7 ms·

Harnessing public entrepreneurship

36 points by martialg 4y ago

Kaibeezy 4y ago
Scanned it. Absolutely excruciating reading but seems like there’s something meaningful in there. Will go look for a readable synopsis of his thesis… This is way better; “editing” FTW: https://fst.net.au/industry-insights/whos-who/mitch_weiss_harvard_business_school_2021/ https://fst.net.au/industry-insights/whos-who/mitch_weiss_ha...
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  After trying to read the podcast transcript (which was difficult to read, since it appears to be a direct automated transcript), then reading this Q&A, I have to thoroughly discount the 'Harvard Business School Professor of Management Practice' analysis of 'the problem'. Here's an excerpt: >Could you pinpoint any reason as to why we’ve perhaps strayed from possibility government? >Weiss: In part, it’s just by virtue of our age. Ageing organisations and ageing bureaucracies have a harder time being innovative. A second reason is [...] it’s a problem of overlearning. Alright, so take a material problem like "filing taxes is needlessly complicated" and ask why? The issue certainly isn't 'aging', but a lobbying arm and capitalist interests that has forced people to pay the likes of Intuit $70+ per year just to do the thing. I struggle to understand how 'aging' and 'overlearning' is the culprit here.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    The difference between academia and practice is that academia is only satisfied with a perfectly coherent theory and practice is perfectly satisfied with an incoherent but working solution. Sometimes, it's more productive to use words, ideas, and objects that already exist to solve problems. Even if they're not ideally suited. To answer the "filing taxes is needlessly complicated" actual problem, the "overlearning" (by which they seem to mean "over-optimizing for risk reduction") explanation would be that the individuals in government responsible for writing the tax code have all optimized for actions which will further/protect their careers. And those actions inevitably lead to a more complicated tax code, because {adding tax code} generally makes important entities happy (exclusions! or more heavily targeting not-you!) and {removing tax code} only makes the people happy (in an abstract way, albeit often angry in a specific way). An example of government policies that could help fight this are the "1-in-2-out" style regulatory reduction mandates. Where in order to implement a new regulation, previously standing ones have to be culled, which effectively incentivizes pruning useless or less important regulation.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      The point raised by the parent wasn't "why is the tax code complicated", but "why is filing taxes so complicated". These are not the same question, and the answers, while related, are not the same either.
  - Kye 4y ago
    It's almost as if there were a decades-long campaign to make government ineffective so people would support dismantling and selling it off to private interests.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - roenxi 4y ago
    The bureaucracy is its own organism. The lobbying arm and capitalist interests are a bit like social gardeners, taking the growing bureaucracy and making sure it grows in ways that favour the entrenched interests (with the alternative, cynically, being destroying the market for everyone). If the lobbying ceased, the bureaucracy wouldn't really change. It would ossify in its current form and keep working towards its current goals.
lettergram 4y ago
In the last 10 years I’ve seen massive buildings constructed in the town I went to school in (Champaign). Literally sky scrapers all over. So yes, we can solve a public problem (housing). The question is whether we can recognize and want to solve the problems imo. Today our media seems incapable of highlighting issues. The media pushes a narrative to effect social change (ie political); rather than presents the issues. On the ground most people agree on the issues, but half the population take the narrative at face value and push the same political ideology (which often doesn’t address the root issues). To be frank, we have a cultural issue. Most of our institutions rely on a solid cultural basis. With the degrading of our culture (classically liberal, ie conservative values, but libertarian in policy) we no longer have a conservative value system being presented. So we have the libertarian “you do you” mentality, without the public shame that comes with certain actions (such as public displays of nudity, open drug use, etc). To me, this comes across as many places in the United States have become unsafe for children - SF being one. I can’t let me kids walk down the street with needles, human waste and screaming homeless. We don’t help those people because we don’t have the cultural foundation to. In short, we can solve more problems than before, but the culture itself has the problem.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  Do you think returning to god would help solve our cultural issues?
  - Kye 4y ago
    Which one(s)? That's always the issue. Even people who nominally follow the same set can't agree on how to apply it down here on Earth. There's a reason the First Amendment says government and religion shouldn't meddle in each other's affairs.
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      The one true god who created America as a shining city on a hill, through his apostles, the founding fathers. I think you'll find the 1st Amendment says no such thing; that was an interpretation recently corrected by the Supreme Court.
freen 4y ago
Grift: the project of gaining power/wealth from the existence of a problem without any interest in even remotely attempting to solve the problem. If saying “the government is the problem” is an effective strategy for a person to gain political power, then that person is heavily incentivized to do everything in their power to make government ineffective. See: Complaining extensively about both high taxes and high gas prices yet uniformly voting against removing the gasoline tax. Supporting the troops, yet voting against medical care for veterans.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  See also: Calling for donations after the reversal of Roe v Wade. Disavowing the role of the party in power to control gas prices when they’re rising and then tweeting about how much they’re doing to save Americans money when gas prices are falling. As no fan of either major party, it’s amusing to me (and slightly sad) to watch true adherents point fingers at the other side. * - https://twitter.com/vp/status/1552050367822708737?s=21&t=83gsln1PB9JpVbbIhNbf0g https://twitter.com/vp/status/1552050367822708737?s=21&t=83g...
  - freen 4y ago
    Yeah, an armed insurrection by Neo-Nazis with the stated goal of a coup d’etat is certainly very centrist Democrat.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > Disavowing the role of the party in power to control gas prices when they’re rising and then tweeting about how much they’re doing to save Americans money when gas prices are falling You’re complaining about messaging not policy.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      If I measured all of what is said, spent, and done in national politics, I would probably conclude that national politics is more about messaging and money than policy.
