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One of the things I love about Palladium (and closely related, Samo Burja's newsletter) is the depth of research. Like the detail that one of the most egregiou

One of the things I love about Palladium (and closely related, Samo Burja's newsletter) is the depth of research. Like the detail that one of the most egregious episodes from California HSR involved a Spanish company that performed excellently on rail projects in Spain. Overall, this piece makes a strong case that the problem is specifically NIMBYism and loss of government institutional capacity. I think the million dollar question is how government organizations can hire and retain better. The current situation looks dire. Obviously a charismatic leader with a broad anti-NIMBY mandate would go a ways at getting competent people to want to work in government. You saw that succeed on a small scale with orgs like US Digital Service. The elephant, after that, is merit-based pay and promotion. Someone needs to sell this to the public. RN literally random cops and plumbers make mid six figures thru overtime while the directors of $100b mega-project are low-energy lifers making less than that. That's not gonna work.

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
NIMBYs don't cause the gross mismanagement of funds on existing rail lines.
thr0wawayf00 4y ago
> I think the million dollar question is how government organizations can hire and retain better. Simple: offer salaries that compete with the private sector. Of course, this involves raising tax revenues which is incredibly unpopular politically. But we get what we pay for and as long as public sector pay remains a joke compared to the private sector, we are always going to have this problem.
- seoaeu 4y ago
  The worst part is that it wouldn’t even require any noticeable increase in tax revenue! The salaries of the dozen or so government employees managing a billion dollar contract are a rounding error in the total cost
- jcims 4y ago
  I don't think it's just that simple to be honest. Government organizations are going to be held to the highest standard for equity, transparency and governance (and ideally security, but...). Building a product with artifacts that demonstrate and/or attest to all of these things creates incredible friction. I'm just coming out of a seven year stint at one of the largest banks in the world, and despite loving the people I work with I couldn't take it any more. I've on the other side of the summit in my career and I don't really want to have navigating bureaucracy be a major component of my professional efforts for the remainder of it.
  - Teknoman117 4y ago
    Not to make you feel old or anything, but this sounds a lot like what happened with my dad. I'm 6 years into my career and he's mostly through his. His highest-income years were doing software development in the law department of one of the big oil companies. It basically broke him to learn what they were doing. Now he's trying to find the motivation to do contract work in his 50's because he doesn't want to deal with corporations ever again...
    - jcims 4y ago
      lol nothing you can do to make me feel older than i already do :) Give your dad a fistbump for me, it's tough, but once he finds the right customer he'll be off to the races. I've been there before and I've been thinking about doing the same myself.
- ch4s3 4y ago
  We could shift the model from guaranteed pensions to employee contribution retirement funds, and shift the savings to salary. We’d get better pay for civil servants, remove the incentive for bad ones to stay, and make cities and states more financially sound all in one shot.
- ceeplusplus 4y ago
  Not really. If you brought on vastly more competent people and digitized+automated government like the private sector, you wouldn't need to hire so many people, so you can afford to pay the competent people more. Of course, this means stepping on the toes of a bunch of incompetent lifers who are just there for the 9-5 chill life and pension, so it will never happen. You've gotta ask yourself: if private sector style pay would cost more, then wouldn't that imply the private sector is vastly more inefficient than the government? But that's clearly not the case, so we come to the conclusion that private sector pay and hiring standards must result in much greater output per dollar.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  In Washington State, teacher salaries were raised substantially, with no change in educational results. The thing is, just giving everyone raises doesn't work. It needs to be based on merit. I've proposed a system where teachers get a base salary, plus a substantial increment for every student in their class that meets grade level expectations at the end of the school year.
