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if only the "right" people would run for office...

lqet 6y ago
Where I live, it is possible to elect people into public office that weren't officially running, at least on a local level. There was a prominent example in a nearby town (not a big town, around 50,000 inhabitants) a few years ago in which only the current mayor and some dubios candidate ran for mayor. At the end, a prominent local opposition figure was elected because thousands of people wrote his name + address on the ballot. He accepted and is now mayor.
jillesvangurp 6y ago
Most politicians are not around long enough to have to deal with the consequences of their policies. So, they tend to be focused on short term wins. The rare good ones combine that with long term vision that actually makes sense. Often that's not even recognized until decades later. Four years, maybe eight in some cases. Not much more. That's all they have to prove their worth. Most complex projects easily take longer than that to plan and execute. Civil servants on the other are typically there until they retire. In many countries civil servants enjoy special job protections that ensure it is typically hard to fire them. And since they are large organizations, there's a bit of a rat-race to get promoted to the lucrative top positions. That requires pleasing the people holding the purse strings. Politicians in other words. And politicians need to get stuff done and that requires warm relations with the established civil servant leadership because otherwise nothing gets done and they lose the next elections. This adds to the problem because politicians basically rely on an already compromised bureaucratic machinery that resists changes to make it smaller. So any new policy just translates into more budget, more people, and more bureaucracy. The old ones never go away. You see the same pattern of behavior in large corporations except those periodically get forced by their shareholders and the market to do something about it. Sometimes that fails and they get acquired, lose market-share, or even just implode and disappear. If you look at the fortune 500 through the years, you'll see there's a lot of churn there. New companies take up spots vacated by older failing corporations. But pretty much all of them employ way more people than the competitors that ultimately displace them. Banks were mentioned in the article a few times. Most banks have actually been reducing head count for years. It used to be that they had to have offices in every small city, village, and even neighborhoods. Not any more. Those days are long gone. There are now several startups disrupting the space with online only banks. Any bank looking to survive in that space is pretty much copying that organizational model at this point. And as consumer banking is a this point a low margin product, a lot of the older and bloated banks are clearly struggling.

lqet 6y ago

Where I live, it is possible to elect people into public office that weren't officially running, at least on a local level. There was a prominent example in a nearby town (not a big town, around 50,000 inhabitants) a few years ago in which only the current mayor and some dubios candidate ran for mayor. At the end, a prominent local opposition figure was elected because thousands of people wrote his name + address on the ballot. He accepted and is now mayor.

jillesvangurp 6y ago

Most politicians are not around long enough to have to deal with the consequences of their policies. So, they tend to be focused on short term wins. The rare good ones combine that with long term vision that actually makes sense. Often that's not even recognized until decades later. Four years, maybe eight in some cases. Not much more. That's all they have to prove their worth. Most complex projects easily take longer than that to plan and execute. Civil servants on the other are typically there until they retire. In many countries civil servants enjoy special job protections that ensure it is typically hard to fire them. And since they are large organizations, there's a bit of a rat-race to get promoted to the lucrative top positions. That requires pleasing the people holding the purse strings. Politicians in other words. And politicians need to get stuff done and that requires warm relations with the established civil servant leadership because otherwise nothing gets done and they lose the next elections. This adds to the problem because politicians basically rely on an already compromised bureaucratic machinery that resists changes to make it smaller. So any new policy just translates into more budget, more people, and more bureaucracy. The old ones never go away. You see the same pattern of behavior in large corporations except those periodically get forced by their shareholders and the market to do something about it. Sometimes that fails and they get acquired, lose market-share, or even just implode and disappear. If you look at the fortune 500 through the years, you'll see there's a lot of churn there. New companies take up spots vacated by older failing corporations. But pretty much all of them employ way more people than the competitors that ultimately displace them. Banks were mentioned in the article a few times. Most banks have actually been reducing head count for years. It used to be that they had to have offices in every small city, village, and even neighborhoods. Not any more. Those days are long gone. There are now several startups disrupting the space with online only banks. Any bank looking to survive in that space is pretty much copying that organizational model at this point. And as consumer banking is a this point a low margin product, a lot of the older and bloated banks are clearly struggling.