38 ms·

Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution

• supafastcoder 3y ago
  There’s no such thing as a broken system, every system is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it currently gets.
  • advisedwang 3y ago
    "The purpose of a system is what it does." See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
  • kjkjadksj 3y ago
    By that definition if I crumple a ball of paper and throw it and it goes 7 feet, I’ve engineered a physical marvel of an object that goes exactly that distance.
    • forgetfreeman 3y ago
      While absurd this is accurate. Incidentally, in the 5th grade I won (and was disqualified from) a school-wide paper airplane contest. The rules as presented prior to the contest: - No design constraints specified, your paper airplane could be any style that suited you. - paper airplanes must be constructed from a single sheet of paper (no size limit specified) - weighting was allowed (no weight limit specified) The day of the contest I walked out into the middle of the school gym with a single large sheet of construction paper and a dollar and fifty cents in quarters in my pocket. I placed the quarters in the middle of the paper then carefully crumpled it into a ball in such a way to ensure the coins were trapped. I then threw it the full length of the gym and out the gym doors, tripling the closest best distance. I was immediately pulled aside by several teachers and informed I was disqualified, with no reasons for the disqualification given. Moral: none that I can discern.
      • diracs_stache 3y ago
        Independent thinking like that could never be encouraged or rewarded in a place designed to produce just smart enough replacement labor. Hell, equivalent stunts in places like university or the workplace wouldn't necessarily end up in your favor (similar arbitration resulting in the organizations desired outcome likely being the case).
      • jogjayr 3y ago
        The rules, as you gave them to us, didn't define an "airplane". So you have to go to a dictionary for that. Which means ball of paper isn't an airplane because an airplane has to have wings. I understand why it felt unjust to you at the time. But even if you go 100% rules lawyer, the disqualification was correct.
        • forgetfreeman 3y ago
          Nope. Airplane was undefined as specific questions regarding design requirements and defining features where asked, the response was: there are no limitations other than it must be a shape made out of paper.
• alexey-salmin 3y ago
  "The Thirteenth Voyage" of Ijon Tichy is quite an amusing read on the topic
  • johngossman 3y ago
    “The planet had once been beset by burning winds, which—the scientists said—threatened to turn it into one enormous desert. Therefore a great irrigational plan was adopted. To implement which, appropriate institutions and top-priority bureaus were set up; but then, after the network of canals and reservoirs had been completed, the bureaus refused to disband themselves and continued to operate, irrigating Pinta more and more.” By the time Tichy arrives, people are being encouraged to breathe underwater. — The Star Diaries: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy I’m surprised the Soviets didn’t suppress this story
• felonynolef 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • airstrike 3y ago
    Why? Are we running out of names to give out?
    • felonynolef 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • hn_go_brrrrr 3y ago
        Acerbic, I think, but not really passive aggressive.
        • felonynolef 3y ago
          How is acerbic different from ironic?
          • card_zero 3y ago
            It's from from acerbus "bitter to taste, sharp, sour, tart." So it's something said in a mildly mean, cynical, or indeed bitter way, which could include irony but doesn't have to. Also cynicism is about dogs (and Diogenes), and sarcasm is to do with tearing flesh. There's something called the etymological fallacy that says I shouldn't explain words via their roots, but I like to anyway, I think it adds meaning.
            • felonynolef2 3y ago
              I don't know, it's clearly a synonym to me. "Why? Are we running out of names to give out?" is clearly with the intention to be mean but be smug about it, so hence the passive agressiveness.
            • 3y ago
• unethical_ban 3y ago
  It's a good article for those who are unfamiliar with these cautionary tales of second order effects and fraud. As someone who believes government is a solution to many problems, these lessons are critical. I disagree with the universality of the statement "any institution made to solve a problem will preserve it". They back off this in the caveats section. Two important things to prevent this is to consider the influence of money on a solution/organization, and what kind of oversight is needed for an organization. Also, when spinning up a program, asking "is the problem this org solves a permanent one?" Or can the problem be eradicated? A group created to clean up trash in a city park system might need to be large one year, but practically non-existent 5 years later if goals are met. The planned decommissioning of such organizations should be considered.
  • yukkuri 3y ago
    Yes, sadly this is an easy way for people to dishonestly claim to themselves and others that any attempt to solve problems (other than the "problem" of how to generate ever greater wealth disparity which somehow never gets included in this) is completely worthless
  • christkv 3y ago
    If the mandarins salaries and livelihood depend on it they will move mountains to sustain the institution. This is human nature. The problem with public institutions is that they fase few external pressures. A company will eventually die and history is littered by the corpses of former industry titans. Public institutions on the other hand.
    • yukkuri 3y ago
      Yeah like all those external pressures that have kept private mega corps from polluting, monopolizing, pervasively surveiling, brutally exploiting labor, and generating false "science" that maintains their dominance even in the face of huge global negative effects... Oh, wait...
      • christkv 3y ago
• yukkuri 3y ago
  There is a trap here of saying "thus we shouldn't do anything about problems" rather than the more reasonable "we should be prepared to iterate on our efforts".
  • wahnfrieden 3y ago
    It’s more a criticism of top-down hierarchical control of institutions (at any scale) than it is an indictment of humans cooperating around some goal Cui bono makes that clear
    • zaik 3y ago
      But note how all the examples were private companies or enterprising individuals who weren't controlled somehow, but simply wanted to protect their profits.
      • smallmancontrov 3y ago
        The political right uses multiple deca-billion-dollar megaphones to talk nonstop about this problem as it relates to the government while dramatically underrepresenting the extent to which it happens in the private sector so that they can lobby for privatization as a silver-bullet. I think it's fair for the article to shore up the complementary point of view. No less fair than what the right is doing, at any rate.
        • calvinmorrison 3y ago
          Well the difference is, tax slaves are forced at the end of a barrel to prop up local governments, and purportedly don't do that for free markets
          • TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
            How much is health insurance compared to local taxes?
          • 3y ago
• GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
  Corporate rent seeking would seem to be a more prevalent example, even in the context of government. For example, most of the US defense budget goes directly to the military industrial media complex instead of the uniformed military.
  • lotsofpulp 3y ago
    >For example, most of the US defense budget goes directly to the military industrial media complex instead of the uniformed military. Source? I would be surprised if the highest category of military spend was not healthcare (including VA) plus salaries (including DB pensions) plus benefits, which is all payroll expense to employees.
    • Footkerchief 3y ago
      Looks like you're right -- $551 out of $842 billion, 65%, is spent on compensation. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59475 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59475 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59511 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59511
      • lotsofpulp 3y ago
        Thanks for looking that up to confirm. My hunch was based on Medicare + Medicaid + Social Security eclipsing everything else in the US federal budget.
  • empath-nirvana 3y ago
    > most of the US defense budget goes directly to the military industrial media complex Even if it were true (which it isn't), most of the money that goes to contractors also goes to salaries.
  • SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    Side topic… but I sure love reading about the MIC from the same people that complained about it for decades but now are jumping up and down to “Send Help To Ukraine” which is really just feed the MIC as a stimulus package.
• jprete 3y ago
  This is more or less Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy. https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
  • timmg 3y ago
    Ha! I'm sure I've heard of that before -- but didn't remember it. Yesterday I came to this exact conclusion when talking about how things work at my job :/
  • adbachman 3y ago
    This is 100% accurate to my experience working as a software developer for the US federal government. Important humanitarian mission (I worked in the asylum and refugee org) filled with true believers, dedicated civil servants with a heart for service, managed by career middle managers. 18F, USDS, interesting smaller contractors, and all the "innovation" orgs direct hiring software devs like me were aimed at supporting the mission, but it felt like they were never going to win over the system of 9 digit contacts to support the status quo.
• nudgeee 3y ago
  Not just institutions, individuals too. I’ve seen many individuals ‘dig their heels’ into protecting their own pet project/baby/solution/etc, mainly due to ego. It takes maturity and humility to step back, assess objectively, trade off pros and cons, and ultimately let the best decisions, ideas and solutions win, even when it’s hard to give up your idea or a solution you’ve worked super hard on.
  • tux1968 3y ago
    > It takes maturity and humility to step back It also takes energy, focus, and intellectual capacity. All of which are being removed from the current effort at hand. There is a real cost to continually reevaluating the situation. Sometimes you just have to put your head down and plow ahead. This is why having competition is so powerful. Someone will likely be working hard at the right problem using the right strategy. There is no perfect strategy that will always result in using the fewest resources to generate the best solution. We have to accept inefficiencies and wasted efforts.
    • TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
      You don't solve perverse incentives with competition if the competition rewards perverse incentives. Competition isn't a panacea that makes everything bad go away. It's almost an institution in its own right, and is just as likely to suffer from Shirky-like problems as anything else.
      • tux1968 3y ago
        > Competition isn't a panacea that makes everything bad go away. Nobody said it did. I'm not making a moral claim, i'm saying that it is a matter of reality that nobody can predict the future perfectly and that effort from any individual is a limited resource. So it makes sense sometimes for an individual to just press on in the direction they've chosen, and not "waste" time reevaluating too often. You can either have one central authority that dictates a single direction, and forces all effort down a single path. Or you can have a more diffuse strategy that explores the solution space in multiple directions simultaneously. Competition, in the context I was referring to it, is basically just the difference between breadth first, or depth first search. I wasn't making a claim about what motivated the search in the first place.
• Lichtso 3y ago
  The article mentions this in the very end, but isn't the "Shirky principle" just a case of perverse incentives? Allocating a budget to solving a problem continuously does set the incentives to prolong the problem. I wonder how much paying after the problem is solved would help vs. paying in advance as it is often done for agencies / institutions.
  • chiefalchemist 3y ago
    > I wonder how much paying after the problem is solved would help vs. paying in advance as it is often done for agencies / institutions. If only more government programs operated this way. Yet instead of (for example) a solution to poverty, we get The Poverty Industrial Complex.
    • malfist 3y ago
      Poverty is famously a one time, single solution issue. /s
      • chiefalchemist 3y ago
        It might be. How can we say when all be get are "solutions" that deepen it, perpetuate it, normalize it, etc.? So yeah, I'm glad we agree. Thanks for proving my point. Hint: Start by reading Matt Desmond's "Evicted" and then go from there. Also, watch the Rob Redford film "The Candidate". Make note of how many of "the issues" - and the associated narratives - persist today. Imagine selling a product that promises a solution but ultimately only keeps selling you promises.
        • malfist 3y ago
          I ate lunch yesterday, why am I hungry today? Clearly there's a lunch industrial complex
          • chiefalchemist 3y ago
            Have you read the Desmond book? A simple yes or no will suffice.