  - ejb999 4y ago
    >>plus a substantial increment for every student in their class that meets grade level expectations at the end of the school year Don't be surprised when all of a sudden almost every student magically 'meets grade level expectations' and teachers get their large bonuses, and yet many of the students can't actually read when they graduate. Unfortunately, this is just an incentive to inflate grades and fudge results to make them look better.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      Naturally, the teacher won't be in charge of evaluating their own students.
      - idontpost 4y ago
        And of course the people who are won't have any conflicts of interest of their own.
        WalterBright 4y ago
        There are well known techniques to deal with this. It's hardly a new problem.
      - ejb999 4y ago
        But there is no real firewall between teachers and administrators - most administrators are former teachers - it's a pretty cozy club in most schools. I am not opposed to the idea in theory, but don't see any way to honestly make it work. Also fairly certain almost every teachers union will oppose it - and I say that as someone who has the experience of negotiating teacher's union contracts from the other side of the table.
- arghnoname 4y ago
  I've known people who work for various government agencies, some that pay well for their respective fields. It seemed to be a pattern where someone would accrue a large salary through time on the job, internal patronage, etc, but then be totally incapable or uninterested in doing their job well. They'd just hire someone else to do this person's job and shuffle titles around. No one gets fired for non-aggressive incompetence. Merit is below two or three other things when considering promotion and salary hikes. At least in the cases I'm familiar with, it's an incredibly frustrating experience. Increasing top-level salary would not fix this, but probably just increase the lack of fairness by over-paying to a greater extent the embedded poor performers.
- _uy6i 4y ago
  Citation please? Everything I’ve seen implies public sector employees in California make massively more than their private sector counterparts.
  - loudmax 4y ago
    The article doesn't: "Instead of hiring staff, the Authority relied heavily on outside consultants. These consultants were well paid, with the primary consultant compensation for HSR at $427,000 per engineer, compared with the Authority’s in-house cost of $131,000 per engineer. This structure creates a principal-agent problem where they are incentivized to maximize their billable hours."
    - _uy6i 4y ago
      I mean that public sector employees are underpaid. Comparing consultants and in-house cost is always going to to result in 2-3x disparity (you’re paying a premium for swing capacity). I’m willing to bet the state employee is overpaid Vs his private sector non-consultant counterpart. You then have ask why hire a consultant and I think the answer is that it’s some combination of not being able to fire state employees after the project, or that those employees are actually ineffectual/incompetent. (As an aside I’m willing to bet the #’s aren’t apples to apples with the consultant being a fully loaded coast, and the in-house not including pension benefits etc)
newaccount2021 4y ago
49531 4y ago
I'm very much anti-NIMBY, but I've had a hard time getting involved with YIMBY organizations. It feels like a lot of YIMBY stuff is good but it always feels like there's a side of it driven by real estate developers wanting to deregulate in ways that hurt residents. Am I wrong, or would it just be better to create more housing in ways that created affordable housing (rent control, public housing, and so forth) instead of trying to see if "market" forces of supply / demand fix the issue? Also please correct me if I am wrong, I haven't dug too deep into YIMBY aside from surface level digging.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- imachine1980_ 4y ago
  In general a mix of both, public housing + private development, in less restricted zoning.
- Ma8ee 4y ago
  You say that you are anti-NIMBY, but you are concerned about people who want "to deregulate in ways that hurt residents"? You don't see the problem here?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Most everyone is YIMBY in theory but NIMBY in practice.
    - gkop 4y ago
      Indeed. When somebody is a true YIMBY it's major news: https://piedmontexedra.com/2019/07/piedmont-resident-terry-mcgrath-reflects-on-sheltering-a-homeless-couple-and-making-national-news https://piedmontexedra.com/2019/07/piedmont-resident-terry-m...
    - telchar 4y ago
      You’re just describing a NIMBY - someone who may be pro-development in theory but not in their backyard. YIMBY is an explicit rejection of that. In fact few people are YIMBY in theory.
