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Comment by Recurecur | Hacker News Reader

One issue with private, for-profit organizations is their major focus is “creating shareholder value”, which is apparently the modern way of saying “making money”. That, along with competition (if applicable, see below), drives them towards minimizing costs, increasing efficiency, and innovating.

Government has the major focus of taking money, and largely spending it arbitrarily. It’s inarguable that the US Federal Government is bloated, corrupt, and vastly inefficient. Despite taking in $trillions in revenue every year, the US has $40 trillion in debt. That’s utterly inexcusable, and heads should roll.

Getting back to the discussion about private enterprise, would you characterize Amazon as bloated, corrupt, and inefficient, despite being an effective monopoly? I would not, though I’ll admit I have no data on the corruption aspect…

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Often "minimizing costs" for a for-profit organization means providing worse services to their customers, though.

> would you characterize Amazon as bloated, corrupt, and inefficient, despite being an effective monopoly?

It's funny you should bring this up in the context of healthcare. Amazon acquired One Medical a few years ago. Within no more a year, One Medical got so much worse. Harder to book appointments, wait times increasing, and care team not responding to in-app messages as quickly. (And sometimes being significantly less helpful than they used to be; e.g. "you don't need a recommendation or a referral for a general surgeon since you're on a PPO; just look through UCSF Health's directory and pick one". And this, after I specifically asked for a recommendation, twice. Not to mention most of UCSF's departments will turn you away without a referral, regardless of what kind of insurance you have.)

So I don't know if Amazon is bloated, corrupt, or inefficient, but Amazon acquiring what used to be a genuinely useful medical group made it much, much worse, and I assume that was all in the name of "minimizing costs".

Amazon also owns whole foods and it seems to be doing just fine. Maybe not the exact same as when it launched, but in many places it is one of the best places around to buy groceries.

One Medical, I had before/after Amazon and was never that impressed. They had nice offices and a good booking system, but the GPs were a couple notches above webmd IMO.

> That, along with competition (if applicable, see below), drives them towards minimizing costs, increasing efficiency, and innovating.

Highly debatable. Not making a profit on paper (or moving it to low tax-environments) is a great way to dodge paying taxes. Innovation is a side effect of competition, not of profit-seeking. Plenty of examples of oligopolies and monopolies where innovation ground to a halt in favor of siloization, buying up competitors, dark patterns, regulatory capture, etc.

The right way too look at this is that the organisation of private industry creates a selection pressure on "making money" (not profit!), with the minimum being "able to cover costs" and thus stimulates evolution of strategies to do so. Like in biological evolution, there are many, many pathological situations that can occur.

> Government has the major focus of taking money, and largely spending it arbitrarily.

This is false. The US is a bad example because it has an incredibly corrupt political system, especially since Citizens United. In general in most modern developed democracies spending by the government is supported democratically to a very large extent. That is not to say that 80% of citizens support each bit of spending, but for 95% of the things where money is spent by the government, a majority agrees that money needs to be spent there. The word "arbitrarily" is definitely not warranted.

> would you characterize Amazon as bloated, corrupt, and inefficient, despite being an effective monopoly?

Don't know, yes, and don't know.

For corruption, I think it is necessary to determine how it would even look like for Amazon. Corruption in government is often "favoring entities friendly to the people making the decisions over objectively better options". I'd argue that that is wholly accepted in private enterprises and even encouraged. A "quid pro quo" in private enterprise is just "a business deal" or "customer relations". "Nepotism" is just "helping your friends out". Etc. I would assume that things like that are very, very common within Amazon.

With regard to bloated/inefficient: This is incredibly hard to make definitive statements on without having worked there and having a lot of intimate knowledge, so I'll refrain from doing so. I think it is, but I don't know.

Also, whether an organization (private or public) is bloated and inefficient is often only a reference to what you think the goal of the organization is.

If the goal of the USPS was to turn a profit, then serving rural addresses is inefficient and the jobs and infrastructure to do so is bloat. Luckily that’s not the goal of the USPS.

I hesitate to mention Mamdani in this forum but it seems like he has done a lot to make NYC’s government “more efficient” in many ways. But also many people disagree on who that government should primarily serve.

I feel that a lot of government spending on roads is inefficient and would be better spent on transit systems. Many people disagree with my values tho.

Stop voting for politicians who keep starting pointless unwinnable wars and you can cut the military budget in half. Boom, 10% of the expenses gone, and $500B less of a budget deficit. Tax some billionaires and it'll be net-positive in no time.

No kidding. Eliminating the federal deficit isn't particularly difficult in mathematical terms; the political will just isn't there, and both Democrats and Republicans can blame the other party when they're in power for out of control spending.

(At least the Democrats seem to be more open to actually taxing to make up for shortfalls, unlike Republicans.)

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