mynameishere 4y ago
If you can get people to agree on a what is a problem, it can get solved quite simply in many cases. For instance, illegal immigration could be solved trivially, but the bulk of the ruling class is in favor of it for various reasons, so it stays. This boring person is so short on details that I suspect he is pretty comfortable with the way things are. He mentions Covid. Okay--the solution to Covid was to wait until it evolved into a cold-like disease as Coronaviruses seem to do. The short term solution was to isolate at-risk populations. Instead, we be-masked five year olds. We're still be-masking five year olds. I would consider that a public problem, and I suspect professor Weiss would disagree. The CDC is right on top of a new public problem, however, and advises people to have clothes cover any rashes during sex and to clean their latex gear in between partners. https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/sexualhealth/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/sexualhealth/index.ht...
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  > The short term solution was to isolate at-risk populations. We didn't know who they were. Even as it became clear, as with most things in life, it was gray, not black and white, and there was a gradient of risk, as well as pools of individuals who for reasons unknown were above-expected risk. Look at the death counts by age cohort. Sure, the elderly are up there, but it's not as if Covid killed just 1M old people in the US. Your position is essentially a cost-benefit analysis, just like all the others, with the difference that you think that the cost of attempted to limit disease spread throughout the entire population was higher than any benefits accrued. It's likely not just Weiss who might disagree with you, but most of the relatives, friends, colleagues and neighbors of the million dead people. That doesn't mean you're definitively wrong (far from it), but the point is that nobody is "wrong" or "right" in this: everyone's doing cost/benefit analysis and coming to different conclusions.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  the main reason illegal immigration exists is because it's better for our country than not having it. increasing legal immigration is politically unpopular currently, but immigrants are (on net) a massive benefit to society. add a result, Democratic policy is try to expand legal immigration and don't try too hard to stop illegal immigration, while Republican policy is spend a few billion dollars on an art project (a giant wall) that won't stop pretty much any illegal immigration because almost all illegal immigrants enter the country legally.
photochemsyn 4y ago
I think they need to define what they mean by a 'public entrepreneur'. A private entrepreneur in a capitalist system is a fairly clear concept: someone who starts a business using funds that they are responsible for in some way, i.e. they bear the risk of failure. A successful entrepreneur is one whose business generates some degree of profit, i.e. it has a positive balance sheet. Note that a manager of someone else's money is not, by this definition, an entrepreneur, as they are not really bearing most of the risk of failure. In addition, most entrepreneurs turn to external sources of capital (VC funds, banks, etc.) to grow their businesses once they've demonstrated some degree of independent success. So, what's a public entrepreneur? Someone who starts a program / business using public funds, but then puts the profits in their own pocket? Are we talking about private contractors who seek government contracts (I assume not)? Is a Congressperson who uses insider information about pending bills to make lucrative investments a 'public entrepreneur'? How about a government-funded academic trying to lever their state-financed IP into a lucrative side business? Rather than public entrepreneurs, we'd be better off with reliable civil servants who are not corrupt, i.e. not taking kickbacks from private contractors, not altering regulations solely for the benefit of private parties who will later give them 'jobs', not using their academic positions as launching pads for government-funded 'public-private startups', etc.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Very well said. In capitalism, if you have money, you can get power. In socialism, if you have power, you can get money.
  - varispeed 4y ago
    There is a problem: In socialism, if you have power, you can print money In capitalism, if you have money, you can get power and then you can print money Given enough time, both systems evolve into something that cannot be easily distinguished. There are always going to be groups of people destined to be exploited through the similar mechanisms. People who are attracted to capitalism believe that it is a system of equal chances, that they can participate in the economy and achieve success with their own hard work. People who are attracted to socialism believe that the system is preventing them from having a chance due to their background that is outside of their control and they believe the state should intervene and help them participate and achieve success. These two ways of thinking are ripe to be exploited by politicians, divide et impera. Politicians from both sides rather than trying to meet somewhere in the middle, they rather enforce the differences. Like "capitalist" will say "lazy" people shouldn't eat, and "socialist" will say the "Bourgeoisie" is not paying their fair share. It is also interesting that the politicians who are for capitalism tend to be against social freedoms like gay marriage, abortions and politicians who are for socialism, tend to favour strict regulation of economy, but afford wide social freedoms. As if they have created this these sort of red lines to further the divide of the society. For instance, if you want to run your own business your option is to vote for a party that won't get in your way, but you'll have to consider you'll have to mess up with your friends who are same sex and want to get married. There seems to be no party that would be good for small and medium business and at the same time acknowledge the needs of modern society. Or am I missing something? I understand that my comparison is a bit crude, but it's something that fascinates me. This is happening in many countries, this style of politics.
varispeed 4y ago
How that isn't fascism dressed up in words accessible to people not educated in totalitarian systems? This nonsense should be flagged.
amrocha 4y ago
He talks about "new ideas" and "entrepreneurship" being the solution to societal problems. To me that shows such a lack of understanding of why we can't solve the problems we have. The reason the problems don't get solved is not a lack of ideas. We know how to solve homelessness, global warming, and traffic deaths. We know exactly what to do. Stop emitting CO2. Build houses, give people jobs, make sure wages keep up with housing. Slow down cars in city centers, build separate pedestrian infrastructure, encourage public transport. The reason we don't do these things is political. More ideas won't solve anything.

