I'm reminded of the adage that to really get things done, you need a small qualified team, and everyone else to get out of their way. (See the original Appke Mac team as an example.)
Big projects are hard. They're expensive. With large budgets comes lots of oversight, endless second guessing, and a zillion rules, perfected over years, to ensure money is not wasted or stolen.
I once pitched an off-the-shelf program to a corporate, which would have cost 10k to roll out company wide. But the procurement process demanded a proper evaluation first, which eould cost about 5 times that. Better that than letting someone later claim that 10k was wasted.
Large business wastes just as much money as govt, but when a business makes a mistake they just stop talking about it. In govt it ends up on CSPAN. When it's not your money, it's easy to spend. Reputation (and blame doging) is far more valuable than cash.
Which brings us back to well resourced, small teams, of competent people.
> Large business wastes just as much money as govt, but when a business makes a mistake they just stop talking about it.
It is refreshing to see someone else say this. John Ralston Saul wrote about it, completely changing my view of the supposed efficiency of big business - and explain why neoliberal shibboleths like privatisation don’t result in improved efficiency.
> Big projects are hard. They're expensive. With large budgets comes lots of oversight, endless second guessing, and a zillion rules, perfected over years, to ensure money is not wasted or stolen.
Not really perfected. According to the Standish Group only 1% of “very large” software projects succeed. This would be unacceptable to most reasonable people. But the processes they use enable so many excuses for failure that accountability goes out the window. Basically, all the money is spent on risk mitigation to the point that the project fails because all the money is spent before it actually starts.
There is a huge amount of crazy that goes on when there is a crazy amount of money to play with.
Another factor is that 'private enterprise' gets to decide which customers they want to have.
Meanwhile, government organizations cannot be 'run like a business' because they have to follow the laws that created them, which often preclude competition with the private sector.
A lot of people talk about the inefficiencies of government with lots of cushy career bureaucrats that are lazy. In truth, US government federal employees get substantially worse benefits and protections than private sector EU companies while much of the ire is directed at “lazy” public sector employees.
The kinds of experimentation and wild re-orgs constantly in private sector have substantial costs and so many of them are not so much product driven as they are investor fad driven it’s a ton of capital waste. Yet somehow market proponents see that as healthy and by design. Like uh, then by design public sector is supposed to be more stable and they have different kinds of capital inefficiencies systemically and we are spreading out risk as a society similar to a long term financial portfolio.
I read this pre internet but I think the book was called “the unconscious civilisation”. I really loved it at the time, but haven’t read it for 30ish years.
"In this intellectual tour de force John Ralston Saul argues that our society is only superficially based on the individual and democracy, and the West now toils unconsciously in the grip of a stifling “corporatist” structure that serves the needs of business managers and technocrats as it promotes the segmentation of society into competing interest groups and ethnic blocks."
Published in 1999, so not quit pre-internet. But I still bought paper books back then!
>Large business wastes just as much money as govt, but when a business makes a mistake they just stop talking about it. In govt it ends up on CSPAN.
The other difference is that the business has to compete with other businesses and turn a profit (or convince investors it will eventually turn a profit) to survive. In any given year they might get away with waste. If you’re a mega corp in an oligopolistic business, maybe even a decade or two. But eventually, you live or die by the bottom line. By contrast, a government keeps existing no matter how poorly it manages its finances. Look at Zimbabwe, Argentina, Venezuela, South Africa, Greece, etc.
No, businesses absolutely collude to get out of each others way, and it happens a lot more than you think. Even businesses that are "competitors" often have different aims and goals in the long run. And generally their are banks an wall street that are willing to pick up the tab for businesses that are big enough, even if they are failing. Look at a company like yahoo, or oracle, or IBM. How do they keep existing, when they are essentially zombies running on funding through the public market?
IBM is laughing stock to everyone. Whoever would want to work there, it’s not young ambitious people.
But it’s also a 100-year oligopoly, it will take more time to die.
