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It's not really corruption. It's moral hazard, and its self-reenforcing. The moral hazard is that the people paying for the solution don't make it and don't sup
by javajosh 5y ago
It's not really corruption. It's moral hazard, and its self-reenforcing. The moral hazard is that the people paying for the solution don't make it and don't support it. They make poor decisions based on what they can see and don't know enough to ask deeper, relevant questions about complexity. It's self-reenforcing because the kinds of people who do know enough to ask deeper, relevant questions usually have little interest the work of keeping fundamentally broken systems alive on life support, and their thoughtful improvements will go unnoticed or worse, taken as evidence of incompetence. (I suppose the value proposition of some companies is that they can do both; I have doubts that that has ever happened.)
- medstrom 5y agoIn Nassim Taleb's words, the decisionmaker doesn't have "skin in the game" e.g. they won't be punished or shamed when the decision turns out badly.
- dmos62 5y agoWon't they? Won't your peers know what you've done?
- javajosh 5y agoIf your job is to allocate money to the actual doers, and they don't get it done, is it the allocator's fault, or the doer's fault? The best case is when you get the authority but no responsibility for failure, which is precisely what many modern American middle-adminstrators do.