• ccvannorman 3y ago
  Such an important principle when considering the governance of and improvement of societies. I noted that the article didn't mention the War on Drugs; probably books have been written about the Shirky principle and the US's war on drugs.
• ballenf 3y ago
  Legal barriers to entry and similar regulations are often the form entrenched players use to preserve their problem. It's a hard balance to strike because the examples of harm from too little regulation make easy soundbites. But the costs of the certification are complex and difficult to quantify, albeit very real.
  • unglaublich 3y ago
    Maybe governments should provide 'pro deo' certification services for new players that wish to enter the market.
• chiefalchemist 3y ago
  Nah. Correction: Institutions try to preserve themselves. That's the goal. That's the root problem. Once you understand the power of that belief, the behaviour, the rhetoric, etc. all becomes much clearer. The bullshit much easier to cut through. The fact the problems don't get solved is a "side effect" to self preservation.
  • unglaublich 3y ago
    Exactly. You should shape an environment where institutions _cannot_ exist if they don't solve the problem. E.g., 'no cure, no pay', set and fixed subsidies, under-performance penalties, competition.
    • chiefalchemist 3y ago
      Or at least put a finite deadline and/or other limits (e.g., budget) on the "project". Instead we back unproven "solutions" and then keep throwing money at them in an insanity sorta way. Boggles the fucking mind.
      • catlifeonmars 3y ago
        Institutions are composed of people who expect to continue to get paid and therefore their incentives are aligned. If changing jobs was less costly it might alleviate the problem somewhat.
        • chiefalchemist 3y ago
          Why change jobs when you can align your self interest with your current job?
• CPLX 3y ago
  The first main example used here is dumb. The point wasn't that carpooling needed to go back to being inconvenient again, the problem is obviously that if you expand the definition of "carpooling" too much you get unlicensed and unregulated common carrier transportation companies that are effectively taxi or bus services with no oversight at all, and people could get killed. Of course there's ways around that, and maybe the trade-offs are worth it. That's what the legislation concluded it seems. But the argument here is a strawman.
• kaycebasques 3y ago
  Systemantics by John Gall has some insightful and surprising gems that feel related to The Shirky Principle, I guess because they're both related to complex wetware systems. > Complex Systems Tend To Oppose Their Own Proper Function. My favorite axiom. Your city has a problem with trash building up on the streets so it sets up a waste management company. The company starts out by collecting trash daily, but then they shift to a Tuesday-only schedule. Next, you get a notice saying that the company will no longer service your building unless you buy their standardized garbage cans (to ensure that the robotic arms on their trucks can pick them up). Eventually, the waste management union goes on strike and the trash starts piling up on the street again anyways. > People In Systems Do Not Do What The System Says They Are Doing. The stated purpose of a king is to rule a country, but in reality they spend a lot of time fighting off usurpers. This one feels related to the Shirky Principle: > A System Continues To Do Its Thing, Regardless Of Need. The Selective Service System continues to require all 18-year-old male US citizens to register for the draft, even though the US hasn’t had a draft in 51 years. https://www.biodigitaljazz.net/blog/systemantics.html https://www.biodigitaljazz.net/blog/systemantics.html (one of my many blogs)
  • electrondood 3y ago
    This was exactly what came to mind. Thanks for posting the reference
    • kaycebasques 3y ago
      Great book. I learned from its Wikipedia page that the author (John Gall) pitched 30 different publishers, got rejected by all of them, and then published it himself. It got discussed in academic papers and then the New York Times picked it up. And we're still talking about it 50 years later. Given that the central theme of the book is "systems barely work" I very much like to imagine Gall taking all of the rejections in stride because he was able to view the publishers as just another system that has its own goals and perhaps isn't really working as it should.
  • MichaelZuo 3y ago
    > Eventually, the waste management union goes on strike and the trash starts piling up on the street again anyways. Isn't that just free association? Unless they signed a binding agreement that prohibited striking whatsoever, I can't see why they shouldn't be able to.
• mizzao 3y ago
  As soon as I read this, I thought of TurboTax and its mission to preserve the crappy system of filing US taxes so that its software can continue to profit.
  • bdw5204 3y ago
    My first thought was of the 2 major US political parties and their mission of promising things they have no intention of ever doing to get votes so they can win elections, take away more of our freedoms and redistribute more wealth from the many to the few. TurboTax is also a great example though.
    • wesselbindt 3y ago
      This is quite independent of the US. The state functions purely to protect the interests of the dominant class. In the US, the dominant class happens to be capital owners, but that's true in most of the world these days.
      • jjjjj55555 3y ago
        I tend to agree, but then I look at Europe and I say, who is the ruling class here? In the US it's obvious that corporations run everything, but that doesn't seem to be the case in western Europe.
        • cheschire 3y ago
          That's because western europe is the ruling class.
          • jjjjj55555 3y ago
            All of the people of western Europe are the ruling class? LOL I doubt any of them feel that way. What are they ruling exactly?
        • smallmancontrov 3y ago
• a1o 3y ago
  I don't understand why saying institutions and focusing on government, the current example I have in mind for this is Google relationship with search and Ads in the AI era.
  • zaik 3y ago
    Not one example given in this article was a government institution.
    • a1o 3y ago
      It's the second paragraph and when I stopped reading.
    • ptx 3y ago
      That's what I thought was weird. It starts and concludes with "For example, the Shirky principle means that a government agency [...]", but all the actual examples in-between are of private companies causing problems, not government agencies.
• jupp0r 3y ago
  Counter example: WHO and smallpox
  • supertrope 3y ago
    Also the March of Dimes. When humanity miraculously fixed their core issue they expanded their mission.
    • jupp0r 3y ago
      Good point, let's hope Polio is not coming back though and it gets eradicated completely eventually.
  • unglaublich 3y ago
    True, but smallpox is just an aspect of health. Solving smallpox leaves a lot of health related issues for WHO to focus on.
• newman8r 3y ago
  I have to leave the example of police and police unions - which have very powerful lobbyists who try their darnedest to keep as many things illegal as possible.
  • kjkjadksj 3y ago
    Our firefighters, who also do ems, are currently battling a bike lane plan. I guess in places like Amsterdam with bike lanes huge swaths of city must burn down routinely if you believed the bull pedaled by our fire dept.
    • falserum 3y ago
      Id we are being charitable to firepeople, I assume, that bikelane will reduce width of auto part of the road, thus making difficult: for firetruck to drive on it or make turns, other cars can not allow through the firetruck. (Maybe amsterdam bikelanes were not an afterthought and took all this into the design) Diclaimer: I have no idea, just speculting
• paulsutter 3y ago
  This explains a lot about the effectiveness of San Francisco's $600M in spending on drug addiction/homelessness, the spend and problem seem to increase together
  • electriclove 3y ago
    Homeless Industrial Complex
    • malfist 3y ago
      Please tell me, what companies are involved in the "homeless industrial complex" and what industrial product do they produce?
      • reeboo 3y ago
        https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2024/02/22/city-will-scrap-28-tiny-pods-and-purchase-100-new-units/ https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2024/02/22/city-will-scrap-2...
      • 4RealFreedom 3y ago
        They produce wealth for their executives. The Colorado Coalition For The Homeless received 122M in 2023. In 2021, the CEO made $313K. The top 6 people make over $200K a year. All of this from a non-profit. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/840951575 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/840... https://kdvr.com/news/problem-solvers/colorado-coalition-for-the-homeless-ceo-makes-313k-is-he-worth-it/ https://kdvr.com/news/problem-solvers/colorado-coalition-for...
        • gruez 3y ago
          >The Colorado Coalition For The Homeless received 122M in 2023. In 2021, the CEO made $313K. The top 6 people make over $200K a year. All of this from a non-profit. What's the typical salary for a CEO of a for-profit company that has 122M in revenues? While I can understand why people are outraged at the prospect of people getting money from a non-profit, it's unrealistic to expect everyone to be volunteers. Besides the question of how they'd financially support themselves, you have the problem of "pay peanuts, get monkeys".
• nindalf 3y ago
  The UNRWA, the UN Agency for helping Palestinian refugees has been accused of perpetuating their misery - (The real problem with the UN’s agency for Palestinians, The Economist https://archive.is/c7Pop https://archive.is/c7Pop).
  • jfengel 3y ago
    Unfortunately that is a deep and complex problem. There are a lot of forces that are using the Palestinians as a stick with which to harass Israel, in part to deflect from their own human rights abuses. The result is a set of permanent mutual grievance. An intractable problem may now be utterly insoluble.
    • golemiprague 3y ago
      [dead]
  • ImHereToVote 3y ago
    Accused by who? The ones that need to legitimize the massacre?
    • nindalf 3y ago
      Accused by the Economist in this case. But they quote Palestinians who say the same.
      • enterprise_cog 3y ago
        They quote one Palestinian and his quote can be interpreted as a call for a two or one state solution. It is an empty statement without more context.
  • cobbzilla 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • 3y ago
• gmerc 3y ago
  Ah yes, the US Healthcare industry in a nutshell
• pjdesno 3y ago
  Spam email is another example. There's a paper from Stefan Savage's group a while back where they were able to estimate overall revenue of a few big spam-generating pharma/counterfeit product networks, and it looks like the anti-spam industry is vastly bigger than the underground spam-generating industry, and had no desire to shut off the ultimate source of their revenues. There's a reason we don't see many of those emails anymore, and it's not because of any action by anti-spam companies - it's because firms whose products were being counterfeited convinced the credit card companies to shut off the banks handling payments for these purchases. (most evidently went through a couple of banks in I think Azerbaijan) Evidently all the viagra spam was coming from people who also hawked fake Gucci stuff...
  • gruez 3y ago
    >There's a paper from Stefan Savage's group a while back where they were able to estimate overall revenue of a few big spam-generating pharma/counterfeit product networks, and it looks like the anti-spam industry is vastly bigger than the underground spam-generating industry, and had no desire to shut off the ultimate source of their revenues. This doesn't follow. The US army has a vastly bigger budget than the Taliban or Viet Cong, yet it still lost to them. Revenue is only a relevant factor when the battle is symmetric. For spam there's no reason to believe it is. Spammers are basically guerilla fighters because they operate as criminal networks in areas with lax law enforcement. What's the "anti-spam industry" supposed to do? Send in PMCs? >There's a reason we don't see many of those emails anymore Yeah, they've been replaced with phishing emails and scams instead.
    • fragmede 3y ago
      Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok scams too. People copy someone's profile, pretend to be them, say they're them to their friends and ask them for money. With AI voice changers, it even sounds like them.
    • mike50 3y ago
      The Viet Cong were being supported by China and the USSR.