It’s also a golf company - its main activity is channeling golf courses to government members and management teams. You wouldn’t classify ClearQuest or DrWatson are serious pieces of software. DrWatson can be reproduced with a small python script, that’s why it sells so well: You sell the idea of AI to the press since 1995 and it gives a good image.
The business of IBM is mainly funneling money from governments to government members; from corporations to higher managers. It makes corruption legal. This kind of businesses thrive well in general.
>But eventually, you live or die by the bottom line. By contrast, a government keeps existing no matter how poorly it manages its finances. Look at Zimbabwe, Argentina, Venezuela, South Africa, Greece, etc.
That's just survivorship bias. Some counterexamples:
This is an interesting counterpoint, but I'm not sure it's a counterexample: those governments kept existing, in the sense that the, say, Cuban government existed both before and after; they just had radical changes of direction and leadership. The same can and does happen to companies, and I think many casual observers would say that the business has survived.
> I once pitched an off-the-shelf program to a corporate, which would have cost 10k to roll out company wide. But the procurement process demanded a proper evaluation first, which eould cost about 5 times that.
Normally, the cost of COTS software is many times the sticker price. Deployment, ongoing training (of existing and new staff), adjusting policies, security monitoring, upgrades, etc., etc., all have costs.
Even if this was a "use once only and throw away" program, the cost of deployment (timetabling, writing and distributing instructions for use, etc.) and of ensuring deletion would be more than $10k in even a small organisation.
Proper evaluations take these costs into account. Bureaucracy is the worst form of management, except for all the others that have been tried.
> I once pitched an off-the-shelf program to a corporate, which would have cost 10k to roll out company wide.
$10k, plus the effort to actually deploy, train, etc. And what happens if you need to roll back? What criteria are you checking against? So many questions.
> Better that than letting someone later claim that 10k was wasted.
Listen, I don't disagree with the idea of small, qualified teams being great. But I've also seen a good number of people who think they are qualified push things through that were really just bad ideas. This comes from smart people, too. Smart at what they do, but not at the specific thing they are trying to get done. It's just outside of their wheelhouse.
> Which brings us back to well resourced, small teams, of competent people.
> Large business wastes just as much money as govt, but when a business makes a mistake they just stop talking about it.
Perhaps also dictatorial governments: they would have the authority to sweep things under the rug and make sure no one talks about them.
That's one of the "problems" of more open societies: the dirty laundry is there for all to see. This makes it possible to bike shed on many (perhaps trivial) things.
> Reputation (and blame doging) is far more valuable than cash.
There's perverse incentive at work, too. When you get to manage a project, your status rises, even if you fuck it up. Because the next time they need someone, they will look for someone with experience. "Surely, (s)he has learned a lot since then." So it actually can be good for your career to waste money.
>No one wants to be in the video clip as a stone-faced bureaucrat with no good answers, being yelled at by a righteous—or self-righteous—politician fighting the good fight on behalf of the aggrieved public. In front of the cameras, you can’t say things like “it doesn’t work because we were forced to use an ESB.” You would look like you were trying to throw someone else under the bus, and the legislators wouldn’t understand what you were talking about anyway. Your job is simply to endure the hearing, produce as few viral sound bites as possible, and not incriminate others.
>As painful and sometimes humiliating as these hearings are, if you’re a career civil servant, it is the second system of accountability that matters more to you. The legislature can’t fire or officially reprimand you, no matter how bad a job they think you did (although they can put political pressure on the administration to do so). They can’t make you ineligible for promotions and raises. On the other hand, violations of policy, process, and procedure—real or perceived—can do all of that, even if there is no hearing.
It should be no surprise that companies contracting with the Federal Government create layers to match whatever the government creates. It should also be no surprise that the large players in contracting propose changes to government structures that feed this cycle in perpetuity. "Digital Transformation" is all the current rage and the new job titles are springing up in response.
The legendary Pete Worden touched on this in 1992's "On Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones"[0]. Not all his examples have aged well. Hubble was resurrected and the massive early problems (and costs) forgotten. He also confuses operational systems (EOS, GOES, etc.) with tech demonstrators (Clementine, etc.). Despite that, his comments on organizational behavior are well made.