36 points by martialg 4y ago

Scanned it. Absolutely excruciating reading but seems like there’s something meaningful in there. Will go look for a readable synopsis of his thesis… This is way better; “editing” FTW: https://fst.net.au/industry-insights/whos-who/mitch_weiss_harvard_business_school_2021/ https://fst.net.au/industry-insights/whos-who/mitch_weiss_ha...

wildrhythms 4y ago
After trying to read the podcast transcript (which was difficult to read, since it appears to be a direct automated transcript), then reading this Q&A, I have to thoroughly discount the 'Harvard Business School Professor of Management Practice' analysis of 'the problem'. Here's an excerpt: >Could you pinpoint any reason as to why we’ve perhaps strayed from possibility government? >Weiss: In part, it’s just by virtue of our age. Ageing organisations and ageing bureaucracies have a harder time being innovative. A second reason is [...] it’s a problem of overlearning. Alright, so take a material problem like "filing taxes is needlessly complicated" and ask why? The issue certainly isn't 'aging', but a lobbying arm and capitalist interests that has forced people to pay the likes of Intuit $70+ per year just to do the thing. I struggle to understand how 'aging' and 'overlearning' is the culprit here.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  The difference between academia and practice is that academia is only satisfied with a perfectly coherent theory and practice is perfectly satisfied with an incoherent but working solution. Sometimes, it's more productive to use words, ideas, and objects that already exist to solve problems. Even if they're not ideally suited. To answer the "filing taxes is needlessly complicated" actual problem, the "overlearning" (by which they seem to mean "over-optimizing for risk reduction") explanation would be that the individuals in government responsible for writing the tax code have all optimized for actions which will further/protect their careers. And those actions inevitably lead to a more complicated tax code, because {adding tax code} generally makes important entities happy (exclusions! or more heavily targeting not-you!) and {removing tax code} only makes the people happy (in an abstract way, albeit often angry in a specific way). An example of government policies that could help fight this are the "1-in-2-out" style regulatory reduction mandates. Where in order to implement a new regulation, previously standing ones have to be culled, which effectively incentivizes pruning useless or less important regulation.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    The point raised by the parent wasn't "why is the tax code complicated", but "why is filing taxes so complicated". These are not the same question, and the answers, while related, are not the same either.
- Kye 4y ago
  It's almost as if there were a decades-long campaign to make government ineffective so people would support dismantling and selling it off to private interests.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- roenxi 4y ago
  The bureaucracy is its own organism. The lobbying arm and capitalist interests are a bit like social gardeners, taking the growing bureaucracy and making sure it grows in ways that favour the entrenched interests (with the alternative, cynically, being destroying the market for everyone). If the lobbying ceased, the bureaucracy wouldn't really change. It would ossify in its current form and keep working towards its current goals.