xh-dude 4y ago
My impression of Burja is that he’s better at the writing - there are always interesting details - than average but not generally a superior analyst. For example: https://brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/modern-russia-can-fight-and-win-land https://brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/modern-russia-can-fight... has interesting and useful details but I think has been demonstrably and obviously short of similar analysis from experts in the field who are less certain but more reliable vis-a-vis outcomes.
mhh__ 4y ago
> depth of research I've enjoyed Burja's work but he does enter patterns that I would categorize as just needlessly contrarian. I believe he once used the number of ships to say the US navy is slipping, rather than by tonnage - by numbers the north Koreans should be really powerful, and they are right?
_uy6i 4y ago
On top of all that, You also have to solve for the structural inefficiency of public sector pay and benefits. Public sector employees make tons more than than private sector counterparts when you account for pensions and benefits, but those only really accrue if you “put in your 20” - making government service basically a non-starter for someone that doesn’t want to be a lifer…
fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
It may depend on the author, as some articles in the publication are inconsistent with the characterization of “in-depth research.” Previously, the publication wrote about “Stanford’s War on Social Life,” but made some omissions that misrepresented some key facts used as evidence of Stanford’s supposed demise.[1] Two key things pointed out by our fellow HN readers included the (1) failure to acknowledge the association of the defunct fraternity, wistfully characterized as emblematic of campus social life, with the Brock Turner rape; and (2) the mischaracterization of Lake Lagunita as a beloved campus waterfront neglected by Stanford, when it was in fact an artificial pond created by a dam that the municipality stopped servicing.[2] These may or may not necessarily be important for a casual audience, but for a publication that presents itself in the self-appointed realm of “governance futurism” there is a lack of rigor and a palpable sense of linguistic license. Take it for what you will. [1]https://palladiummag.com/2022/06/13/stanfords-war-on-social-life/ https://palladiummag.com/2022/06/13/stanfords-war-on-social-... [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31732944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31732944
- m-ee 4y ago
  The Stanford article rings true to me as an alum. The justification for KA losing their housing was entirely unrelated to the Brock Turner case. He was not a member, he just happened to be attending the party. My time predates most of the events of this article but the war on fun was well underway. Sentiment was that the frats in trouble at the time (kappa sig and SAE) largely deserved it, especially SAE, but there was a sense that anyone else could be next. The university values conformity over social life or even safety. The abrupt removal of the European theme houses without any justification pretty much confirms the former, the banning of hard alcohol and end of the "open door" drinking policy confirms the latter. The coops are probably next on the chopping block. EDIT- Unrelated fun fact, there is tunnel underneath lake lag that the endangered salamanders and other wildlife can just to get to the other side of the road. This also creates an ambush point for local raccoons and coyotes to eat what comes out.
  - fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
    Not an alum so I can’t speak to the first person experience, and the quirks of Stanford are not interesting. My comment’s purpose is limited to that of a discriminating reader seeking to become more informed. I think these observations would have been fine independently but the context is important, if only for the sake of refuting it. The failure to acknowledge it, and the license taken with respect to other facts is what is unsettling.
twblalock 4y ago
Other countries that can build major projects better than the USA don't have merit-based pay and promotion for their civil servants.
balsam 4y ago
>Like the detail Whats interesting is that it was the “parent” company ACS Grupo that was successful. (They bought a decisive stake in Dragados) Seems like old school corruption=>incompetence=>credential laundering to me. https://www.vozpopuli.com/economia_y_finanzas/empresas/acs-florentino_perez-ferrovial-sacyr-fcc-grupo_ohl-acciona-ministerio_de_fomento-adif-ave-renfe-aldesa-dragados_0_824617545.html https://www.vozpopuli.com/economia_y_finanzas/empresas/acs-f...