> We create systems designed to drain the jobs of bureaucrats, especially low-level bureaucrats, of any opportunity to exercise judgment. When things go wrong, we find new ways to constrain, and we make the hierarchy more and more rigid.
This is the crux of the article, and it is an excellent point.
I believe that there is a fundamental difference between a being a rule-follower and being a judgment-exerciser. Situational awareness can provide clues as to what mode of operation is appropriate. However, choosing a mode of operation is itself an exercise in judgment.
If you design a rule-based system, and hire people based exclusively on their ability to follow and enforce rules, you should not be surprised when that system selects for the kind of people who copy job postings verbatim into their resumes and proclaims them to be "most qualified".
> you should ask yourself: With every decision you make, is this good for the company? (OfficeSpace, 1999)
I'll counter that fake or self-serving cultures are more toxic and destructive in an organization than bureaucratic policies. Mandated perspectives through culture manipulation feels more like group think and design by committee than genuine empowerment.
Tl/dr: Top-down control of a country doesn't work. But we already knew this; the 20th Century was a huge experiment, run in multiple countries, in trying to make top-down control work. It failed. The lesson we should be drawing from all this is to stop asking our government and our elected representatives to fix all problems. The government's role should be limited to protecting everyone's basic rights and maintaining an orderly civil society. Any problem solving after that should be on us, as citizens and using private means, not government fiat.
FDR's administration was the most effective of the 20th century and was characterized by more top-down control than any other during the period in question. Maybe you don’t like the outcomes, but it can’t be argued that much was accomplished.
I'd blame those things on the Democrats too. You can't keep cheating and cheating, and then whine that the other side started cheating too just to keep up with you.
Obama even had the opportunity to close Guantanamo. Didn't consider it important enough to waste the political capital on. Was more concerned about his team retaining power than doing the right thing.
> Government, and political opportunists, can be effective in both good and bad policies/actions.
Effectiveness is only ever used with bad policies. I don't know that I've even come close to figuring out the mechanism for it, but there is one that inevitably tips effectiveness towards ends malevolent. If you were to plot out historical leaders for how effective they were on some sort of spectrum, and then plot them out for how evil they were, it'd be the same spectrum.
None of those countries are ones that I think we should be eager to mimic. However, if we are talking about nuance, we should consider:
The USSR rapidly went from a relatively backwards nation that had been devastated by WW2 to a highly industrialized world superpower. That's a lot of success even if the costs weren't worth it.
Cuba has been hamstrung by US embargoes.
Unfortunately I'm not knowledgeable enough about Venezuela to say.
> The USSR rapidly went from a relatively backwards nation that had been devastated by WW2 to a highly industrialized world superpower.
Imperial Russia was one of the most powerful countries in the world prior to WW1 and industrialising very rapidly. One of the reasons the Germans went for it when they did was because they knew that any later they could not beat the Russian Empire. To manage to become a “highly industrialised world superpower” starting with the Russian Empire of 1913 is not an achievement.
> Cuba has been hamstrung by US embargoes.
No other countries embargo the US and oceanic transport is so cheap they transport onions to Ireland from Australia at a profit. Cuba is a dump because of its government, not because of the US.
> Unfortunately I’m not knowledgeable enough about Venezuela to say.
Pretty standard communist story. Secret police, middle class and educated flee in their millions, economy collapses.
Imperial Russia was breaking down and on the brink of collapse ...until they violently collapsed. They were also behind western countries technologically and by pretty much all aspects. That includes military being one massive mess with horrible conditions for soldiers and comparatively larger looses.
Same thing, west can not go in and occupy current Russia either, but that does not make the country any less dysfunctional mess comparatively. Same with imperial Russia.
Unfortunately, we've also tried the privatization approach that you are advocating and it has failed miserably.
Inequality is skyrocketing, many working people lack access to medical care or financial security, many people have no choice but to work jobs that mistreat & demean them, global warming is ravaging the world, etc.
Really? When? When has the government not put its thumb on the scale in thousands of different ways?
