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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

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?
  - walterbell 3y ago
    Perhaps someone will forward this article to government employees or public sector organizational game theorists.
    - intended 3y ago
      There are most certainly some papers out there which look into the issue. The OP though, opened with a point on the rhetorics of the piece. As is usual, such conversations are tricky, evidence by this sub threads where we are discussing govt. Rhetoric is a pretty interesting topic.
- hawthornio 3y ago
  These examples are based around the idea of profit motive and these examples show a profit motive is rarely able to achieve the desired effect—these examples in no way speak to government agencies.
- bruce511 3y ago
  Neither were an example of the shirky effect though. Both were examples of misaligned incentives, or if you like the law of unintended consequences. The lesson though is clear and useful. Be careful what you -measure- because people will optimize to improve the measure. When the measurement is a proxy for what you actually want, you won't necessarily get the outcomes you were hoping for. For example what makes a good driver? I'd suggest patience and consideration. How many driving incidents are fueled by impatience or inconsiderate? Yet those are impossible to test for, so despite passing the driving test (operate the machine, know the rules) we end up with roads full of terrible drivers.
dcow 3y ago
Perhaps it’s easier to study isolated corporations and draw generalizations than it is to study a large interconnected bureaucratic blob? I don’t generally see why problems of human nature wouldn’t present similarly across the public and private sector. If anything, finding a problem in supposedly efficient environments would imply the problem exists in less efficient environments.
- crabmusket 3y ago
  I'm sure it is. But surely there would be some examples that could have been cited? I'd suggest that in government, it's not so much human nature that's different as incentive structures. I don't mean to argue that government is all sunshine, roses and enlightened altruism. Just that even if Shirky's theorem is just as true of governments, this article doesn't support that conclusion, despite being written as if it does.
  - dcow 3y ago
    I get what you’re saying and it’s a fair point (ack that it’d be nice to have a gov’t example) but I am just saying that I don’t think lack of citing a domain-specific case study implies a problem is irrelevant in a given domain. It’s rather strong of a statement to say that this article does not support the conclusion that government institutions or systems or entities are susceptible to the Shirky principle when it presents supporting evidence that is reasonably applicable to all types of institutions, systems, and entities.
    - crabmusket 3y ago
      My original post wasn't so much to suggest that the problem is irrelevant to government. I was just pointing out the interesting ideological maneuver: show evidence of a problem in companies, then ask the reader to imagine a problem in government. Kelly's post struck me similarly. > supporting evidence that is reasonably applicable to all types of institutions, systems, and entities I don't agree, but this verges into my own opinion lacking any supporting evidence. It just seems clear to me that publically funded institutions must have very different incentives in some areas than privately funded market institutions. Again, I'm not saying this effect doesn't exist in governments. But it does need demonstrating, if one wants to actually argue that.
crazygringo 3y ago
Thank you, I came here to post exactly this! None of the examples in the article actually support the hypothesis described, that "institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution". The very first one is about how tax-filing companies don't want the government to make filing taxes easier, but that's because tax-filing companies aren't non-profits dedicated to making taxes easier to file -- they're corporations dedicated to making a profit. The same with the bus company wanting to eliminate competition. The story about the cobras is a tangent about unintended consequences that has nothing to do with the supposed Shirky principle (it's actually an example of perverse incentives [1]), and so forth. If you peel the layers back, you realize that this is essentially just the age-old conservative ideology that government intervention is bad because it never solves the problem but just makes government bigger. And then you realize that counterexamples abound. Did the history of vaccines in the 20th century just wind up sustaining the ravages of smallpox and polio? Of course not. Does investment in a military lead people to attack you? Of course not. Do incentives for solar power actually play a role in preserving fossil fuel usage that otherwise could have been eliminated? Don't be ridiculous. And guess what? The IRS is currently piloting programs to make filing taxes simpler. Despite the lobbying efforts of tax-filing companies. The "Shirky principle" is something that sounds really clever, and it's so cynical you almost think it must be true... but that doesn't mean it is true. The evidence that seems to support it doesn't, and the massive evidence against it seems to be ignored. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