  • 3y ago
• verisimi 3y ago
  Of course institutions preserve the problem - that is the reason for their existence - so they are in a fight for survival to keep a systemic problem going. It is even better for them if the institution has managed to enshrine its position in law, creating huge barriers to entry for any upstart that tries to come up with better solutions. Taxis, medicine, banking - there are so many examples. If you ask me, a freer market is the answer - less intervention, allow simple economic forces to play out. But the inclination is to have more government meddling etc to fix the mess, which has the opposite effect that it was intended to have. This is such a common pattern however, one ought to be asking whether the "unintended effect" (of entrenching the problem) is in reality an "intended effect", with only lip service being paid to 'doing the right thing' to facilitate legal changes.
  • analog31 3y ago
    Ah, but a "freer market" is itself an artificial institution, subject to the same inescapable law.
  • psychoslave 3y ago
    The so called free market tends to engender monopolies or oligopolies that will do their best to destroy any concurrency though. Free market is the myth that can be thrown at plebeians to ashame them on their inability to compete with establishment, whatever the form it takes.
• unglaublich 3y ago
  Sounds like a lack of competition. Multiple entities should compete for providing the best solution, and the entities should be rewarded or penalized accordingly.
  • btbuildem 3y ago
    I'll give the Canadian telecom market as a counterexample: Multiple large providers (Rogers, Bell, Telus, Videotron to name the top four) instead of competing for customers and driving prices down, they have effectively colluded into an oligopoly - to the point of matching prices and plan details. In this case we have multiple entities working together to maintain the existing problem, so they can collectively maximize profits.
• forgot-im-old 3y ago
  One solution is to keep these organizations so lean and understaffed that they would love to eliminate tasks and reduce the scope of their responsibilities.
• ttoinou 3y ago
  Literally what Ivan Illich was saying 50 years ago when he talked about counterproductivity in institutions
  • mistrial9 3y ago
    credit to California's Jerry Brown and his media outreach for championing the work of Ivan Illich
• jakearmitage 3y ago
  Hello ATF.
• alexwhb 3y ago
  Really interesting read. I’ve had this exact thought but not in a well defined sentence before. Especially regarding entities like turboTax or DoT (Departments of Transportation) where they will expand highways even though it’s a well known empirical fact that this typically causes induced demand or more traffic. It’s really nice to have such a well defined principle to this idea.
  • Valid3840 3y ago
    Exactly what I had in mind. In the case of the DoT, I wonder what could be the solution there, some exterior safeguard? reducing fundings?
    • alexwhb 3y ago
      Ya honestly that’s a great question. I think more public awareness would be helpful and pressure on state representatives. But honestly you see where it can go badly wrong in Austin TX. A majority (as far as I’m aware) are against the DoT highway expansion and have proposed alternative plans for light rail… but the DoT has over ridden this majority and gone ahead with the highway expansion anyway. Maybe if the engineers that work on these projects are skilled in planning rail projects too… there’d be less myopic focus on roads. Just a thought.
  • thegrim33 3y ago
    I don't understand how people perpetuate that induced demand stuff. It absolutely falls apart if you think about it at all. So we shouldn't expand highways because it "induces demand/traffic"? So all of our cities and states should have kept their original one lane dirt roads and never improved on them, because expanding the dirt lanes would have induced demand and caused more traffic? Our transportation system would have been better / more effective with a couple of dirt roads and never expanding? It doesn't even remotely make sense.
    • alexwhb 3y ago
      I think the argument of induced demand is not so much we should never build or expand road infrastructure, that’s obviously asinine, but rather we should consider alternative transportation investments. Rail, dedicated bus lanes etc all increase rider density dramatically over cars. Induced demand will happen regardless of the mode of transport, but cars allow for an extremely low ridership density per lane. That’s really the point being made. And if you look at the economics of road infrastructure it’s far inferior to other modes when you look at raw cost per person who can and will use it. Lastly from an environmental, and safety perspective there are several other modes of transport that are far superior
• m3kw9 3y ago
  Most times they don’t need to preserve the problem as the problem always slowly evolves and so does the institution. Another reason they cannot easily preserve problem is because there is competition. I do think this could be happening for medicine, and most likely place for it to happen
• HashThis 3y ago
  Corporations do that also by keep hiring lobbyists to get congress to sell out, to keep the problem in place. Like TurboTax & H&R Block not wanting the IRS to automate personal taxes. ...and their lobbyists got congress to pass a law to block the IRS.
• kazinator 3y ago
  I'm on a Committee (Phong Ngo) Oh, give me a pity, I'm on a committee Which means that from morning to night We attend and amend and contend and defend Without a conclusion in sight. We confer and concur, we defer and demur And re-iterate all of our thoughts We revise the agenda with frequent addenda And consider a load of reports. We compose and propose, we suppose and oppose And the points of procedure are fun! But though various notions are brought up as motion There's terribly little gets done. We resolve and absolve, but never dissolve Since it's out of the question for us. What a shattering pity to end our committee Where else could we make such a fuss? Copyright Phong Ngo RG APR99
  • seabass-labrax 3y ago
    Very fun poem! But do you know who Phong Ngo is? I'm having much trouble finding on the Web any other works attributed to such an author.
    • kazinator 3y ago
      I found two posts of this poem to Usenet, dated 1998, one of them claiming that the author is unknown. Thus it wasn't written in 1999, making the entire Phong Ngo copyright claim inauthentic. It looks like it appears in the fortune program's database. Search for the word committee in the following file: https://github.com/shlomif/fortune-mod/blob/master/fortune-mod/datfiles/songs-poems https://github.com/shlomif/fortune-mod/blob/master/fortune-m... It is attributed to Leslie Lipson, possibly this one, a political scientist who died in 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lipson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lipson That attribution seems credible. I also found an old file of quotes (evidently from the alt.quotations newsgroup) where it is also attributed to Lipson, and additionally a "Michael J. Irvin <IRVINMJ@WSUVM1>" is credited as having submitted it. It could be because of Irvin that it ended up in the fortune program. ftp://ftp.cs.brown.edu/pub/alt.quotations/Archive/c.txt
  • pizzafeelsright 3y ago
    Ngo may be a play on NGO.
• spacebacon 3y ago
  A wise man once said. You doin too much, gah.
• giantg2 3y ago
  The AMA is an amazing example of this, even though most doctors do not belong to the AMA.
  • mrandish 3y ago
    The TSA is also miraculous in it's ability to suck up billions of dollars in hidden fees added to every plane ticket and annoy tens of millions of people while performing a "service" which has been proven (many times, including by the TSA's own studies) to be completely unnecessary since cockpit doors were hardened and pilot procedures updated in 2002. Even if it was needed, their "service" has also demonstrated itself to be completely ineffective based on the number loaded handguns accidentally included in carry-on luggage and missed by TSA screening every year.
    • paulryanrogers 3y ago
      This seems reductive. For everything TSA misses they've caught plenty of other weapons that have no place in the cabin of an aircraft. No security can be perfect, so tradeoffs are inevitable. We can disagree about the thresholds, but it's not just theater.
      • derefr 3y ago
        But it's not the TSA's job to prevent murders in the air. (We already had a service specifically for that — the Air Marshals!) The TSA's only job is to prevent planes from being hijacked or destroyed in a way that results in massive collateral damage. And as the GP says, if you can't get in the cockpit, there become relatively few ways of doing this. (And the ways that do remain — e.g. binary explosives — are addressed by the more-limited carry-on regulations and security checks that every country does, and which the US already did before the TSA.)
        • paulryanrogers 3y ago
          An air marshall on a flight has one gun. If a determined group could reliably bring multiple guns into the cabin they're much more likely to overpower the marshall. From there they could open exterior doors and throw debris into the engines. Or perhaps their weapons could breach even armored cockpit doors.
• georgeecollins 3y ago
  Turbo Tax. Southwest Airlines lobbying against high speed rail.
• divan 3y ago
  Interesting links in the article and comments, but it seems like two different concepts are mixed here – the nature of bureaucracies and wrong incentives. I struggle to understand how cobra and rat cases are "institutions trying to preserve the problem". Cobra effect, in particular, is an immensely interesting topic of how rewarding the metrics can distort the system, otherwise known as Goodhart's effect. I highly recommend reading these two papers on the subject for anyone interested: - Categorizing Variants of Goodhart's Law [1] - Building less-flawed metrics: Understanding and creating better measurement and incentive systems [2] Adding the "Cognitive Surplus" book to the to-do shelf, but it seems like Shirky principle is mostly about institutions and the nature of bureaucracies. Now, a good question would be - when and why Shirky principle does not apply to the institutions. My first thought is the difference between bureaucracies that have "owner" and ones who lost it. When a bureaucracy has an owner (person or group of people) who can change the bureaucracy in response to external events, then it's probably unlikely to have Shirky effect (WHO and smallpox example in comments). However, bureaucracies that have lost their owner will most likely have this effect. The best thing I read on this subject (how bureaucracies work) is Samo Burja's "Great Founder Theory" [3]. If anyone can suggest something along these lines on the fundamental principles of bureaucracies, I would appreciate a lot. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04585 https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04585 [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666389923002210 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266638992... [3] https://samoburja.com/gft/ https://samoburja.com/gft/
• hyperthesis 3y ago
  The ones that don't no longer exist. Survival of the Obstructionest. Some institutions obsolete themselves. Though I can't think of one as they are arguably not "institutions".
• deleted 3y ago
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• charles_f 3y ago
  > municipal authorities, who realized that their best efforts at dératisation [extermination of rats] had actually increased the rodent population I live in a complex of town houses. We have lots of rats and mice. This is seemingly an unsolvable problem, and our pest control company keeps adding poison traps, but the problem does not go away. They blame government, because the poison they are allowed to put in their doesn't kill the mice, (as this could kill eagles or other animals eating the mice). We ended up buying our own standard issue traps lately that either slap them to death, or drown them, and the problem is getting better. Makes you question why the pest control company didn't do that. Or not, we know why.
  • roncesvalles 3y ago
    I've always had a gut feeling that if the best solution to a pest problem is to buy a $10 spray from Home Depot and spray it around your house in 10 minutes, a pest control company is never going to do it because it doesn't make them look like pros. I wonder then which other processes are "held back" at a certain level of complexity only because if made simpler, the optics of the process would devalue the people who charge money to do it. Oil and filter changes?