For example, someone downthread mentioned the ACA, as though before it was passed health care was "privatized" in the US. It was no such thing. Health care in the US has not been "privatized" at the very least since World War II, when the government prohibited private companies from competing for employees on wages and so the companies had to compete on benefits instead, with health insurance being the biggest benefit. Then the government started regulating the health care industry, and the whole mess evolved to what we have now.
To really find "privatized" health care in the US you have to to back to before WW II. What you will find is that, given the knowledge of the time, health care worked better in the US then. And even then it wasn't completely privatized: for example, the government still regulated the supply of doctors and other health care workers with licensing, which drives up costs and drives down accessibility to care.
Exactly, private insurance companies with millionaire executives are the most efficient way to handle a fundamental human need for our society. /s (this means sarcasm).
Nobody in their right mind should be defending the ACA imo, and nobody here has done so as far as I can tell. Your comment is a special kind of annoying. Multiple strawmen.
The ACA was overwhelmingly a landslide giveaway to private insurance corporations, who have used that taxpayer money to multiply their lobbying influence. The # of insured Americans has only increased a hair more than the total US population, while the cost of insurance and cost of healthcare services have greatly increased in the time since.It's a classic case of Democratic Party means testing and bureaucratization.
The article was about a military project contracted out to a private corporation. Are you saying that the government shouldn't maintain a military? Because if you're not saying that then how is your comment even relevant here?
A country’s army should protect the country, not the foreign interests of a few wealthy or powerful citizens of that country. Non-interventionists would go as far to say they shouldn’t get involved in any foreign wars at all. I think it’s hard to expect allies that would help defend without the opposite, but that could be limited to aiding foreign defense.
I feel you should clarify that “TL/DR” means “too long, don’t read”, since what you’ve written is in no way a summary, but rather a statement of opinion in no way supported (and indeed assumed away) by the article.
> Any problem solving after that should be on us, as citizens and using private means, not government fiat.
That's just a libertarian ideological trope, and doesn't follow from the premise. Another way of avoiding top-down control is to devolve decision-making; to have a truly multi-polar government, where those exercising subsidiary powers can't be bullied (or sacked) by those at the centre.
In the UK, for example, it has become fashionable for an incoming government to try to rebuild the Civil Service in its own image. C.f. Truss firing Scholar, head of the Treasury, as her first act.
I’m not sure why this isn’t a more popular position on a board full of entrepreneurs. I’m all for a government that prevents people from screwing each other over, but it doesn’t mean it should enter that market and screw everyone over.
> They’re frustrated because they’re supposed to be steering the ship of our country through changing times…
The first paragraph and already a misinformed position of the role of representatives (hint, it’s in their name). Congress (or the other branches) was never about controlling a country, rather ensuring freedom.
Government policy meant to control will always backfire because, again, that’s not their job.
This is a simplistic and reductive reading of "steering the ship." What if she said "govern"? It would mean exactly the same thing, yet it would also be a tautology and you'd have nothing to complain about. The piece is very directly about the problem of thinking about this in a more sophisticated yet concrete way. Please read it!
I don't think you quite understand what the word "government" means.
Here's a hint though, albeit at the risk of committing the etymological fallacy: the word "government" comes from the Greek "kubernétés" (κυβερνήτης), meaning "steersman". This is where the "steering the ship" metaphor comes from.
It's literally the job of government to "[steer] the ship of our country".
Big projects are hard. They're expensive. With large budgets comes lots of oversight, endless second guessing, and a zillion rules, perfected over years, to ensure money is not wasted or stolen.
I once pitched an off-the-shelf program to a corporate, which would have cost 10k to roll out company wide. But the procurement process demanded a proper evaluation first, which eould cost about 5 times that. Better that than letting someone later claim that 10k was wasted.
Large business wastes just as much money as govt, but when a business makes a mistake they just stop talking about it. In govt it ends up on CSPAN. When it's not your money, it's easy to spend. Reputation (and blame doging) is far more valuable than cash.
Which brings us back to well resourced, small teams, of competent people.