- ars 3y ago
  The unrwa is an example of this. An agency created to help Palestinians ends up perpetuating the conflict by generating ever increasing numbers of refugees who can't work in their country of birth (Lebanon, Syria, etc) because they are denied citizenship. More reading: https://pij.org/articles/1168/the-discrimination-against-palestinian-refugees-living-in-lebanon https://pij.org/articles/1168/the-discrimination-against-pal...
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    It's actually quite the opposite. There's a great recent analysis in the Economist that disagrees [1] -- it claims the problem isn't with the UNRWA at all (as Israel has been claiming), but rather with neighbor states actively blocking solutions that would therefore allow the UNRWA to disband. Key quotes: > Some Israeli officials have wanted to shut down UNRWA for years, accusing the agency of helping to prolong the conflict. They have seized the moment to press their case. For its supporters, meanwhile, the agency is above reproach, a group of selfless humanitarians doing vital work. As ever, life is more complicated than a morality play. The continued existence of UNRWA is a problem—but not for the reasons its critics think... > This is a problem—but not one of UNRWA's making. Blame instead the Arab states that have refused, for decades, to offer citizenship to the Palestinians in their midst. The 1.7m registered refugees in Gaza (or their ancestors) lived under Egyptian control for almost two decades until 1967. Instead of offering them rights, Egypt left them in squalor. Similarly: > In many ways, UNRWA was the government. Hamas officials have all but admitted this in interviews over the past few months. They said Hamas’s role was to build up its military capabilities, not to care for their people—they had do-gooders for that. Israel, too, relied on UNRWA to mitigate the consequences of the draconian blockade that it (along with Egypt) imposed on Gaza. Even today, as Israel tries to abolish UNRWA, it still relies on the agency to prevent mass starvation in Gaza. It's not the UNRWA that is trying to perpetuate itself. It is the actions of several countries that force the continued status of refugee on the Palestinians, Hamas not taking over basic governmental services, and Israel not providing humanitarian services in Gaza. The UNRWA is doing its best to do necessary humanitarian work when others aren't stepping up. The idea that UNRWA is the primary party responsible for perpetuating the situation, in order to therefore perpetuate its existence, couldn't be further from the truth. [1] https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2024/02/15/the-real-problem-with-the-uns-agency-for-palestinians https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2024/02/15/...
da_chicken 3y ago
The only real counterexample I can even think of is the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America, which disbanded when it had achieved success. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_in_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i...
- jamestimmins 3y ago
  Somewhat amusing bc American bathrooms would be so much nicer if they all had paid attendants in them and requirement payment to use.
  - kaibee 3y ago
    Yeah, the actual outcome is now that many businesses close their bathrooms to the public unless you’re buying something.
    - nothercastle 3y ago
      Or they just say that they are out of order
    - alexb_ 3y ago
      I have only seen this happen in big cities. Outside of big cities this just doesn't happen.
  - BrandonMarc 3y ago
    Unless clean free toilets are a big part of their advertising. See: Buc-ee's locations.
  - da_chicken 3y ago
    I think that's a definition of "nice" that undermines the utility of public bathrooms, which I think is a lot more essential to the public good.
  - geodel 3y ago
    Yeah, considering it would be most coveted job and best of the best in town would be falling over each other to be a toilet attendant. It naturally would lead to some of the finest toilet experience one can have.