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago

NIMBYs don't cause the gross mismanagement of funds on existing rail lines.

thr0wawayf00 4y ago

> I think the million dollar question is how government organizations can hire and retain better. Simple: offer salaries that compete with the private sector. Of course, this involves raising tax revenues which is incredibly unpopular politically. But we get what we pay for and as long as public sector pay remains a joke compared to the private sector, we are always going to have this problem.

seoaeu 4y ago
The worst part is that it wouldn’t even require any noticeable increase in tax revenue! The salaries of the dozen or so government employees managing a billion dollar contract are a rounding error in the total cost
jcims 4y ago
I don't think it's just that simple to be honest. Government organizations are going to be held to the highest standard for equity, transparency and governance (and ideally security, but...). Building a product with artifacts that demonstrate and/or attest to all of these things creates incredible friction. I'm just coming out of a seven year stint at one of the largest banks in the world, and despite loving the people I work with I couldn't take it any more. I've on the other side of the summit in my career and I don't really want to have navigating bureaucracy be a major component of my professional efforts for the remainder of it.
- Teknoman117 4y ago
  Not to make you feel old or anything, but this sounds a lot like what happened with my dad. I'm 6 years into my career and he's mostly through his. His highest-income years were doing software development in the law department of one of the big oil companies. It basically broke him to learn what they were doing. Now he's trying to find the motivation to do contract work in his 50's because he doesn't want to deal with corporations ever again...
  - jcims 4y ago
    lol nothing you can do to make me feel older than i already do :) Give your dad a fistbump for me, it's tough, but once he finds the right customer he'll be off to the races. I've been there before and I've been thinking about doing the same myself.
ch4s3 4y ago
We could shift the model from guaranteed pensions to employee contribution retirement funds, and shift the savings to salary. We’d get better pay for civil servants, remove the incentive for bad ones to stay, and make cities and states more financially sound all in one shot.
ceeplusplus 4y ago
Not really. If you brought on vastly more competent people and digitized+automated government like the private sector, you wouldn't need to hire so many people, so you can afford to pay the competent people more. Of course, this means stepping on the toes of a bunch of incompetent lifers who are just there for the 9-5 chill life and pension, so it will never happen. You've gotta ask yourself: if private sector style pay would cost more, then wouldn't that imply the private sector is vastly more inefficient than the government? But that's clearly not the case, so we come to the conclusion that private sector pay and hiring standards must result in much greater output per dollar.
WalterBright 4y ago
In Washington State, teacher salaries were raised substantially, with no change in educational results. The thing is, just giving everyone raises doesn't work. It needs to be based on merit. I've proposed a system where teachers get a base salary, plus a substantial increment for every student in their class that meets grade level expectations at the end of the school year.
- ejb999 4y ago
  >>plus a substantial increment for every student in their class that meets grade level expectations at the end of the school year Don't be surprised when all of a sudden almost every student magically 'meets grade level expectations' and teachers get their large bonuses, and yet many of the students can't actually read when they graduate. Unfortunately, this is just an incentive to inflate grades and fudge results to make them look better.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Naturally, the teacher won't be in charge of evaluating their own students.
    - idontpost 4y ago
      And of course the people who are won't have any conflicts of interest of their own.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        There are well known techniques to deal with this. It's hardly a new problem.
    - ejb999 4y ago
      But there is no real firewall between teachers and administrators - most administrators are former teachers - it's a pretty cozy club in most schools. I am not opposed to the idea in theory, but don't see any way to honestly make it work. Also fairly certain almost every teachers union will oppose it - and I say that as someone who has the experience of negotiating teacher's union contracts from the other side of the table.
arghnoname 4y ago
I've known people who work for various government agencies, some that pay well for their respective fields. It seemed to be a pattern where someone would accrue a large salary through time on the job, internal patronage, etc, but then be totally incapable or uninterested in doing their job well. They'd just hire someone else to do this person's job and shuffle titles around. No one gets fired for non-aggressive incompetence. Merit is below two or three other things when considering promotion and salary hikes. At least in the cases I'm familiar with, it's an incredibly frustrating experience. Increasing top-level salary would not fix this, but probably just increase the lack of fairness by over-paying to a greater extent the embedded poor performers.
_uy6i 4y ago
Citation please? Everything I’ve seen implies public sector employees in California make massively more than their private sector counterparts.
- loudmax 4y ago
  The article doesn't: "Instead of hiring staff, the Authority relied heavily on outside consultants. These consultants were well paid, with the primary consultant compensation for HSR at $427,000 per engineer, compared with the Authority’s in-house cost of $131,000 per engineer. This structure creates a principal-agent problem where they are incentivized to maximize their billable hours."
  - _uy6i 4y ago
    I mean that public sector employees are underpaid. Comparing consultants and in-house cost is always going to to result in 2-3x disparity (you’re paying a premium for swing capacity). I’m willing to bet the state employee is overpaid Vs his private sector non-consultant counterpart. You then have ask why hire a consultant and I think the answer is that it’s some combination of not being able to fire state employees after the project, or that those employees are actually ineffectual/incompetent. (As an aside I’m willing to bet the #’s aren’t apples to apples with the consultant being a fully loaded coast, and the in-house not including pension benefits etc)

newaccount2021 4y ago

49531 4y ago

I'm very much anti-NIMBY, but I've had a hard time getting involved with YIMBY organizations. It feels like a lot of YIMBY stuff is good but it always feels like there's a side of it driven by real estate developers wanting to deregulate in ways that hurt residents. Am I wrong, or would it just be better to create more housing in ways that created affordable housing (rent control, public housing, and so forth) instead of trying to see if "market" forces of supply / demand fix the issue? Also please correct me if I am wrong, I haven't dug too deep into YIMBY aside from surface level digging.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
imachine1980_ 4y ago
In general a mix of both, public housing + private development, in less restricted zoning.
Ma8ee 4y ago
You say that you are anti-NIMBY, but you are concerned about people who want "to deregulate in ways that hurt residents"? You don't see the problem here?
- bombcar 4y ago
  Most everyone is YIMBY in theory but NIMBY in practice.
  - gkop 4y ago
    Indeed. When somebody is a true YIMBY it's major news: https://piedmontexedra.com/2019/07/piedmont-resident-terry-mcgrath-reflects-on-sheltering-a-homeless-couple-and-making-national-news https://piedmontexedra.com/2019/07/piedmont-resident-terry-m...
  - telchar 4y ago
    You’re just describing a NIMBY - someone who may be pro-development in theory but not in their backyard. YIMBY is an explicit rejection of that. In fact few people are YIMBY in theory.

