only be paid for by tax receipts and public debt (and license and fines, which as the Chief Justic pointed out are effectively tax receipts). If there is no political will to constrain one of both of those, the bureaucracy will grow unbounded.

Anyway, the short of it has nothing to do with marshaling resources, it has to do with constraining costs absent profit.

I think one of the problems people have with evaluating the efficiency of government is that most of the projects government engages in are necessarily very complex. The point of government research is to work on projects that are too blue-sky to be immediately interesting to industry, but the flip side of this is that such projects are inherentl difficult to manage. DOD projects are notorious for this. Every big DOD RFP asks for something literally nobody has ever built before. When I worked at a company that contracted for DARPA, the government literally didn't know what it wanted us to build because our work would inform their opinion of what was possible to build. You can't hold these sorts of projects to the same standard as implementing an invoicing system for a company that's basically the same as every other invoicing system ever made.

Ok, how about a welfare system then, it seems to me that a government welfare ministry should distribute about 90% of what it takes in spending 10% on administration, when I looked into my government it was spending 55% on administration.

Put this into perspective, once the US finished paying interest on debt, medicare and welfare there's no money left over for anything else.

Science programs are one thing, but the government can't deliver 70 year old services with reasonable efficiency.

You could get that kind of efficiency, or get closer to it anyway, if you just cut people a check. It turns out that's more effective at combating poverty than most social programs anyway. But it's politically impossible.

It depends entirely on the structure of the welfare program. For example, the veterans affairs administration provides services, mostly health services, directly to veterans. In that case, you'd expect 100% to be overhead, because VA doctors and hospitals are paid out of overhead.

Most federal welfare programs, however, involve cutting a check. Look at the Social Security Administration. It has a budget of about $12.7 billion, and administers $700-800 billion in benefits to 50-60 million people: http://www.ssa.gov/pressoffice/basicfact.htm

That amounts to an overhead of 1.6%, or ~$250 per person served.

Or, look at it another way. Total federal payroll is about $180 billion, for 2.15 million federal employees (a number that has fluctuated between 1.8 and 2.2 million for the last half century despite nearly a doubling of the population). That's about 4.7% of the budget, or 1.2% of GDP.

Most of the federal government is not overhead. 95% of it is just taking in tax revenue from certain people and cutting checks to other people.

> a military which does not use bureaucracy loses wars to ones that do.

You couldn't be more wrong about this. The decentralized Vietnamese beat the (by-then) bureaucratic US.

The US army during WWII was defined by its ability to delegate to the lowest possible level of the officer hierarchy and this was one of the major reasons it was able to beat the rigid and highly-centralized Nazis.

The Confederacy came within a stones throw of winning the Civil War, which would have been the equivalent of two guys in their garage taking down one of the worlds largest Corporations. They lost because of the overwhelming differences in resources, but their agility and ability to promote talent allowed them to run circles around the North for the first two years.

Winfield Scott and Hernando Cortes both won in Mexico because they distanced themselves from their respective governments. They were allowed complete freedom from bureaucracy because they went out of communication range of the politicians.

Sun Tzu actually made a name for himself by beating a major neighboring kingdom with a tiny, but agile force.

I could keep going...

The Civil War is a better example than Vietnam -- not only because public support died in the US with Nixon's "Guam doctrine", but because it wasn't a particularly existential struggle for the US -- that is, my point was that there is a "natural selection" of social institutions based on military defeats. (Also, South Vietnam was an interesting question in its own right: to what extent is a strong-man or dictator a "bureaucrat"? Chinese civilizations are a grand example of a clear bureaucracy with a central dictator, so the answer isn't trivially either "not at all" or "absolutely.")

Just to be clear: I am not arguing against agility and I think that the central agile ability -- the ability to fail cheaply -- is probably the most important feature in many areas, including some military conquests. (One of the most interesting applications of cheap failure is interface design. If you can test a new idea cheaply it allows feedback loops which make you feel like you're really "interacting with something.")