causal 3y ago
One example I've seen in government/non-business settings is needing to spend all budgeted money in order to avoid budget cuts. It's an incentive to look for problems in order to keep their funding as the solution.
- pstuart 3y ago
  In some cases it doesn't even require creating "problems", the budget just needs to be spent to justify keeping it for the next round. I believe the military excels at this practice. Incentives drive behavior and it would be wonderful to find incentives to minimize budgets reasonably and to ensure they can be properly increased when justified.
  - llamaLord 3y ago
    This is one of those things that seems amazingly dumb to me in business and in government. If I run a department in a company that is responsible for say, customer service, there are a million ways I could improve customer service by doing things like increasing efficiency in "back of house" areas and the reallocating those funds to customer facing areas. Problem is... I can't do that, because if I drive efficiency in the BOH area I don't get to keep the surplus resources I just created, it gets gobbled back up by the organisation at the next budget cycle... So there's literally a NEGATIVE incentive for me to optimise. Now, I understand why the organisation feels the need to capture that surplus, there might be other areas of the business that leadership thinks needs those resources more. But what they're failing to understand is they're actually hurting both the team making the efficiency AND the team who needs the extra resources because now everything is just going to remain exactly the way it was. This seems like a ridiculously easy problem to solve though... Just allow teams that drive efficiency dividends to retain say half of the benefit they generate. The company still gets a chunk of resources back to redistribute the way they see fit, AND the team generating the efficiency are able to implement the rebalancing of resources WITHIN the team that incentives them to make the changes in the first place. I would bet serious money that the NET divided returned to the central pool would actually be HIGHER even though they only get half of each block of surplus, because you would be providing SO MUCH more incentive to individual teams to find and implement these efficiency gains now.
gxs 3y ago
It does bug me when I see less than precise language, though I’m sure somewhere in this comment I’ll be less than precise and someone will point it out. If you look up the definition, the spirit of the word is definitely not to convey companies or businesses. In fact, sometimes the word is used to denote an especially popular or longstanding restaurant with a strong, devout customer base, “this hot dog joint had become a New York institution”. Stuff like that is usually said in jest and/or as hyperbole. It’s possible for some companies to actually become institutions I think, but I can’t think of one off the top of my head. I don’t think size or date of founding matter, as I certainly wouldn’t call companies like Apple, Google, Walmart, or US Steel institutions. Funny enough, though, sometimes you can use it to describe something, such as institutional knowledge. Anyway, the article didn’t give off a pretentious vibe that some do with pseudo rigorous language etc, so it didn’t cause me any indigestion, lol.
nightowl_games 3y ago
I value your post, but this sentence is ironic: > Which to me is very amusing, but it's written in a style that encourages you to take it completely seriously. Because you expect me to take you seriously but instead of making a valuable assessment you instead resort to saying you find it amusing, as if the reason you find it amusing is obvious and implied. It isn't.
- crabmusket 3y ago
  Fair point. To be specific, I find the idea that management only exists to combat the influence of unions ridiculous. A claim so surprising really begs for at least a fig-leaf of justification.
samirillian 3y ago
a) agree b) Reads like chatgpt wrote it. Something about needing some stilted conjunction every other sentence. c) If the lab leak theory for covid is true, that'd be a good government example. The whole anthrax thing was weird as hell too. edit - actually I guess it's fuzzy. Where's the line between prolonging a problem and inventing a problem
elliotec 3y ago
Are you implying that government institutions don’t preserve problems to which they’re the solution?
- clevergadget 3y ago
  don't know if he is but the point stands regardless. the space around this question private v public is more than active enough for the writer to know better than skip past it and assume they are identical. personally i think they are basically identical but it is a little dirty.
- zadokshi 3y ago
