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>She seems to believe that the public sector can innovate...okay, where is the evidence of this? Well, she wrote a whole book about it, she's not just assertin

>She seems to believe that the public sector can innovate...okay, where is the evidence of this? Well, she wrote a whole book about it, she's not just asserting it. The public sector played a huge part in the genesis of the Internet for one thing. >The examples of successful innovation are cases where private incentives have been merged with public funding. All very suspect. But another pretty critical point of that book was that our public conversation is inhibited by the extremely limited vocabulary we use to describe it. Is a defence contractor really part of the "private sector"? Is a NASA engineering team part of the "public sector" the way an employee of a mail sorting centre is? What about an academic working for an old school monopolist like Bell? Ok, fine it was privately owned so if you want to use a crude and almost useless private/public sector split it is very easy to say "private" but it's not private sector in quite the same way as a local shop is, is it?

hogFeast 7y ago
What is distinction between an assertion and writing a book? You also realise that writing a book does not mean you are automatically right. Presumably you think Mein Kampf was a real triumph? The book is irrelevant, you are either wrong or right. And my exact point is that there is a distinction between saying: 1. The public sector played a huge part in the genesis of the Internet. 2. The public sector can make wise investments, and we can definitely control this. Point 1 is true but point 2 does not follow logically from it. And, again, there is a lot of evidence that point 2 is definitely not true. I am not particularly sure there is any need for quibbling over definitions. It is just about incentives. To take the UK as an example: stuff like ICFC/3i, which was publicly funded but run on a commercial basis (another example is NEB/BTG, this failed...until Thatcher), worked and pretty much all of the nationalised industries failed because there were no budget constraints (the purpose of the 1975 Industry Act was to ensure nationalised companies employed a lot of people who would then vote for the govt...it didn't matter if a private sector manager was employed i.e. British Leyland). Again: the distinction between what works and what doesn't is fairly well understood. The issue is that Mazucutto looks at something like ICFC (btw, I know she looked at this because I have talked to people who she has advised) and says: look the public sector can get things right (i.e. confirmation bias). When the point is that how you design things matter massively (a point which is often made less explicitly). Ownership is basically irrelevant but for someone who wants to grow the state, i.e. most of the people she advises, that seems like the most relevant point.

hogFeast 7y ago

What is distinction between an assertion and writing a book? You also realise that writing a book does not mean you are automatically right. Presumably you think Mein Kampf was a real triumph? The book is irrelevant, you are either wrong or right. And my exact point is that there is a distinction between saying: 1. The public sector played a huge part in the genesis of the Internet. 2. The public sector can make wise investments, and we can definitely control this. Point 1 is true but point 2 does not follow logically from it. And, again, there is a lot of evidence that point 2 is definitely not true. I am not particularly sure there is any need for quibbling over definitions. It is just about incentives. To take the UK as an example: stuff like ICFC/3i, which was publicly funded but run on a commercial basis (another example is NEB/BTG, this failed...until Thatcher), worked and pretty much all of the nationalised industries failed because there were no budget constraints (the purpose of the 1975 Industry Act was to ensure nationalised companies employed a lot of people who would then vote for the govt...it didn't matter if a private sector manager was employed i.e. British Leyland). Again: the distinction between what works and what doesn't is fairly well understood. The issue is that Mazucutto looks at something like ICFC (btw, I know she looked at this because I have talked to people who she has advised) and says: look the public sector can get things right (i.e. confirmation bias). When the point is that how you design things matter massively (a point which is often made less explicitly). Ownership is basically irrelevant but for someone who wants to grow the state, i.e. most of the people she advises, that seems like the most relevant point.