lettergram 4y ago

In the last 10 years I’ve seen massive buildings constructed in the town I went to school in (Champaign). Literally sky scrapers all over. So yes, we can solve a public problem (housing). The question is whether we can recognize and want to solve the problems imo. Today our media seems incapable of highlighting issues. The media pushes a narrative to effect social change (ie political); rather than presents the issues. On the ground most people agree on the issues, but half the population take the narrative at face value and push the same political ideology (which often doesn’t address the root issues). To be frank, we have a cultural issue. Most of our institutions rely on a solid cultural basis. With the degrading of our culture (classically liberal, ie conservative values, but libertarian in policy) we no longer have a conservative value system being presented. So we have the libertarian “you do you” mentality, without the public shame that comes with certain actions (such as public displays of nudity, open drug use, etc). To me, this comes across as many places in the United States have become unsafe for children - SF being one. I can’t let me kids walk down the street with needles, human waste and screaming homeless. We don’t help those people because we don’t have the cultural foundation to. In short, we can solve more problems than before, but the culture itself has the problem.

hotpotamus 4y ago
Do you think returning to god would help solve our cultural issues?
- Kye 4y ago
  Which one(s)? That's always the issue. Even people who nominally follow the same set can't agree on how to apply it down here on Earth. There's a reason the First Amendment says government and religion shouldn't meddle in each other's affairs.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    The one true god who created America as a shining city on a hill, through his apostles, the founding fathers. I think you'll find the 1st Amendment says no such thing; that was an interpretation recently corrected by the Supreme Court.

freen 4y ago

Grift: the project of gaining power/wealth from the existence of a problem without any interest in even remotely attempting to solve the problem. If saying “the government is the problem” is an effective strategy for a person to gain political power, then that person is heavily incentivized to do everything in their power to make government ineffective. See: Complaining extensively about both high taxes and high gas prices yet uniformly voting against removing the gasoline tax. Supporting the troops, yet voting against medical care for veterans.

sokoloff 4y ago
See also: Calling for donations after the reversal of Roe v Wade. Disavowing the role of the party in power to control gas prices when they’re rising and then tweeting about how much they’re doing to save Americans money when gas prices are falling. As no fan of either major party, it’s amusing to me (and slightly sad) to watch true adherents point fingers at the other side. * - https://twitter.com/vp/status/1552050367822708737?s=21&t=83gsln1PB9JpVbbIhNbf0g https://twitter.com/vp/status/1552050367822708737?s=21&t=83g...
- freen 4y ago
  Yeah, an armed insurrection by Neo-Nazis with the stated goal of a coup d’etat is certainly very centrist Democrat.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > Disavowing the role of the party in power to control gas prices when they’re rising and then tweeting about how much they’re doing to save Americans money when gas prices are falling You’re complaining about messaging not policy.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    If I measured all of what is said, spent, and done in national politics, I would probably conclude that national politics is more about messaging and money than policy.

mynameishere 4y ago

If you can get people to agree on a what is a problem, it can get solved quite simply in many cases. For instance, illegal immigration could be solved trivially, but the bulk of the ruling class is in favor of it for various reasons, so it stays. This boring person is so short on details that I suspect he is pretty comfortable with the way things are. He mentions Covid. Okay--the solution to Covid was to wait until it evolved into a cold-like disease as Coronaviruses seem to do. The short term solution was to isolate at-risk populations. Instead, we be-masked five year olds. We're still be-masking five year olds. I would consider that a public problem, and I suspect professor Weiss would disagree. The CDC is right on top of a new public problem, however, and advises people to have clothes cover any rashes during sex and to clean their latex gear in between partners. https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/sexualhealth/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/sexualhealth/index.ht...