xh-dude 4y ago

My impression of Burja is that he’s better at the writing - there are always interesting details - than average but not generally a superior analyst. For example: https://brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/modern-russia-can-fight-and-win-land https://brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/modern-russia-can-fight... has interesting and useful details but I think has been demonstrably and obviously short of similar analysis from experts in the field who are less certain but more reliable vis-a-vis outcomes.

mhh__ 4y ago

> depth of research I've enjoyed Burja's work but he does enter patterns that I would categorize as just needlessly contrarian. I believe he once used the number of ships to say the US navy is slipping, rather than by tonnage - by numbers the north Koreans should be really powerful, and they are right?

_uy6i 4y ago

On top of all that, You also have to solve for the structural inefficiency of public sector pay and benefits. Public sector employees make tons more than than private sector counterparts when you account for pensions and benefits, but those only really accrue if you “put in your 20” - making government service basically a non-starter for someone that doesn’t want to be a lifer…

fleetwoodsnack 4y ago

It may depend on the author, as some articles in the publication are inconsistent with the characterization of “in-depth research.” Previously, the publication wrote about “Stanford’s War on Social Life,” but made some omissions that misrepresented some key facts used as evidence of Stanford’s supposed demise.[1] Two key things pointed out by our fellow HN readers included the (1) failure to acknowledge the association of the defunct fraternity, wistfully characterized as emblematic of campus social life, with the Brock Turner rape; and (2) the mischaracterization of Lake Lagunita as a beloved campus waterfront neglected by Stanford, when it was in fact an artificial pond created by a dam that the municipality stopped servicing.[2] These may or may not necessarily be important for a casual audience, but for a publication that presents itself in the self-appointed realm of “governance futurism” there is a lack of rigor and a palpable sense of linguistic license. Take it for what you will. [1]https://palladiummag.com/2022/06/13/stanfords-war-on-social-life/ https://palladiummag.com/2022/06/13/stanfords-war-on-social-... [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31732944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31732944

m-ee 4y ago
The Stanford article rings true to me as an alum. The justification for KA losing their housing was entirely unrelated to the Brock Turner case. He was not a member, he just happened to be attending the party. My time predates most of the events of this article but the war on fun was well underway. Sentiment was that the frats in trouble at the time (kappa sig and SAE) largely deserved it, especially SAE, but there was a sense that anyone else could be next. The university values conformity over social life or even safety. The abrupt removal of the European theme houses without any justification pretty much confirms the former, the banning of hard alcohol and end of the "open door" drinking policy confirms the latter. The coops are probably next on the chopping block. EDIT- Unrelated fun fact, there is tunnel underneath lake lag that the endangered salamanders and other wildlife can just to get to the other side of the road. This also creates an ambush point for local raccoons and coyotes to eat what comes out.
- fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
  Not an alum so I can’t speak to the first person experience, and the quirks of Stanford are not interesting. My comment’s purpose is limited to that of a discriminating reader seeking to become more informed. I think these observations would have been fine independently but the context is important, if only for the sake of refuting it. The failure to acknowledge it, and the license taken with respect to other facts is what is unsettling.

twblalock 4y ago

Other countries that can build major projects better than the USA don't have merit-based pay and promotion for their civil servants.

balsam 4y ago

>Like the detail Whats interesting is that it was the “parent” company ACS Grupo that was successful. (They bought a decisive stake in Dragados) Seems like old school corruption=>incompetence=>credential laundering to me. https://www.vozpopuli.com/economia_y_finanzas/empresas/acs-florentino_perez-ferrovial-sacyr-fcc-grupo_ohl-acciona-ministerio_de_fomento-adif-ave-renfe-aldesa-dragados_0_824617545.html https://www.vozpopuli.com/economia_y_finanzas/empresas/acs-f...