    • monsieurbanana 3y ago
      Software, websites
    • yallpendantools 3y ago
      I'm gonna have to play advocate here for The Institution over The Individual. The jobs you mentioned (pest control, basic car maintenance) exist because a lot of people can't be bothered to learn how to do it properly. (Or, to put it more cynically: a lot of people are idiots. Like, a lot. Cue the quote about the average man and the thought that half of humanity is dumber than that...) A lot of things can go wrong with the $10 spray you bought from Home Depot. You could end up spraying it where you're not supposed to and at best you end up poisoned in the ICU, at worst you contaminate your area's water supply. You could spray it on a lazy Saturday afternoon but you forgot about your dog who loves to lick the floor; at best you end up with a very expensive vet bill, at worst your dog then licks your kids in the face and you end up with a dead dog and a dead kid. To be clear, I'm not saying your gut feeling is wrong; I'd probably do the same, honestly. But it most certainly doesn't apply to everyone. Further, oil and filter changes might be super easy, barely an inconvenience but you could end up not resealing and tightening a valve or a nut enough and the worst time to find that out is when you're doing 100KPH on a highway. Don't even get me started about people who think they could save money by using olive oil where they are supposed to use a specific type of coating grease or lubricant; after all, they buy olive oil from the grocery once every month so, as a car maintenance item, it's "basically free". These people are not only a danger to themselves. They are a danger to everyone they share a road (or a residential area) with. Of course, having an industry around these tasks doesn't eliminate the possibility of these dumb outcomes but having "professionals" who are have read the fabulous manual and are regulated put them head and shoulders above J. Handyman Smith when doing said job. Emphasis on regulated, we give that far less credit than it deserves. You might have also read the fabulous manual but if you are not regulated, not beholden to a specific standard or process, how do I even check you didn't cut corners? If you mess up somewhere, how can you and everyone else even begin to assess the magnitude of your fuck-up and thereby respond appropriately?
• simpaticoder 3y ago
  I used to believe that any organization who takes morality seriously must fund it's equal and opposite organization. It would serve as a foil, collecting unhappy customer stories and potentially turning them into lawsuits. The second organization's stated goal is to end the first organization. But after a moment's thought, the Shirky Principle clearly makes this unworkable - both orgs want to survive, so the second org will, in general, tend to shirk its duties (so to speak) and function merely as a private welfare scheme and a cloak of respectability for the first.
• intrepidsoldier 3y ago
  IT and Kubernetes
• gumby 3y ago
  The most general form of this is Upton Sinclair’s: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”. Though often the causes are not cynical or nefarious.
  • mistrial9 3y ago
    not wrong but - notice that this states a principle from the point of view of a single individual only. Certainly other "lenses", frameworks or mission statements are relevant?
• mechhacker 3y ago
  I didn't see any mention of Robert Conquest's 3 laws of bureaucracy: 1 Everyone is conservative about what he knows best. 2 Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing. 3 The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies
• Georgelemental 3y ago
  French sociologist Jean Baudrillard wrote of the supposedly "anti-racist" French NGO "SOS Racisme": > Every society must designate an enemy, but it must not seek to exterminate it. This was the fatal error of Fascism and the Terror, but it is also the error of the soft, democratic Terror, which is in the process of eliminating the Other even more surely than the Holocaust. The operation that consisted in hypostasizing a race and perpetuating it through internal reproduction, which we stigmatize as a racist abjection, is now being carried out at the level of individuals, in the very name of man's right to control his own process genetically and in all its forms. SOS-Racism. SOS-whales. Ambiguity: in one case, it's to denounce racism, in the other, it's to save whales. What if, in the first case, it's also a subliminal call to save racism, and thus the anti-racist struggle as the last vestige of political passions, and thus a virtually doomed species?
• serial_dev 3y ago
  I thought this was going to be an article about the Agile Industrial Complex or Clean Architecture.
• syngrog66 3y ago
  bingo
• zubairq 3y ago
  I guess the principal "Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution" can apply to almost anything though, as really it is talking about "incentives"?
  • germandiago 3y ago
    Exactly. It is about incentives. Always. Every time. Any time.
• bpiche 3y ago
  Illich talked about this. That’s what Medical Nemesis was all about, and Deschooling Society.
• hprotagonist 3y ago
  https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
  • screenoridesagb 3y ago
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  • kaycebasques 3y ago
    Another great related insight from Systemantics (see other thread below) > For Every Human System, There Is A Type Of Person Adapted To Thrive On It. There are some attributes that are probably necessary for survival in any system, but each system has some uniqueness in the sense that it attracts different traits. It’s hard to tell what traits any given system attracts. The traits do not necessarily align with successful operation of the system itself e.g. the qualities for being elected president don’t necessarily align with the ability to run the country effectively. Systems not only attract people who will succeed within the system but also people with parasitic traits that thrive at the expense of the system. “Efforts to remove parasitic Systems-people by means of screening committees, review boards, and competency examinations merely generate new job categories for such people to occupy.”
  • osrec 3y ago
    Does the second group also end up skewing remuneration in their favour? For example, a tech company where managers are paid over the odds, while the passionate engineers who do a lot of the technical heavy lifting are paid less.
• mitchbob 3y ago
  Related: The purpose of a system is what it does. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
• sitkack 3y ago
  The Clay Shirky talk, "The Collapse of Complex Business Models" is play on "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter (as mentioned in the post). Another great person to study in systems and complexity is Jane Jacobs. One parallel is see is people "warning" about the impending population collapse (which we desperately need), but what we need to do is actively restructure our society to handle it gracefully. https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/archaeology/archaeological-theory-and-methods/collapse-complex-societies https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/archae... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs
  • shakesbeard 3y ago
    Also see https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws?tab=readme-ov-file#the-shirky-principle https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws?tab=readme-ov-file#th...
• Georgelemental 3y ago
  NATO and its system of related organizations is another great example. Built to defend against the USSR, when the USSR fell it made sure to repeatedly provoke Russia so that the threat from the east would be preserved.
  • google234123 3y ago
    I think Putin’s always dreamed about restoring the Soviet Union. In his own words, it’s disaster.
    • Georgelemental 3y ago
      No he hasn't, he thinks the Soviet Union was a disaster! Putin has always been very clear about his motivations, which he has expounded upon in countless lengthy interviews and speeches. For example, his July 2021 ramblings: https://www.prlib.ru/en/article-vladimir-putin-historical-unity-russians-and-ukrainians https://www.prlib.ru/en/article-vladimir-putin-historical-un...
• iandanforth 3y ago
  Many here will see connections to The Innovator's Dilemma. So I want to ask, are you aware of any business that recognized it had become an impediment to further innovation and "consciously" applied the suggestions from TID? Has anyone done a review of their own business trying to see if they had become part of the problem rather than the best solution to the problem?
• gloryless 3y ago
  The systems people are just nodding
• exabrial 3y ago
  I can think of no better example of than the US Postal Service. They’re literally is zero reason in 2024 why are we cutting down trees using diesel fuel to ship paper to a mill using coal to make it into paper using more diesel fuel to ship it to my home to be trashed picked up by a dump truck, using more diesel fuel to be thrown in a giant pile on what it would’ve been otherwise pristine piece of land.
  • johnchristopher 3y ago
    I don't think the US Postal Service is responsible for the quantity of paper people are shipping to your doorstep, neither for the disposal of that pile of paper in a giant pile etc.
    • dilyevsky 3y ago
      Usps is at least partially kept afloat by marketing postage aka spam. It’s a quarter of their revenue and probably like 90%+ of my inmail… Though it’s not like usps was created to prevent lots of trees from getting cut so I’m not sure what tp is on about
  • Angostura 3y ago
    To be clear, you believe that everyone in the US is sufficuently digitally savvy and well equipped with digital technology that paper is no-longer needed? Have you tried volunteering with your local town's digital champion/digital mentoring programme, if they exist? Yoiu may find it it interesting
  • dambi0 3y ago
    What proportion of your trash is made up of mail?
    • exabrial 3y ago
      I received 6 letters in the last 6 months I want to keep. Three of them were cards from nieces/nephews. 3 of them were bills, but could have been sent via email. This is generously maybe 120 grams. Compare that to the _enormous_ amount of unsolicited bulk trash that I have to clean out regularly. I would say the yearly minimum is 5kg with the upper bound probably around 25kg. I cannot fathom the huge diesel cost to deliver this crap straight to the landfill.
• thegrim33 3y ago
  Another book that covers the topic - Quigley's the Evolution of Civilizations. Taken from a summary: "Quigley defines a civilization as “a producing society with an instrument of expansion.” A civilization’s decline is not inevitable but occurs when its instrument of expansion is transformed into an institution—that is, when social arrangements that meet real social needs are transformed into social institutions serving their own purposes regardless of real social needs." He spends some time defining institutionalization, when groups transition from being a group that was formed to accomplish a goal, to being a group whos goal becomes to preserve the group, the various stages involved, and the points where there's opportunities to rectify the situation via reform.
• seventytwo 3y ago
  …duh? I thought this was common knowledge.
• imadierich 3y ago
  [dead]
• sdeframond 3y ago
  Luncheon vouchers systems are run by private entities that take a fee on it. I believe the fee is pretty high (a shop owner told me 8%, but I am not too confident). I definitely believe this system is outdated, that the tax-cut is eaten by said companies plus the extra burden and that the world would be a slightly simpler place without meal vouchers (at least as I know them in France). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meal_voucher https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meal_voucher
  • gruez 3y ago
    Any source that companies are actually paying a premium on this? Given that gift cards are sold at par or even at a discount, I'm skeptical that companies will pay a premium for what essentially are gift cards.
    • sdeframond 3y ago
      Companies don't pay a premium but merchants pay a transaction fee. Reading from Swile's website, it is a flat 3.85%, quite lower than what I initially thought. I am not sure how it compares to credit cards. Source https://www.swile.co/en/merchants/meal-vouchers https://www.swile.co/en/merchants/meal-vouchers
• jmilloy 3y ago
  I tend to think that this isn't inherent to institutions (or individuals), but rather that institutions that have this behavior tend to grow and last, whereas institutions that do not stay small and eventually disappear. A kind of survivorship bias.
• jl2718 3y ago
  True, but then how do problems actually get solved? Perhaps only by agents that would benefit if the problem were solved. For instance, send UNICEF into nations with extreme poverty, and you will get back a bunch of sad stories, a bigger UNICEF, and a larger population to feed. Send a cigarette company, and magically the people will find a way to create an economy to fund their nicotine addiction. There are other solutions to the plagues of poverty, such as civil war, narco-states, natural resource extraction, and refugee migration. Not your intent? Well, you probably didn’t actually want to solve the problem; you just wanted to feel good about your intent to solve the problem, and now I ruined it for you, so I’m the problem.
  • mikelitoris 3y ago
    No you didn’t solve the problem. You just traded one problem for another one.
    • jl2718 3y ago
      This is actually the point, and is analogous to convex optimization, in that systems always evolve along the boundary of constraint, and in the linear case, it will always be an exchange of active parts of the problem.