  No. The point is the examples don’t directly support the contention. Observing that the examples don’t directly support the contention doesn’t by itself validate or invalidate contention.
- crabmusket 3y ago
  I'm implying that both the author of this article, and Kevin Kelly, have an anti government bias that they're supporting using examples from the private sector. (Unions aren't the government, but I'm lumping them together in comparison to the private sector.)
- intended 3y ago
  I think he’s pointing out what your question is a victim of - rhetorical devices that ensure a certain point of view is reinforced. The opening line is about institutions, while the examples are about firms. The point being that this will focus people on government behavior, while the examples are anything but. As we can see in the comments, it is somehow effective even when we are discussing the structure of the argument. The conversation naturally generates poles, which end up reinforcing the govt wastefulness argument - without the underlying article itself supporting those comments. This is pointed out by people who see the device, but this counts as an indicator that they are “pro-government”. Discussion ensues in the comments, entrenching the rhetoric, without having to resort to valid examples. I love such constructions, like stingers that dig deeper if you try to pull them out.
- 3y ago
metacritic12 3y ago
Case in point: the UN Committee to eradicate smallpox was successful and then self-disbanded. They were not a company.
tw04 3y ago
Which is odd because every government program torn down in the last 50 years has almost immediately resulted in a resurrection of the bad behavior by private corporations it was meant to stop.
- hackernewds 3y ago
  Doesn't imply the opposite isn't true either. Spending on "fixing" the homelessness crisis in SF has ballooned as expected and a lot of nonprofits and agencies well positioned to take advantage have benefited from the unhoused bull market
  - lisper 3y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39495635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39495635
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    The fault here lies with the SF electorate, who collectively wants their housing investment to be protected and homelessness to be fixed. Actually, I would argue that this isn't even a conflict, because SF homeowners probably do not want a durable solution to the homelessness crisis. That would require bulldozing the suburbs. They instead want SF to sweep the homeless under some proverbial rug so that their presence does not tarnish the value of their homes. House them, but house them somewhere else. This isn't even an instance of the Shirky principle, it's just people using words in confusing ways.
- moneywoes 3y ago
  examples for illustration please
csomar 3y ago
I don't think the examples were exhaustive. As I read it, the writer tries to extrapolate and generalize his principal to everything and everywhere as some sort of natural law; so it'll affect governments, unions, companies, etc...
- crabmusket 3y ago
  I think that's a fair and charitable reading, that maybe they've just overgeneralised a bit, or maybe just haven't chosen the exact mix of examples they "should" have. The ideological lean, though it may have been completely innocent or accidental, stood out to me.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
A lot of examples in the comments are NOT the Shirky Principle. The Shirky Principle is about how an organization wants to self-perpetuate. The comments are just blaming any government program that might be miss-managed, or under-performing, for any number of reasons, regardless of any relation to Shirky. Shirky != Government. Any organization can underperform for many reasons. There can just be multiple groups with conflicting incentives. or "multipolar traps" https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
dclowd9901 3y ago
I think the broadest definition of the role of government is to regulate. With that in mind, it would mean that the government (and its agencies) would be intentionally failing to regulate well so that there is a perceived continued need to regulate? As asinine as that sentence sounds, it actually seems to be exactly the state we're in right now. We have tons of government and tons of regulation, and yet we still see corruption and criminality everywhere, and people begging for more regulation to undermine it.
danmaz74 3y ago
This is also the perfect example of survivorship bias: all the institutions which effectively solved a problem don't exist any more today, as they were shut down or repurposed and renamed.
bryanrasmussen 3y ago
huh, yeah it implies that without unions companies wouldn't need any of that pesky management, just like without traffic lights cars wouldn't need brakes.