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
> The short term solution was to isolate at-risk populations. We didn't know who they were. Even as it became clear, as with most things in life, it was gray, not black and white, and there was a gradient of risk, as well as pools of individuals who for reasons unknown were above-expected risk. Look at the death counts by age cohort. Sure, the elderly are up there, but it's not as if Covid killed just 1M old people in the US. Your position is essentially a cost-benefit analysis, just like all the others, with the difference that you think that the cost of attempted to limit disease spread throughout the entire population was higher than any benefits accrued. It's likely not just Weiss who might disagree with you, but most of the relatives, friends, colleagues and neighbors of the million dead people. That doesn't mean you're definitively wrong (far from it), but the point is that nobody is "wrong" or "right" in this: everyone's doing cost/benefit analysis and coming to different conclusions.
adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
the main reason illegal immigration exists is because it's better for our country than not having it. increasing legal immigration is politically unpopular currently, but immigrants are (on net) a massive benefit to society. add a result, Democratic policy is try to expand legal immigration and don't try too hard to stop illegal immigration, while Republican policy is spend a few billion dollars on an art project (a giant wall) that won't stop pretty much any illegal immigration because almost all illegal immigrants enter the country legally.

photochemsyn 4y ago

I think they need to define what they mean by a 'public entrepreneur'. A private entrepreneur in a capitalist system is a fairly clear concept: someone who starts a business using funds that they are responsible for in some way, i.e. they bear the risk of failure. A successful entrepreneur is one whose business generates some degree of profit, i.e. it has a positive balance sheet. Note that a manager of someone else's money is not, by this definition, an entrepreneur, as they are not really bearing most of the risk of failure. In addition, most entrepreneurs turn to external sources of capital (VC funds, banks, etc.) to grow their businesses once they've demonstrated some degree of independent success. So, what's a public entrepreneur? Someone who starts a program / business using public funds, but then puts the profits in their own pocket? Are we talking about private contractors who seek government contracts (I assume not)? Is a Congressperson who uses insider information about pending bills to make lucrative investments a 'public entrepreneur'? How about a government-funded academic trying to lever their state-financed IP into a lucrative side business? Rather than public entrepreneurs, we'd be better off with reliable civil servants who are not corrupt, i.e. not taking kickbacks from private contractors, not altering regulations solely for the benefit of private parties who will later give them 'jobs', not using their academic positions as launching pads for government-funded 'public-private startups', etc.

AlbertCory 4y ago
Very well said. In capitalism, if you have money, you can get power. In socialism, if you have power, you can get money.
- varispeed 4y ago
  There is a problem: In socialism, if you have power, you can print money In capitalism, if you have money, you can get power and then you can print money Given enough time, both systems evolve into something that cannot be easily distinguished. There are always going to be groups of people destined to be exploited through the similar mechanisms. People who are attracted to capitalism believe that it is a system of equal chances, that they can participate in the economy and achieve success with their own hard work. People who are attracted to socialism believe that the system is preventing them from having a chance due to their background that is outside of their control and they believe the state should intervene and help them participate and achieve success. These two ways of thinking are ripe to be exploited by politicians, divide et impera. Politicians from both sides rather than trying to meet somewhere in the middle, they rather enforce the differences. Like "capitalist" will say "lazy" people shouldn't eat, and "socialist" will say the "Bourgeoisie" is not paying their fair share. It is also interesting that the politicians who are for capitalism tend to be against social freedoms like gay marriage, abortions and politicians who are for socialism, tend to favour strict regulation of economy, but afford wide social freedoms. As if they have created this these sort of red lines to further the divide of the society. For instance, if you want to run your own business your option is to vote for a party that won't get in your way, but you'll have to consider you'll have to mess up with your friends who are same sex and want to get married. There seems to be no party that would be good for small and medium business and at the same time acknowledge the needs of modern society. Or am I missing something? I understand that my comparison is a bit crude, but it's something that fascinates me. This is happening in many countries, this style of politics.

varispeed 4y ago

How that isn't fascism dressed up in words accessible to people not educated in totalitarian systems? This nonsense should be flagged.

amrocha 4y ago

He talks about "new ideas" and "entrepreneurship" being the solution to societal problems. To me that shows such a lack of understanding of why we can't solve the problems we have. The reason the problems don't get solved is not a lack of ideas. We know how to solve homelessness, global warming, and traffic deaths. We know exactly what to do. Stop emitting CO2. Build houses, give people jobs, make sure wages keep up with housing. Slow down cars in city centers, build separate pedestrian infrastructure, encourage public transport. The reason we don't do these things is political. More ideas won't solve anything.