> 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!
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.