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?
- walterbell 3y ago
  Perhaps someone will forward this article to government employees or public sector organizational game theorists.
  - intended 3y ago
    There are most certainly some papers out there which look into the issue. The OP though, opened with a point on the rhetorics of the piece. As is usual, such conversations are tricky, evidence by this sub threads where we are discussing govt. Rhetoric is a pretty interesting topic.
hawthornio 3y ago
These examples are based around the idea of profit motive and these examples show a profit motive is rarely able to achieve the desired effect—these examples in no way speak to government agencies.
bruce511 3y ago
Neither were an example of the shirky effect though. Both were examples of misaligned incentives, or if you like the law of unintended consequences. The lesson though is clear and useful. Be careful what you -measure- because people will optimize to improve the measure. When the measurement is a proxy for what you actually want, you won't necessarily get the outcomes you were hoping for. For example what makes a good driver? I'd suggest patience and consideration. How many driving incidents are fueled by impatience or inconsiderate? Yet those are impossible to test for, so despite passing the driving test (operate the machine, know the rules) we end up with roads full of terrible drivers.

dcow 3y ago

Perhaps it’s easier to study isolated corporations and draw generalizations than it is to study a large interconnected bureaucratic blob? I don’t generally see why problems of human nature wouldn’t present similarly across the public and private sector. If anything, finding a problem in supposedly efficient environments would imply the problem exists in less efficient environments.

crabmusket 3y ago
I'm sure it is. But surely there would be some examples that could have been cited? I'd suggest that in government, it's not so much human nature that's different as incentive structures. I don't mean to argue that government is all sunshine, roses and enlightened altruism. Just that even if Shirky's theorem is just as true of governments, this article doesn't support that conclusion, despite being written as if it does.
- dcow 3y ago
  I get what you’re saying and it’s a fair point (ack that it’d be nice to have a gov’t example) but I am just saying that I don’t think lack of citing a domain-specific case study implies a problem is irrelevant in a given domain. It’s rather strong of a statement to say that this article does not support the conclusion that government institutions or systems or entities are susceptible to the Shirky principle when it presents supporting evidence that is reasonably applicable to all types of institutions, systems, and entities.
  - crabmusket 3y ago
    My original post wasn't so much to suggest that the problem is irrelevant to government. I was just pointing out the interesting ideological maneuver: show evidence of a problem in companies, then ask the reader to imagine a problem in government. Kelly's post struck me similarly. > supporting evidence that is reasonably applicable to all types of institutions, systems, and entities I don't agree, but this verges into my own opinion lacking any supporting evidence. It just seems clear to me that publically funded institutions must have very different incentives in some areas than privately funded market institutions. Again, I'm not saying this effect doesn't exist in governments. But it does need demonstrating, if one wants to actually argue that.

crazygringo 3y ago

Thank you, I came here to post exactly this! None of the examples in the article actually support the hypothesis described, that "institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution". The very first one is about how tax-filing companies don't want the government to make filing taxes easier, but that's because tax-filing companies aren't non-profits dedicated to making taxes easier to file -- they're corporations dedicated to making a profit. The same with the bus company wanting to eliminate competition. The story about the cobras is a tangent about unintended consequences that has nothing to do with the supposed Shirky principle (it's actually an example of perverse incentives [1]), and so forth. If you peel the layers back, you realize that this is essentially just the age-old conservative ideology that government intervention is bad because it never solves the problem but just makes government bigger. And then you realize that counterexamples abound. Did the history of vaccines in the 20th century just wind up sustaining the ravages of smallpox and polio? Of course not. Does investment in a military lead people to attack you? Of course not. Do incentives for solar power actually play a role in preserving fossil fuel usage that otherwise could have been eliminated? Don't be ridiculous. And guess what? The IRS is currently piloting programs to make filing taxes simpler. Despite the lobbying efforts of tax-filing companies. The "Shirky principle" is something that sounds really clever, and it's so cynical you almost think it must be true... but that doesn't mean it is true. The evidence that seems to support it doesn't, and the massive evidence against it seems to be ignored. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