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• shp0ngle 3y ago
  I'm always thinking about that when I see various homeless shelters in my city. Yes I dont doubt that people there work from their goodwill... but... if homelessness disappear, they will be out of business? From some point of view, homelessness is GOOD for them? Same thing with all those African charities I guess, but I dont have any direct experience with poverty in Africa while I see homeless daily
• prabhu-yu 3y ago
  Police system wants criminals to persist. Justice system wants litigations to persist. Medical system wants diseases to prolong. Religious leaders don't want to us to reach our own god. Political and military leaders want the country to be threatened. Education system don't want us to learn on our own. So, they create artificial pressure to get educated. Even top technological companies pay legal bribes to users not to use competatiors product. so on. Only solution to all this is: Think how would we live if such entities did not exist. Then develop necessary skills and use them in daily life.
  • Spivak 3y ago
    > Police system wants criminals to persist It's not actually police most of the time, it's for-profit prisons. They are by far the biggest lobby for keeping minor drug offenses illegal. Police don't actually benefit a whole lot from there being lots of crime, at least where I live -- it makes them look bad.
    • prabhu-yu 3y ago
      Sorry, I generalized it too much. I was expressing the general tendency, not the exception, forgot put a star mark! Yes, you are correct. There are good people in every system. Even I have seen top doctors in top hospitals who wished patients who had surgeries to return home as soon as possible. I have seen (some you tube videos) some police persons who wished less crime. I have seen engineers fixing bugs once for all! This adage can be seen in the Neitz-sche's statement - "exploitation is a basic function of life".
  • 65 3y ago
    It's funny too because it applies to almost every industry, and to almost every individual in those industries. I wrote and maintain the codebase for a government ETL pipeline that an entire analytics team relies on. It would in no way benefit me to have good documentation, or tests, or a readable codebase. I put those things in because I'm not a sociopath. The difference is that corporations behave like sociopaths, not most individuals.
• 343242dfsdf 3y ago
  I know
• alok-g 3y ago
  A story from a physicist friend working in a mid-size high-tech company: There was a director-level organization of about 50 people trying to solve a technical research-level problem. The physicist found an innovative solution that was too simple and just worked. When he demonstrated it to everyone, he thought everyone would be very happy. On the contrary, his manager started having unexplained issues with him and he was shortly let go. He has ultimately given up on corporate politics and is currently a physics teacher at a usual local college. As the physics teacher, he found that the students in his class barely knew basic stuff (vector addition, etc.) from the pre-requisite courses. He tried to teach to cover up. He diligently and fairly checked the answers/solutions from the students in the mid-term exams, and found that practically no one passed. He was shortly called by the college dean and heard back. The dean's primary concern was that irrespective of whether students actually learn or not, if so many fail the exams, the college would get shut down. He is now forced to pass the students even while he realizes that by passing them now, he's setting them up for failure in the future if they actually pursue physics. I surmise that if the Shirky Principle were to stop acting, say 80% of projects/institutions may just go away and should. ---- In some cases, it's even worse -- Institutions invent fake problems that they allege to be the solution for and then of course never solve them.
  • matthewdgreen 3y ago
    On the one hand, your friend could just be experiencing a streak of bad luck or a series of bad organizations. On the other hand, after many years of life experience, when I hear a (first or second hand) account that takes the form “of course I was the reasonable one in every case and these N organizations were clearly behaving like idiots”, I’ve learned to consider the possibility that the speaker is just unusually difficult. The larger the value of N, the more seriously I consider it. And I’ve learned this the hard way.
    • mturmon 3y ago
      Yes. Besides “N”, another indicator you alluded to is the degree to which the aggrieved person is willing to take any responsibility for the outcome. Sometimes gifted people can negotiate problems with a nervous college dean or engineering manager, so that their solution gets adopted. These problems exist in the world, and successful engineers will hopefully learn to cope with them.
• onos 3y ago
  Perhaps our institutions could be replaced by finite lifetime endeavors, similar to vc funds. Reminds me of us vs Japanese tv shows. Theirs often last only a season or two and the stories are good. Ours go on and on till we are sick of them.
• cs702 3y ago
  ...because solving the problem would make them unnecessary.
• bcatanzaro 3y ago
  “To oppose something is to maintain it. To be sure, if you turn your back on [Rome] and walk away from it, you are still on the road [to Rome]. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.” - Ursula K. Le Guin
  • codingclaws 3y ago
    the left hand of darkness, read it recently
  • magpi3 3y ago
    Yes, and I think I really see this with authoritarianism and authoritarian impulses, both in politics and in organizations. The people who oppose authoritarianism often end up recreating it in their own image & ideology.
• karmakaze 3y ago
  It also happens at a larger scale where an entire industry maintains the status quo. I think of this every time I read "the $x B ____ industry" > In addition to mentioning the key quote that is now known as the Shirky principle, Kelly also says the following in his blog post: > “The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions (like a company, or an industry) can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem.” I would drop the 'inadvertently' though.
• lawxls 3y ago
  It's funny that nobody mentions such an institution and how it was fixed. Elon Musk fired 80% of Twitter's employees, and it's better than ever.
  • sidibe 3y ago
    > it's better than ever As a product, I think you're in the minority if you think that. As a business, you are delusional if you think that.
• bilsbie 3y ago
  It seems to then follow that every organization started to fix a problem should build in an expiration date.
• osigurdson 3y ago
  It does seem that the incentives are pretty aligned with keeping the organization in place and thus not solving the problem. The incentive structure would have to change to fundamentally fix the issue.
• Animats 3y ago
  This appears in the biggest way in the financial sector. The US financial sector is now about 12% of employment. The US used to have a much simpler financial sector, due to strict regulation. * Banks could not do brokerage, and brokers could not do banking. (Glass-Stegall) * Banks could only do boring stuff - transactions and loans. * Utilities were mostly rate of return regulated, paid dividends, and had stable stock prices. * Utility ownership was simple - there was a limit of 3 on ownership tree depth. (Utility Holding Company Act) * Stocks traded much more slowly. There were no hedge funds, leveraged buyouts, private equity (which is leveraged buyouts under another name), or high frequency trading. * Major companies could have only one class of voting stock, a NYSE rule. (Ford Motor was grandfathered in, being older than the NYSE). * Home loans came mostly from savings and loan companies, which could pay higher interest rates than banks. All that held from 1940-1980, arguably one of the greatest periods for the US. Then came financial deregulation. The big effect was that if you wanted to make money, you didn't go into finance. You went into manufacturing.
  • logicchains 3y ago
    You missed a key thing: before the 70s there was a limit on the amount of cash in the system, but after the US jettisoned all ties to gold there was no limit on how much money the financial system can create. That's why the US dollar has seen more inflation in the past 50 years than in the 150 years before that.
    • pama 3y ago
      Why has the US seen so little inflation in the last 30 years?
      • Spivak 3y ago
        Like ~100% inflation since 1994 sounds bad until you look at the 30 years prior to that which was ~380% inflation.
        • pama 3y ago
• siglesias 3y ago
  A while back when I noticed that many upscale gyms were offering high-calorie workout smoothies, shakes and bars. When I did the math, it happened that most of them would completely obliterate whatever workout you had just done (assuming your goal was calorie deficit)...thus prolonging the need for the gym.
  • semitones 3y ago
    I see your reasoning but disagree with it being an example of the shirky principle. Even once you get "really fit" you don't stop needing the gym, so I don't think "prolonging the need for the gym" is something a gym can actually do, or would want to do. If anything, it's the most fit people that have the most consistent gym habits. On the contrary, to go off on your example, it might actually be _against_ the gym's interest to serve high calorie smoothies, the reason being that those pursuing a calorie deficit are likely to become discouraged by the lack of results over time, and would be more likely to abandon the gym altogether. Gyms are usually optimized for weightlifting and equipment-based exercises, which typically lean more towards performance and hypertrophy/strength training, in which case you need high-calorie nutrient-dense foods to be able to actually see results. However, yes, if you go there for a Zumba session to try to lose weight and then you have three smoothies, you are still gonna be gaining weight. (I'd argue this is still _not_ in the gym's best interest)
  • tracerbulletx 3y ago
    Eh plenty of people are trying to bulk and those things are for them. I doubt that's a conspiracy, gyms want people who either pay and don't go, or if they do go they're probably more likely to stay if they get results than if they don't.
• rsp1984 3y ago
  Accountants, tax consultants, (many types of) lawyers, real estate agents and other useless middlemen, all examples of professions that shouldn't exist, given that there are cheap, easy and efficient technical solutions for the problems they solve. Why are they still in business? Because the law prevents more efficient solutions. Why are laws made in such a fashion? Because said industries offer lucrative deals to lawmakers if they give in to their lobbying. The corruption in the western world is deep and pervasive. It's just one level removed from the public perception s.t. the price we all pay for it is hidden.
• intalentive 3y ago
  The problem is money and the way it is allocated. Institutions can't ossify if the funding dries up first. In a market system, an institution that fails to serve a purpose goes out of business. In a command system, too, bad management gets the axe. In the hybrid system we have had since the early-mid 20th century, institutions can be both 1) insulated from market discipline; and 2) influence their own funding through lobbying and legislation. The former does not occur in a market system, and the latter does not occur in a command system. What is missing is negative feedback. Systems without negative feedback are typically unstable.
• cchi_co 3y ago
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• miga 3y ago
  It would be better to submit the paper for peer review verifying the claims. It is great to have opinions, but it is even better to rigorously check them against reality.
• jmyeet 3y ago
  It's a glaring omission that the word "capitalism" doesn't appear once in this because is at the heart of what the real problem is. To borrowo another commenter's example: waste management. The town starts picking up the trash daily. It may cut back services and standardize waste bins to streamline the process and cut costs. But here's where it really goes awry: the waste management gets privatized, usually in some kind of "public private partnership". Or it and other municipal functions may be delegated to private insitutions, namely HOAs, which historically have been quasi-government actors that were created primarily to exclude people (ie systemic racism, segregation [1]). Now HOAs are menat to be resident bodies but the actual management gets privatized to management companies. A government is accountable to its people. HOAs typically aren't accountable to their residents. They are filled with tinpot dictators, self-interested NIMBYs and corruption. Contracts go out to a company controlled by the HOA president's family, etc. Some of this happens through innocent delusion like the myth of small government being good but usually it's because of corruption and/or lobbying by the beneficiaries of said policies. For public-private partnerships, it's even worse because, to make the prospect attractive, the government assumes all the risk and the private "partner" captures all the profit. This is one way that train companies are run into the ground: in the search for ever-inreasing profits, prices are jacked up and services are cut. As soon as the stakeholders are separated from who the solution is for, you see exactly what's mentioned. This has been known for centuries and can be analyzed as the workers' relationship to the means of production. The best internet is municipal internet. Why? Because it's by and for the residents. There are no shareholders who need to be constantly appeased with higher and higher profits. Capitalism just promotes and rewards rent-seeking. That's all this is. [1]: https://housingmatters.urban.org/articles/how-hoas-can-shape-neighborhoods https://housingmatters.urban.org/articles/how-hoas-can-shape...
