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I think this is more typical in public administration. Employees just follow the existing rules/laws because it’s not their job challenging them, and decision m

I think this is more typical in public administration. Employees just follow the existing rules/laws because it’s not their job challenging them, and decision makers are mostly concerned on shifting away blame from them. Nobody wants to be that guy that ordered to stop searching for a bomb, the day that a new bomb will be placed. The only reason why one should stop doing it is to gain efficiency (= be more productive but doing less useless things), but the efficiency metric is non existent in public administrations.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
> Employees just follow the existing rules/laws because it’s not their job challenging them, and decision makers are mostly concerned on shifting away blame from them >but the efficiency metric is non existent in public administrations. And both of these have very insidious downstream consequences. The nature of government employment selects over time for people who are dedicated to process for process sake so of course there's nobody around who asks "why?" and nobody around to say "the tradeoff is worth it let's do X instead". Politicians and high level bureaucrats control the resource streams. The less efficient the larger the resource streams and the more power they have. Not only is there no incentive for efficacy at a high level because "screw it's other people's money" but there is an incentive for inefficiency because it lets the people calling the shots preserve/grow their power. The only time you get a push for efficiency is deep in the bowels of a silo/fiefdom where the teams are small and the organizational unit's resource inputs are static but their performance metrics are pegged to outputs. Of course this sentiment dies on the way up the org chart because resources are mostly a "use it or lose it" type thing. One effect is that this drives away exactly the kind of results driven people who should be working as public service. Another effect is that it cements the status quo such that it is basically impossible for a government or government unit to pivot from "being inefficient and generally sucking" to "decent use of taxpayer's money" without an existential crisis for the organization. Basically nobody says "hey, WTF are we doing" while the organization is becoming an ineffective graft ridden mess. Everyone just keeps their head down until a shock forces them to actually solve the problems. This is why you never see government organizations in rich places like NYC, Boston or DC clean themselves up but you occasionally see government organizations in poorer places like Buffalo or Newark clean house because as painful as making do with less and cleaning your own house is to those kinds of organizations the alternative of having politicians do it for you to win brownie points is worse. The rich places can just paper over their organizational problems with money. The poorer places have to stay on task or clean house much more frequently if they don't because there's less money to float along on. BigCos have some similarly bad feedback loops but it's much more common to see them lop off an org that's dead weight because when the metric the people at the top use is profit you get much more incentives value driven behavior.
majewsky 6y ago
I don't see what's different between public administrations and large corporations here. You say that the efficiency metric is non-existent in public administration, but it's mostly the same for many organizations within large corporations as well. Efficiency metrics may not be entirely non-existent, but they're incredibly opaque or difficult to measure. (For instance, R&D efficiency is usually difficult to measure because of the inevitable time delay between successful R&D efforts and market success.)
aksjfnkajsnd 6y ago
Did you read the article?

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

> Employees just follow the existing rules/laws because it’s not their job challenging them, and decision makers are mostly concerned on shifting away blame from them >but the efficiency metric is non existent in public administrations. And both of these have very insidious downstream consequences. The nature of government employment selects over time for people who are dedicated to process for process sake so of course there's nobody around who asks "why?" and nobody around to say "the tradeoff is worth it let's do X instead". Politicians and high level bureaucrats control the resource streams. The less efficient the larger the resource streams and the more power they have. Not only is there no incentive for efficacy at a high level because "screw it's other people's money" but there is an incentive for inefficiency because it lets the people calling the shots preserve/grow their power. The only time you get a push for efficiency is deep in the bowels of a silo/fiefdom where the teams are small and the organizational unit's resource inputs are static but their performance metrics are pegged to outputs. Of course this sentiment dies on the way up the org chart because resources are mostly a "use it or lose it" type thing. One effect is that this drives away exactly the kind of results driven people who should be working as public service. Another effect is that it cements the status quo such that it is basically impossible for a government or government unit to pivot from "being inefficient and generally sucking" to "decent use of taxpayer's money" without an existential crisis for the organization. Basically nobody says "hey, WTF are we doing" while the organization is becoming an ineffective graft ridden mess. Everyone just keeps their head down until a shock forces them to actually solve the problems. This is why you never see government organizations in rich places like NYC, Boston or DC clean themselves up but you occasionally see government organizations in poorer places like Buffalo or Newark clean house because as painful as making do with less and cleaning your own house is to those kinds of organizations the alternative of having politicians do it for you to win brownie points is worse. The rich places can just paper over their organizational problems with money. The poorer places have to stay on task or clean house much more frequently if they don't because there's less money to float along on. BigCos have some similarly bad feedback loops but it's much more common to see them lop off an org that's dead weight because when the metric the people at the top use is profit you get much more incentives value driven behavior.

majewsky 6y ago

I don't see what's different between public administrations and large corporations here. You say that the efficiency metric is non-existent in public administration, but it's mostly the same for many organizations within large corporations as well. Efficiency metrics may not be entirely non-existent, but they're incredibly opaque or difficult to measure. (For instance, R&D efficiency is usually difficult to measure because of the inevitable time delay between successful R&D efforts and market success.)

aksjfnkajsnd 6y ago

Did you read the article?