ars 3y ago
The unrwa is an example of this. An agency created to help Palestinians ends up perpetuating the conflict by generating ever increasing numbers of refugees who can't work in their country of birth (Lebanon, Syria, etc) because they are denied citizenship. More reading: https://pij.org/articles/1168/the-discrimination-against-palestinian-refugees-living-in-lebanon https://pij.org/articles/1168/the-discrimination-against-pal...
- crazygringo 3y ago
  It's actually quite the opposite. There's a great recent analysis in the Economist that disagrees [1] -- it claims the problem isn't with the UNRWA at all (as Israel has been claiming), but rather with neighbor states actively blocking solutions that would therefore allow the UNRWA to disband. Key quotes: > Some Israeli officials have wanted to shut down UNRWA for years, accusing the agency of helping to prolong the conflict. They have seized the moment to press their case. For its supporters, meanwhile, the agency is above reproach, a group of selfless humanitarians doing vital work. As ever, life is more complicated than a morality play. The continued existence of UNRWA is a problem—but not for the reasons its critics think... > This is a problem—but not one of UNRWA's making. Blame instead the Arab states that have refused, for decades, to offer citizenship to the Palestinians in their midst. The 1.7m registered refugees in Gaza (or their ancestors) lived under Egyptian control for almost two decades until 1967. Instead of offering them rights, Egypt left them in squalor. Similarly: > In many ways, UNRWA was the government. Hamas officials have all but admitted this in interviews over the past few months. They said Hamas’s role was to build up its military capabilities, not to care for their people—they had do-gooders for that. Israel, too, relied on UNRWA to mitigate the consequences of the draconian blockade that it (along with Egypt) imposed on Gaza. Even today, as Israel tries to abolish UNRWA, it still relies on the agency to prevent mass starvation in Gaza. It's not the UNRWA that is trying to perpetuate itself. It is the actions of several countries that force the continued status of refugee on the Palestinians, Hamas not taking over basic governmental services, and Israel not providing humanitarian services in Gaza. The UNRWA is doing its best to do necessary humanitarian work when others aren't stepping up. The idea that UNRWA is the primary party responsible for perpetuating the situation, in order to therefore perpetuate its existence, couldn't be further from the truth. [1] https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2024/02/15/the-real-problem-with-the-uns-agency-for-palestinians https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2024/02/15/...

da_chicken 3y ago

The only real counterexample I can even think of is the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America, which disbanded when it had achieved success. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_in_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i...

jamestimmins 3y ago
Somewhat amusing bc American bathrooms would be so much nicer if they all had paid attendants in them and requirement payment to use.
- kaibee 3y ago
  Yeah, the actual outcome is now that many businesses close their bathrooms to the public unless you’re buying something.
  - nothercastle 3y ago
    Or they just say that they are out of order
  - alexb_ 3y ago
    I have only seen this happen in big cities. Outside of big cities this just doesn't happen.
- BrandonMarc 3y ago
  Unless clean free toilets are a big part of their advertising. See: Buc-ee's locations.
- da_chicken 3y ago
  I think that's a definition of "nice" that undermines the utility of public bathrooms, which I think is a lot more essential to the public good.
- geodel 3y ago
  Yeah, considering it would be most coveted job and best of the best in town would be falling over each other to be a toilet attendant. It naturally would lead to some of the finest toilet experience one can have.

causal 3y ago

One example I've seen in government/non-business settings is needing to spend all budgeted money in order to avoid budget cuts. It's an incentive to look for problems in order to keep their funding as the solution.

pstuart 3y ago
In some cases it doesn't even require creating "problems", the budget just needs to be spent to justify keeping it for the next round. I believe the military excels at this practice. Incentives drive behavior and it would be wonderful to find incentives to minimize budgets reasonably and to ensure they can be properly increased when justified.
- llamaLord 3y ago
  This is one of those things that seems amazingly dumb to me in business and in government. If I run a department in a company that is responsible for say, customer service, there are a million ways I could improve customer service by doing things like increasing efficiency in "back of house" areas and the reallocating those funds to customer facing areas. Problem is... I can't do that, because if I drive efficiency in the BOH area I don't get to keep the surplus resources I just created, it gets gobbled back up by the organisation at the next budget cycle... So there's literally a NEGATIVE incentive for me to optimise. Now, I understand why the organisation feels the need to capture that surplus, there might be other areas of the business that leadership thinks needs those resources more. But what they're failing to understand is they're actually hurting both the team making the efficiency AND the team who needs the extra resources because now everything is just going to remain exactly the way it was. This seems like a ridiculously easy problem to solve though... Just allow teams that drive efficiency dividends to retain say half of the benefit they generate. The company still gets a chunk of resources back to redistribute the way they see fit, AND the team generating the efficiency are able to implement the rebalancing of resources WITHIN the team that incentives them to make the changes in the first place. I would bet serious money that the NET divided returned to the central pool would actually be HIGHER even though they only get half of each block of surplus, because you would be providing SO MUCH more incentive to individual teams to find and implement these efficiency gains now.