• vegetablepotpie 3y ago
  One of the reasons defense spending in the US is so high and why programs like the F-35 have gone $183 billion over original cost estimates, is because of the Shirky Principle. I’m convinced that earned value management (EV), which is a requirement of contractors to follow under the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR), is a very subtle form of regulatory capture that serves the needs of the managerial professional class over that of the warfighter, workers, and tax payers. EV, at its surface, appears to be a tool for the government to ensure contractors provide honest work and control costs. Because it’s essentially waterfall, it incentives raw task execution and disincentives managing risk, fixing bugs, and satisfying non-functional requirements. We have acquisition programs that follow the systems engineering process, with discrete execution steps of design, development, integration, etc. with people’s careers focused on fulfilling those stages of development. The later in this process an issue is discovered, the more expensive it is to fix [1]. The kicker is that a good manager, under EV, will work to exceed performance, get a task done ahead of schedule, and under budget. This manger has every reason to not solve bugs and to pass them on later in the process. There is no reason for anyone in this process to change it, because careers depend on it continuing to exist, and contractors, as institutions, really benefit from it. In the bad old days of defense contracting, contractors would seriously underbid contracts. As soon as they got the award, because they underbid everyone, the contractor would immediately send a series of change requests to increase the budget. The government has ways to eliminate this risk, such as hiring two contractors to do the same job, then drop a competitor who attempts the change request ramp. Though this is expensive. With EV, contractors get a ramp up and further contracts, without having to directly engage in shenanigans. EV incentivizes the development of brittle and incomplete solutions, like aircraft that give their pilots hypoxia and melt holes in the decks of carriers. The genius of EV is that contractors effectively get change requests and follow-on contracts, and everyone in the system can act honest and honestly say they are acting honest. What I would do instead is change these perverse incentives by amending the FAR by adding alternative oversight mechanisms, such as a knowledge point framework to develop risk modeling or use economic modeling such as cost-of-delay. The problem is that everyone benefits from the current system and you would need strong leadership by many in congress on an obscure issue. [1] https://deepsource.com/blog/exponential-cost-of-fixing-bugs https://deepsource.com/blog/exponential-cost-of-fixing-bugs
• EchoReflection 3y ago
  "Economic Facts and Fallacies" by Thomas Sowell is a very good book that talks a lot about this (indirectly). https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/economic-facts-and-fallacies-second-edition-9780465022038 https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/economic-fac...
• sdsd 3y ago
  They don't need to intentionally try. Institutions that do things to solve problems compete against ones that do things to survive. Even if everyone, in their mind, is trying to solve problems, over time the institutions that survive are the ones that "solve the problem" in a self-perpetuating, self-empowering way.
• FpUser 3y ago
  People trying to protect their cushy feeder? No shit Sherlock. It starts with a single individual and goes up to highest level of Government / Corporations
• quantum_state 3y ago
  The weapon producers are the most obvious group.
• infotropy 3y ago
  It’s like the old consulting adage: “If you’re not part of the solution, there’s money to be made by prolonging the problem.”
• voiper1 3y ago
  It seems many of these - e.g. turbotax - are more specifically regulatory capture. The capitalistic business that makes a profit on tax preparation surely opposses the government giving it away for free.
• Dig1t 3y ago
  This is a classic example of "show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome". I could also see how this same incentive might apply to nonprofit groups as well. i.e. nonprofit groups might actually have an incentive to perpetuate the existence of problems they purport to attempt to solve, because the folks who work there would be out of a job and might lose their prestigious titles as authorities on whatever their chosen problem is.
• LunicLynx 3y ago
  Did someone say Agile Coach?
• AlbertCory 3y ago
  Since I don't see anything in the comments about lawyers or barbers: Lawyers don't want to solve problems. They just want to add them to their practice areas. Try asking an IP lawyer, "Does software need to be patentable?" That will be like asking a barber, "Do I need a haircut?"
• worik 3y ago
  "Shirky principle "? Do "perverse incentives" really need another name?
• analog31 3y ago
  Related to this principle, and other ones mentioned in this thread, while they're entertaining and gratifying to read about, they're also largely un-testable hypotheses. This is not to dismiss them, as there are many ways of thinking that might be useful or comforting in certain situations.
• newsclues 3y ago
  This is a massive problem with the homeless and drug rehab industry. It's too profitable to fix, despite the massive cost to society.
• taion 3y ago
  This feels “truthy”, but I wonder how much of this is selection bias. Organizations that do solve their problems tend to cease to exist or be relevant. In that sense you would expect only the organizations that have not (yet?) solved their problems to persist. It may not exactly be an incentive in the sense that most organizations behave in this manner, depending on how you sample across organizations.
• devit 3y ago
  This is very interesting when applied to thoughts and interiorized beliefs, as well as belief systems that purport to free you from those thoughts and beliefs.
  • justanotherjoe 3y ago
    nice take. I wonder if my ADHD brain is just a mental 'institution' that perpetuates problem so it keeps existing.
• undershirt 3y ago
  Poverty Inc[1] makes the case that NGOs helping developing countries become incentivized to keep them in poverty. [1]: https://www.povertyinc.org https://www.povertyinc.org
  • lisper 3y ago
    Fifteen years ago I made a documentary about homelessness (https://graceofgodmovie.com/ https://graceofgodmovie.com/) and one of the things that many of my subjects talked about was the "homeless industrial complex". These were organizations who ostensibly helped homeless people, while also advocating for policies that created more homelessness and more problems for homeless people, like restrictive zoning to prevent development, and laws against sleeping in public places. I never dug into the extent to which this was true, but it certainly seems plausible. The cost of actually fixing the problem would be putting yourself and everyone in your organization out of work.
    • makeitdouble 3y ago
      It could be simple dissonance with their beliefs as city residents (NIMBY, keep cities clean etc.). Same way a priest can be against abortion and divorce while daily helping victims of abuse and runaway kids.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • nomdep 3y ago
    That is why they really hated it when Mr. Beast actually helps them without giving them their usual 90% "management fee".
• thr0way120 3y ago
  I had same experience at a large company. Guy had a very simple project. He came to me and asked for "help." I found an external vendor who specialized in solving that problem (building a basic product extension) and got it done in two weeks. When I gave him the solution, he immediately stopped talking to me and wanted nothing to do with me. It turned out he had gone to a VP, cleared a 50 person team to work on this problem. He had a weekly call with like 10 people (tiger team he called it) to do nothing but this and nine months later they released the solution and had a giant party. Everyone got credit, high fives all around. AT that point I realized that work is a huge scam at large corporations. He was optimizaing for a "promotable event" that "spreads the credit far and wide." Nothing to do with solving the problem efficiently.
  • Nathanba 3y ago
    Yes I was going to say something similar because articles like this make it seem like a mysterious problem. In reality the reason this happens is because people want profit and the most profitable thing to do is unfortunately to drag a problem out. This literally happens even with individuals, you can give someone a task and he will try to explain to his teamlead that he has to research this all day even though he already knows the answer and he might do another hour on it. In general we have a problem that solving things quickly and permanently is not profitable for the individual/company.
    • teaearlgraycold 3y ago
      Thankfully there do exist situations closer to reality. When at an early stage startup it's either fast or die. Although I also like to remind my co-workers that what you're doing is way more important than just going fast.
      • jrumbut 3y ago
        The institutional preservation instinct can cause perverse incentives but it is useful and allows large organizations to be trusted to do things that can't be addressed by startups. If you have work that requires something to exist in more or less its present form for years or decades at a time it would be a disaster if one of your key vendors pivoted or went bankrupt halfway through.
• bandrami 3y ago
  Having had a career mostly in non-profits and NGOs (on the tech side of them), holy crap does this ring uncomfortably true. There are a few exceptions (de-mining NGOs actually do remove land mines rather than placing new ones, etc.) but the temptation for a whole lot of them to just become permanent fixtures of the problem can be overwhelming. It's how you get situations like where San Francisco spends what amounts to $28K per homeless person in the city per year to "address homelessness", and it get absolutely devoured by a giant NGO-industrial complex.
  • AussieWog93 3y ago
    >$28K per homeless person in the city per year to "address homelessness" Do you have a source for that number, or similar numbers for other cities? I believe you, just wondering if there's a breakdown or something. It's absolutely bonkers to imagine.
    • fragmede 3y ago
      That sounds low. https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-san-francisco-sees-its-homelessness-problems-spiral-out#:~:text=Since%202016%2C%20the%20number%20of,12%20times%20the%20national%20average https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-.... says $57k per person.
    • johnloeber 3y ago
      It's actually more than twice as high haha $57K, https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-san-francisco-sees-its-homelessness-problems-spiral-out https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-...
      • kwhitefoot 3y ago
        Surely it would be just as effective to pay the homeless that money directly!
        • mynameishere 3y ago
• Amehle 3y ago
  [flagged]
• ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  > A well-known example of the Shirky effect in this context is the cobra effect. It describes a case where British colonial officials in Delhi (India), set a bounty on dead cobras, in order to reduce the cobra population. However, this led citizens to breed the cobras for profit, and eventually to release them when the bounty was canceled. Human nature FTW! That's like the Dilbert cartoon, where engineers wrote bugs, and fed them to the QA people for the bounty. I understand that was actually based on a real event.
• zoltrix303 3y ago
  The IT at the company I work for recently launched their own version of ChatGPT. Basically a chat interface that only covers the text generation. (Not image generation, OCR, etc.) When they saw nobody was using their version, they straight out blocked the domain of OpenAI altogether and the page now show a message directing users of their solution. It's a 80k + employee organization, so imagine the impact of such decision.
  • ejb999 3y ago
    Big pharma company by any chance?
  • spixy 3y ago
    That actually can make sense. Public version of ChatGPT shares your company private data with third party (OpenAI), your own version does not.
• TaurenHunter 3y ago
  Reminds me of a recent post about getting a message in Slack with a link to another app about a meeting in Zoom, ... and a number of steps involving a bunch of other apps each costing $15/month/user. In the end nobody does anything but move small amounts of data through those apps.
• subroutine 3y ago
  e.g. every pharmaceutical company.
• romusha 3y ago
  The same as companies and politicians, why put only institutions into the spotlight?
• pizlonator 3y ago
  I believe this is true. And I wonder wonder what the limiting principle is. Is this a bias we all have all the time? Or is this a bias that folks fall into under certain conditions?