In any case, you've given me some food for thought, and thanks for that.

The Civil War is an excellent example, and the best example of the ones I gave.

The article gets one fact wrong-- George W. Bush called for a manned mission to the moon in 2020 and Mars thereafter, but was widely ridiculed, and unsupported in Congress.

http://articles.cnn.com/2004-01-14/tech/bush.space_1_space-e...

http://www.theonion.com/articles/bush-still-working-on-manne...

These government inefficiency arguments seem to ignore the fact that NASA relied significantly on the small handful of large Aerospace companies, yet those companies seem not to be involved in the private ventures that require expanding capabilities.

I would look at the traditional space industry as similar to any unmotivated ~duopoly that is working in an industry with a pretty fixed income. Suddenly they look more like other problem sectors (say US cable internet? US cell? English Trains?)

In those industries the only possible improvements are from government interference or public shaming with comparisons to efficient markets abroad.

The monster in the room is that traditional government outsourcing is a model for constructing monopolies and trusts. The government avoids the complexity of proportionally paying a dozen companies for the same task and few companies can handle the complexity of working for the government.

Once created these trusts/monopolies that can't compete for rational customers must still expand at 9% a year and are "too big to fail" and so based on lobbying that the question of failure could never come up.

Outsourcing the government is like packaging up "government inefficiency" with sector destroyers and some legal skimming off the top.

I would predict that as soon as one of these new companies is successful they will be sued for all the IP the big aerospaces refuse to use, then acquired, and then shelved.

Maybe, This question is totally pointless. Because, it doesn't make sense to go back to the Moon. What for ? it's a desolate rock, we've been there many times already, brought back rocks, learned as much as we could about its geology that we possibly could. Going back to the moon is at best an entertainment proposition, it has no practical or scientific benefits.

The fact that we didn't go back on the moon doesn't say anything about government. We might hold different opinions about its inefficiencies and bloated nature, but none of them are relevant to this debate

Mars, on the other hand, holds a promise, although very remote & very premature that it might one day host humans, even possibly a permanent settlement.

But the moon could be a good testing ground for a settlement. Also, some day a nice starport perhaps.

In addition to geological resources, there is water on the Moon that can be mined [1].

Building a Moon base is a reasonable proposition because it can serve as the stepping stone to other destinations in the solar system. The low gravity makes it more attractive to mine and build things on the Moon rather than having to uplift everything from Earth.

[1] http://www.space.com/7335-water-moon-suddenly-attractive-des...

Yes, but you know, instead of building a moon base to get to the planets so that you can build colonies or extract resources, you could spend that same money on Earth, be it on resource extraction (for the profit motive) or something else that the species finds valuable (for the betterment of humanity angle... e.g. there are sub-saharan african villages without clean water or sanitation, etc).

The economists call it "Opportunity Cost" and all that. The opportunity cost of space exploration is kinda high, and humanity's resources are limited. I like space probes and space bases at least as much as the next citizen of the world, but they're not my priority.

Humanity's resources being limited is pretty much a direct function of stopping further exploration--it would make more sense to try and devote resources now, while we still have them, to securing more resources for the future.

This is a relatively short-sighted view, and the problems with it can be summarized with two very glib statements:

1.) Don't shit where you sleep. 2.) Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

As a species we really ought to stop doing both of those...

It's really easy to call it a short-sighted view when you're not paying the time value of money on the expense.

No, you're just missing the point. People are focused on the profit and monetary cost of decisions based on their limited capacity to reason about time, which is on the order of probably 10-30 years (if we're being overly generous).

Reiterating, not putting all our eggs in one basket ie self-sustaining human populations not on Earth in the shortish term, not in our solar system in the less shortish term, and not in our galaxy in the longish term, is not something a single person is going to do in their lifetime. It may take (tens/hundreds of) thousands of years to accomplish these goals, if they are even possible, but we should start them now because the alternative is a random case of bad luck with a meteor, or a nutter with a thermonuclear or biological weapon, or whatever. Extinction events.

