2 ms·

The comment directly above you on the page right now gives an example of people getting the trade-off wrong, so your dismissiveness is pointless. The framing i

The comment directly above you on the page right now gives an example of people getting the trade-off wrong, so your dismissiveness is pointless. The framing is also relevant for another reason: choosing a conscious trade-off point means that you can choose to move it as circumstances dictate, which can be very non-obvious. There's currently a lot of noise in the UK media about dodgy PPE contracts issued during COVID, and for my money most of the coverage misses the point. The coverage focuses on who the contracts went to, and how much they cost. There is only scant consideration given to whether the contracts were fulfilled (and they weren't - the PPE was no good and couldn't be used). This is precisely backwards: in an emergency situation where you don't have enough of a thing, and the existing systems to provide the thing are very much tuned to preventing fraud, you absolutely want to be able to throw money at the problem and accept that more of it than usual will be going places you wouldn't ordinarily tolerate. That's a lever we should definitely be able to pull, by making a conscious choice to relax . But that's only true if you do actually get what you paid for. Yes, you want to be able to follow up any dodgy procurement after the fact, but in the moment what you need is the critical resource. The scandal should be that none of it worked, not how it was bought.

mjw_byrne 3y ago
> The comment directly above you on the page right now gives an example of people getting the trade-off wrong, so your dismissiveness is pointless. I was only dismissing the way the article presented fraud tolerance as something deeper than a trade-off. I did acknowledge that the trade-off exists and in my other comment stated explicitly that I think discussion of how one finds the right trade-off is interesting. On your COVID example, I agree that in an emergency it's worth pulling the lever as you put it, i.e. grease the wheels and get the stuff we need. But I wouldn't expect the extra spending to be directed disproportionately at cronies of the government, fraudulent or not.

mjw_byrne 3y ago

> The comment directly above you on the page right now gives an example of people getting the trade-off wrong, so your dismissiveness is pointless. I was only dismissing the way the article presented fraud tolerance as something deeper than a trade-off. I did acknowledge that the trade-off exists and in my other comment stated explicitly that I think discussion of how one finds the right trade-off is interesting. On your COVID example, I agree that in an emergency it's worth pulling the lever as you put it, i.e. grease the wheels and get the stuff we need. But I wouldn't expect the extra spending to be directed disproportionately at cronies of the government, fraudulent or not.