• crabmusket 3y ago
  This is rhetorically fascinating. All the concrete examples in this post refer to companies trying to prolong the problem they benefit from, but the summary at the top says "For example, the Shirky principle means that a government agency that's meant to address a certain societal issue..." They took a bunch of examples about companies and used them to imagine a problem of government. Kelly does the same in his blog post, where he opines, without citation, that unions "inadvertently perpetuate the continuation of the problem (management) they are the solution to because as long as unions exists, companies feel they need management to offset them". Which to me is very amusing, but it's written in a style that encourages you to take it completely seriously. Even the use of "institutions", which at least to me implies government more than it does the private sector, is not technically wrong, but I would argue is subtly misleading. Hmmm.
  • btbuildem 3y ago
    It's telling that most commenters for whom this resonated, refer to their experiences in the corporate world. My current job is the first thing I thought of when reading this.
    • crabmusket 3y ago
      I could believe though that far more HN commenters work in the private sector than in government.
  • samatman 3y ago
    Both the cobra effect and the Hanoi rat massacre were government initiatives. They are mentioned in the article. This problem is utterly pervasive in governance, in fact, has been for many generations.
    • crabmusket 3y ago
      But neither are examples of the theorem the article is about. They were simply misleading. I don't actually doubt that the problem exists in government... But why not provide any actual examples of it? Just endlessly re-hashed stories from a hundred years ago?
• dfee 3y ago
  How does this relate to entrepreneurship? I’ve considered that wielding this problem to your advantage is a predicate of success. But I’ve never seen it spelled out in that context.
• j45 3y ago
  Learning about navigating topics like these helps with innovation and disruption. I’d be happy to learn any reading; be it related, complimentary, or tangential
• donretag 3y ago
  This behavior is pretty much the state of the American two party political system. For example, Democrats had countless attempts to make abortion a constitutional right, but if they did, they could no longer count on using that subject for fundraising against the "enemy". Using Democrats as an example, both parties are guilty.
• xdfil 3y ago
  [dead]
• motohagiography 3y ago
  There's a word for this, it's called "managing," which means, "to extract value from." Anything that manages a problem exists to extract value from it - not to kill the golden goose by solving it. It's why there is an entire class of people who benefit from creating chaos and disorder, because it creates opportunities for them to manage, or extract value, from it. If you build something, they are the ones who arrive to "problematize" and wreck it.
  • mberning 3y ago
    In some cases sure, but some things require management due to the nature of reality, and there is nothing to be done about it other than manage the problem. Take something banal such as DLP tools. There is no way to “solve” people stealing data, so tools were created to manage the problem. Then comes the team of people to manage the tool. Then the management structure to oversee the team. And so on. It would be nice to believe that this seemingly small problem could be “solved” once and for all, but that remains to be seen.
• k2xl 3y ago
  Turbo tax comes to mind
• est 3y ago
  There's an ancient saying in Chinese: "养寇自重" basically means the same thing. Keep the bandits alive so kings would finance & arm you handsomely.
• hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  I think this a lot as the root cause of where "bullshit jobs" come from. This pattern happens all the time: 1. Government passes a law to try to improve some problem. All laws in a democracy are the result of a lot of horse trading, so the law itself generally includes a lot of tradeoffs. 2. The new regulations bring up a need for a whole host of people to understand and implement these regulations, who sell their services to other companies and the public at large. Of course, these jobs exist to make it easier for others to follow the regulations, which means that people in these jobs have no incentive to make the regulations simpler in the first place. For example, a lot of people in the US are familiar with flexible spending accounts, FSAs, which let you spend money on health-related items without paying the income tax on the money for those payments. But the rules for FSAs can be notoriously complex. As one example, many products/services are "dual purpose", so you can spend FSA money on a massage if a doctor prescribes it, but not if you just want a massage to feel better. So a whole host of "wellness services" have popped up that will essentially write you a dubious "letter of medical necessity" (literally nobody is ever turned down) so you can buy these items with an FSA. But the real kicker is FSA is "use it or lose it" - you set aside money from your paycheck at the beginning of the year, but if you don't spend it on medically-approved items, it reverts back to your employer at the end of the year. And 25% of all FSA funds are forfeited every year! So the end state is that all of this complexity was set up to create and manage FSAs, but, on average, it's essentially a wash for participants as a whole due to the forfeited money.
• Sparkyte 3y ago
  A solution only exists if you have a problem. A problem is every opportunity for a solution. Uber existed to address the limited amount of taxis in a city and address the pricing problem they produce. How they themselves became more expensive, they also became more of a problem. Then more solutions were added like regulation... The issues are compounding. The phrase is, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions.". A good example is also how some open-source business models moved away and started charing their services. The unintentional consequences of society and businesses making descissions hastedly would out throughly reviewing and executing their strategy. Often businesses that make these underhanded tactics receive massive negative publicity and loss. A good example is how Unity announced that it will start charging per installation of a users game. This became problematic because in turn it was taking an already fairly licensed product and tacting on additional fees which caused it to become unfairly priced. Their initial goal as a platform for game development was to be the better competition to major studios eventually becoming the problem they swore not to be after becoming established.
• richrichie 3y ago
  Imagine the horror of applying this principle to various climate change groups!
• ideashower 3y ago
  The war on drugs is a great example of this. It's led to high incarceration rates in the US, particularly for minor drug offenses, without significantly reducing drug abuse rates. There's plenty of evidence that treatment and decriminalization strategies are more effective than incarceration, and yet localities in the US continue to prioritize punitive measures over reform. And so: a high demand for law enforcement and prison systems which continues to recycle the problem.
• tho2u4o234434 3y ago
  [flagged]
• richrichie 3y ago
  What is well supported by research (across domains) is that moral hazard is real and not a conspiracy.
• mmsimanga 3y ago
  African liberation movements. The successfully fought colonialism, got into power and instead of dispanding and letting technocrats run the countries to improve things like roads, healthcare, access to water. They continue to "fight" imperialism and other ills that are literally impossible to define.
• bouncycastle 3y ago
  antimalware / antivirus companies are another example.
• pushedx 3y ago
  Big IPv4 space holders renting their IPs for $25/month instead of investing in IPv6 adoption. Is that another example of this?
• bunnie 3y ago
  I like to state this in the inverse, as the engineer's paradox: "A good engineer believes their purpose is to solve their problem so effectively that their position is no longer relevant to the organization". Which leads to the corollary that, over time, all good engineers are eliminated from an organization (or are re-homed to a new position where they aren't as effective, until they do become effective, in which case they are re-homed again). An alternative resolution of the paradox is that if every engineer solved their problem such that there were less problems than when they started, there would eventually be no more need for engineers.
• Nevermark 3y ago
  Intuit re tax complexity comes to mind.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• wly_cdgr 3y ago
  The first examples that come to mind are, of course, private prisons, and companies that benefit from war
• DoreenMichele 3y ago
  The cobra and rat examples are examples of perverse incentives and the charitable interpretation of the tendency for institutions to preserve the problems to which they are solutions is that the "obvious" answer, such as "pay people to bring us cobras," may involve perverse incentives which didn't occur to the person who was like "I want this gone. I have a simple and direct solution: I will pay people to make it go away." I am usually speaking of homelessness when I talk about the Shirky Principle. Programs to "help the homeless" are often well meaning but require there to continue to be homeless people to keep doing their work. So tying help to their current status can actively help keep people stuck. It can be quite hard to decide you want to "help the homeless" or "decide to do something about homelessness" and find some way to mentally get yourself out of that box. It took me a long time to get to where I wanted to be mentally on that issue. Actually doing something effective about a problem sometimes means not doing anything that sounds like solving that specific problem is your real goal. And that's kind of a tough place to go mentally and emotionally for most people.
  • cbau 3y ago
    > Actually doing something effective about a problem sometimes means not doing anything that sounds like solving that specific problem is your real goal. And that's kind of a tough place to go mentally and emotionally for most people. Can you give an example? I feel like there is a really key insight here but I'm having trouble parsing it.
    • DoreenMichele 3y ago
      Sorry, I'm looking for something and just happened to trip across this and am seeing it for the first time. I am an environmental studies major who wanted a career in urban planning and I spent years homeless and most stuff aimed at "helping the homeless" does little or nothing to solve the problem. A lot of it is just crisis management -- helping them eat one more day. I have done a lot of analysis of the problem space and the single strongest factor in increasing rates of homelessness is rising rents (presumably relative to wages) and lack of adequate amounts of "affordable" (small space) housing appropriate to the actual needs of our current demographic and it's really, really, really hard to even try to talk about that in a nutshell because people have trouble readily understanding what I'm saying at all. Phrases like "affordable housing" seem to just trigger a lot of people and not convey at all what I am trying to describe. So I increasingly just blog about housing solutions and feel like it's mostly pointless to try to talk about "helping the homeless." I want our housing issues solved and that means largely disengaging from discussions about homeless people. I want to see fewer people on the street and that means we need to solve our housing crisis and most people don't see it that way at all. I feel like I already said that above but maybe not or maybe that helps clarify something for you.
• ETH_start 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • margalabargala 3y ago
    I don't think anyone is arguing that government is perfect, and you've shown some examples of it being imperfect for sure. In particular the restriction of housing by local governments is near and dear to my heart. But to call these things "the pricipal source of harm in our society"? If the sorts of things you listed are the greatest harms you've seen, I envy you. You've never seen a company dump pollution in a river near you, never been unable to breathe the air in your own home from local emissions, and must be too young to have been negatively affected by the housing crisis in 2008. By amount of harm caused, the two things that have caused the most damage to societies are individual persons seeking power for themselves (Putin etc), and organizations seeking to enrich themselves (companies behaving in ways that should've regulated). Those are orders of magnitude beyond everything you listed.
    • ETH_start 3y ago
      The government not fulfilling its core responsibilities, of preventing pollution, assault, fraud and other private acts that victimize people, would allow for all sorts of private harms, it's true. But that is generally not a problem in the advanced economies. In those societies, the major problem is the government going beyond its core responsibilities and consequently causing most of the major problems facing society. This includes the 2008 financial crisis, which was entirely created by the government. The two largest actors in the residential mortgage market in the US are both government sponsored enterprises and collectively guarantee 50% of the market. In 1999 they moved into the subprime market in a big way: https://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/30/business/fannie-mae-eases-credit-to-aid-mortgage-lending.html https://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/30/business/fannie-mae-eases... The Federal Reserve did the rest, with its low interest rate policy that Krugman himself suggested be used to "create a housing bubble": https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/opinion/dubya-s-double-dip.html https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/opinion/dubya-s-double-di... >By amount of harm caused, the two things that have caused the most damage to societies are individual persons seeking power for themselves (Putin etc), The harm caused by government is primarily due to individuals seeking power for themselves. The harm caused by the Russian state is due to Putin and company's personal ambitions. The same applies to the harm caused by public sector unions. It is due to self-serving people working in government. Bad actors are every bit as capable of exploiting society through government as they are through the private sector. And the damage from the former has very few limits due to the state's monopoly on violence.