People struggle to see beyond their own needs and desires. If we're to survive as a species, we have to think and plan on time scales that dwarf the current recorded human history.

This isn't meant to be an indictment of you personally, I'm just pointing out that the view-point, though normal and held by the majority of people, is still short-sighted by definition: a human lifetime is nothing in comparison to human history, and the potential human future.

Do you really think that we know everything about the moon that there's to learn? That, if we researched the moon with new scientific methods developed since the 70's it would not tell us anything new?

Sure, an economic benefits analysis may show out that we don't expect any (direct) breakthroughs coming from moon research that will be worth the money. Fair enough. But saying that it doesn't make sense is overly negative.

In the worst case it'd be an exercise in (applied) human space travel and closed life support, which is also far from a solved problem... I suspect visiting the moon needs to be "easy routine" before we can even start seriously thinking about human settlements on Mars.

(and maybe we could try growing vegetables on the moon before the Chinese do it :-)

You make a good point. We might not have learned everything that we could. My point is we've learned enough. That was phrased poorly. That being said, going to the moon would require huge investments. Allocating resources doesn't happen in a vacuum, there is so much we can do with money that would be a smarter & more productive allocation of capital than going back the moon.

I'm not against sending robotic probes a la Curiosity or pathfinder. But I'd have a hard time advocating for a new Apollo program or a moon base unless & until some clear benefit is established.

Regardless, the point of the article was the inefficiencies of government. What I was arguing for is the pointlessness of bringing up this argument in light of the questionable returns of a moon enterprise. There are many other ways in which you could compare the efficiency of government investment vs private capital (cancer research, infrastructure building, education, healthcare )

Just because there may be things to learn on the moon doesn't mean we have to send humans there to learn them. Robots would work just as well in most cases. And since sending robots is cheaper than sending people, we could send more robots for the same amount of money, thus increasing the amount we learn.

The only thing extra-Terrestial colonization might have going for it is the potential for freedom from being a subject of any terrestial government.

This seems to me a totally natural progression. Governments have the resources to do New Untried Things, to fund Pure Research and Crazy National Pride Projects, and so they do them because no one else can at the time that they are done. But good governments are supposed to be inefficient. Much as we hate bureaucracy, an efficient government is a terrible, scary thing. Inefficiency keeps it in check. So it falls to private enterprise to pick up where governments leave off.

Hmm, I wonder if same apply to mega projects. Cost overran and miss deadlines a lot.

What is the main reason? The fact that they are hard, because they are complex or because they are mostly managed by government. Perhaps, it is a combination of both, but would love to read some scientific analysis about that.

Mostly because government is truly not accountable. Oh I mean we all read about how they have all this accountability built in but in the end it doesn't save us from what they do. The mentality of many in government is scary.

The add in all the purchasing rules, inclusion of minority group requirements, cronyism, and more, and its no wonder why many projects are bound to cost more and have so much waste.

An example of all that is wrong in US projects at least can be summarized by looking that the rail project in California. They are so hell bent on doing something that anything will do which in the end means nothing gets done except a lot of money is expended.

Government has a spending problem in nearly all nations of this world. Politicians do not fear accountability because they know how to play groups off each other and how to buy off one group or another to keep themselves in place.

I've always felt that government running things like space exploration was a bit odd . I think that government funded (all or in part) private enterprise is the way to go, it worked for Columbus and other early adventurers right?

Well the reality is pretty much that anyway. It's not like NASA actually owns the rocket factories. NASA provides the direction, man power during the missions and cuts the checks but it's private* industry that does most of the R&D and construction.

*well technically private but it varies from companies that exist purely on government contracts to companies like TI and boeing.

When government does that, people say it should have no place in "picking winners". Is there really a way for governments to provide money to private enterprise without picking winners?

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