• ChuckMcM 3y ago
  A vice president once asked me how I was able to get effective change in large organizations when no amount of exhortation on the part of senior management had been successful. I pointed out to him that the people who resist the change the hardest are the ones who cannot see what their job would be post change. As a result the change is perceived as an existential risk to their own job and they will go to great lengths to sabotage the change because of that. This is the Shirky Principle embodied in individuals, and small groups some times too.
  • pzs 3y ago
    And what was the rest of your response? How could you get effective change based on this understanding?
    • lucisferre 3y ago
      I think it is implied that they showed people what the change would look like and that it did not threaten their jobs.
      • ctrw 3y ago
        The easier solution to is remove them.
        • error_logic 3y ago
          It's always easier to assume that the fault lies with the listener rather than the speaker. That doesn't mean it's the most effective bias to hold.
          • ctrw 3y ago
            If the speaker can convince the listener they should find a job where they don't need to speak as part of the job description. Dishwashers and janitors give pletnly of job stability for people like those.
• AtNightWeCode 3y ago
  Something I have noticed along the same line is that the importance of actions within a company is mapped from the work roles people have, not from the work to be done.
• Duanemclemore 3y ago
  "Ain't no money in the cure, the money's in the medicine. That's how you get paid." -Chris Rock https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7P4iFg048k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7P4iFg048k
• 77pt77 3y ago
  Institutions "want" to survive first and grow sexond. Doing this is a very effective way of achieving that
• whalesalad 3y ago
  tl;dr job security - is this not a widely understood concept?
• PeterStuer 3y ago
  Pharma is the prime example. A 'good' drug does not cure, it temporary mitigates and 'idealy' makes you even more susceptible, requiring recurrent future consumption. This requires no great conspiracy or planning. Time and the market will disappear companies that eradicate the disease they solved, while persisting and elevating those that stumbled upon the dependency route, and inside those companies teams pursuing platforms resulting in success of the latter kind will rise to prominence and at that stage the company will protect the goose that lays the golden eggs even if that means mothballing internal research that finds a real cure or aquiring outsiders to do the same. None of the pharma products raking in billions upon billions actually solve a condition. All require perpetual consumption to at best stay in the mitigated state.
• quickthrower2 3y ago
  Looks at the complexity introduced by programmers over the last 20 years :-)
• felonynolef 3y ago
  [dead]
• andai 3y ago
  Tangential but hilarious: back in the day, the British were buying fragments of dinosaur fossils from China. Unfortunately, they paid per fragment, so it was much more profitable to break the specimens into bits before sending them. There's also the case of a dolphin that was trained to collect plastic trash (they paid it in fish). The dolphin realized that it could get more fish by tearing the plastic into shreds.
  • ProllyInfamous 3y ago
    effin' dolphins, just genius. "So long, and thanks for all the fish!" —Douglas Adams
• tonis2 3y ago
  War is another thing, that's artificially created for that reason I think. New jobs are created, creating battle equipment, cause stuff always gets destroyed in war. Governments buy guns, choppers tanks, so those who produce them, are swimming in money now. Why would those institutions be interested in a time, where there is no major war ? I also feel like there's some kind of dynamic between US and Russia, like good cop and bad cop. Russia is an aggressive lunatic, and US sells guns, offers protection services for rest of the world from this crazy guy. But what would happen if Russia would be gone, or not aggressive anymore, who would buy the guns then ? World order would be totally different and US would lose customers.
  • hcfman 3y ago
    Well. What happened when Afghanistan went, might give a clue. Nice points.
  • timeon 3y ago
    When I saw the title I knew this topic would be good ground for conspiracy theories. Was there peaceful time before these two countries existed?
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • cutemonster 3y ago
      No, there's always been wars and fighting between men from different tribes. See my sibling comment.
  • mlinhares 3y ago
    We had that brief period after the end of of the cold war and the US just found other places to blow up in the middle east. The gun lobby will never stop. And, unfortunately, you might become a "peaceful nation" but if your neighbor decides to wage war against you, you either bow or buy more guns to fight as well. It's unfortunate but I don't think human beings will be able to coexist without wars for the foreseable future. There's just too much you can win by violence if the other side doesn't have the same firepower.
• yonatron 3y ago
  "We must acknowledge once and for all that the purpose of diplomacy is to prolong a crisis." -- Spock
• xtiansimon 3y ago
  I’ve been struggling with a clients SaaS third-party integrations so much lately everything I read describing counterproductive outcome gets compared in my imagination. Marketing says they support your integration, but in practice there are gaps—somebody made a business decision about what was “good enough” and the company’s investment in development stoped there. Anything that is not served by this limit becomes a “product improvement” request. Maybe this is a related principle I’m discovering now—-same fracked up family of underperformance and unexpected outcomes.
• sinuhe69 3y ago
  Another example is the Hanoi's rat massacre. In 1902, Hanoi, Vietnam was plagued by rats. The French colonial government, in an attempt to control the rat population, offered a bounty for each rat killed. However, this plan backfired spectacularly. People started breeding rats to collect the bounty! And the rat population exploded. This led to a surge in the bubonic plague, which killed thousands of people. This event is a perfect example of the Shirky principle. Once a solution becomes institutionalized, it may perpetuate or even exacerbate the problem to secure its own existence. [1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-1902 https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-190...
  • navane 3y ago
    But it wasn't the institute who started breeding. This sounds more like "paying your programmers by the line" who then flatten their for loops.
  • bluesnowmonkey 3y ago
    That example is in the article.
    • sinuhe69 3y ago
      Oh, I just skimmed the article to find an antidote and didn't know it was there!
  • turboaspie 3y ago
    That's an example of the Cobra effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
• fosk 3y ago
  Look no further than the San Francisco homeless industrial complex for a modern version of this phenomenon.
  • jokoon 3y ago
    I have heard things about this, but I wish there could be a better documentary with proper accounting done to point out those numbers and why they are so high.
    • fosk 3y ago
      In a nutshell, San Francisco’s ultra-liberal policies fight for the right of doing drugs and potentially dying on the streets, because they believe that actually helping these people would be akin to penalizing them because they are poor or jobless, or would be an infringement to their freedom. Helping them really means detaining them and/or forcing rehab for their benefit and the benefit of the community. Many of them suffer from mental illness, often induced by drug consumption, or that leads to drug consumption, but apparently detaining or forcing treatment is considered to be more cruel than letting them die, and so nobody does nothing with huge negative externalities in the community (besides the actual people involved and their families). In San Francisco there are open-air drug markets that nobody shuts down, where illegals are selling “death” 24/7. Of course San Francisco is a “Sanctuary City” so they don’t collaborate with immigration services to deport the drug dealers, let alone shut down the drug trade. Of course keeping to feed their addictions with public money doesn’t actually help them and they eventually die on the sidewalk by over dosing or other drug-related complications. Hundreds of them die every year, it’s really despicable. San Francisco has a large network of no-profits that exists with the sole purpose of trying to “help” the homeless population by encouraging “clean” use of drugs (they distribute needles and other drug accessories), and they are the recipients of 1B+ of funds every year from city hall [1]. Many of these no-profits are plagued with corruption [2], the Mayor itself and people in her circle have been investigated/arrested [3], but nobody does nothing because they are afraid to lose the ultra-liberal vote. Now that the tide is starting (very slowly) to shift, we are seeing politician’s big talk to clean up the city, so far with poor results and no action. Of course with more than a billion dollars on the line every year, some people started to wonder if these no-profits really want to solve the problem (they don’t) to keep the money flowing, and the pockets of corruption ongoing. An interesting book to read is San Fran-Sicko [4] which analyzes this phenomenal in ultra liberal cities. It’s so bad that kids are accidentally ingesting Fentanyl at the park [5]. Even being a moderate democrat acting rationally will earn you the label of “fascist” by the ultra progressives. Ultimately, this will be remembered as a very dark era in the history of San Francisco and everyone involved has blood on their hands, including the voters and supporters of these ultraliberal policies that lead to death and desperation. [1] https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-san-francisco-sees-its-homelessness-problems-spiral-out https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-... [2] https://sfist.com/2024/02/23/scandal-plagued-sfpd-partner-nonprofit-sf-safe-now-accused-of-stiffing-local-florist-out-of-17k/ https://sfist.com/2024/02/23/scandal-plagued-sfpd-partner-no... [3] https://www.ktvu.com/news/former-sf-official-agrees-to-plea-deal-will-cooperate-with-fbi-in-corruption-investigation https://www.ktvu.com/news/former-sf-official-agrees-to-plea-... [4] San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities [5] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-authorities-investigating-whether-a-17621718.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-au...
• jokoon 3y ago
  what's awful is that often, people argue that closing loopholes and improving things are not good, they will use a fallacy of nature or say it's idealistic and impossible to fix because of human nature. cynicism is a drug for some people.
• tappio 3y ago
  Institutions try to preserve themselves. Sometimes it leads to suggested outcome, sometimes they evolve into something else.
• paulhowson 3y ago
  [dead]
• ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  >"You cannot teach a man anything, when his livelihood depends on [you?] not understanding." >[failure to attribute, citation needed]
  • anticensor 3y ago
    It is known as Sinclair's law.
    • ProllyInfamous 3y ago
      With this information here is what Upton Sinclair actually said: >"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Thanks for the nomenclature, Censor.
• Slava_Propanei 3y ago
  [dead]
• FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Start -> The "Shirky Principle" -> Then it escalates to the "Godwin's Law" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law -> Then ends with "Brandolini's Law" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law -> Meanwhile, most of the problems in this thread are not nefarious at all, and can be explained by plain old fashioned bad middle management and the "Peter Principle". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
• slowmovintarget 3y ago
  My wife, every ready with a bucket of cold water, said "We don't need a new name for that. In economics, that's called 'a conflict of interest.'" But, I said... yet the conversation merely devolved into a rant about eliminating lobbying while somehow magically preserving freedom of speech.
• scotty79 3y ago
  Same goes for politicians that promise to fix things. Politician that promises curtailing immigration won't do anything to actually do it because it's the source of his political power.
• Quindecillion 3y ago
  [looks side ways as central banks and the state]
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• timtas 3y ago
  The movie Poverty Inc richly illustrates this concept. https://g.co/kgs/Bb2HafB https://g.co/kgs/Bb2HafB