gxs 3y ago

It does bug me when I see less than precise language, though I’m sure somewhere in this comment I’ll be less than precise and someone will point it out. If you look up the definition, the spirit of the word is definitely not to convey companies or businesses. In fact, sometimes the word is used to denote an especially popular or longstanding restaurant with a strong, devout customer base, “this hot dog joint had become a New York institution”. Stuff like that is usually said in jest and/or as hyperbole. It’s possible for some companies to actually become institutions I think, but I can’t think of one off the top of my head. I don’t think size or date of founding matter, as I certainly wouldn’t call companies like Apple, Google, Walmart, or US Steel institutions. Funny enough, though, sometimes you can use it to describe something, such as institutional knowledge. Anyway, the article didn’t give off a pretentious vibe that some do with pseudo rigorous language etc, so it didn’t cause me any indigestion, lol.

nightowl_games 3y ago

I value your post, but this sentence is ironic: > Which to me is very amusing, but it's written in a style that encourages you to take it completely seriously. Because you expect me to take you seriously but instead of making a valuable assessment you instead resort to saying you find it amusing, as if the reason you find it amusing is obvious and implied. It isn't.

crabmusket 3y ago
Fair point. To be specific, I find the idea that management only exists to combat the influence of unions ridiculous. A claim so surprising really begs for at least a fig-leaf of justification.

samirillian 3y ago

a) agree b) Reads like chatgpt wrote it. Something about needing some stilted conjunction every other sentence. c) If the lab leak theory for covid is true, that'd be a good government example. The whole anthrax thing was weird as hell too. edit - actually I guess it's fuzzy. Where's the line between prolonging a problem and inventing a problem

elliotec 3y ago

Are you implying that government institutions don’t preserve problems to which they’re the solution?

clevergadget 3y ago
don't know if he is but the point stands regardless. the space around this question private v public is more than active enough for the writer to know better than skip past it and assume they are identical. personally i think they are basically identical but it is a little dirty.
zadokshi 3y ago
No. The point is the examples don’t directly support the contention. Observing that the examples don’t directly support the contention doesn’t by itself validate or invalidate contention.
crabmusket 3y ago
I'm implying that both the author of this article, and Kevin Kelly, have an anti government bias that they're supporting using examples from the private sector. (Unions aren't the government, but I'm lumping them together in comparison to the private sector.)
intended 3y ago
I think he’s pointing out what your question is a victim of - rhetorical devices that ensure a certain point of view is reinforced. The opening line is about institutions, while the examples are about firms. The point being that this will focus people on government behavior, while the examples are anything but. As we can see in the comments, it is somehow effective even when we are discussing the structure of the argument. The conversation naturally generates poles, which end up reinforcing the govt wastefulness argument - without the underlying article itself supporting those comments. This is pointed out by people who see the device, but this counts as an indicator that they are “pro-government”. Discussion ensues in the comments, entrenching the rhetoric, without having to resort to valid examples. I love such constructions, like stingers that dig deeper if you try to pull them out.
3y ago

metacritic12 3y ago

Case in point: the UN Committee to eradicate smallpox was successful and then self-disbanded. They were not a company.

tw04 3y ago

Which is odd because every government program torn down in the last 50 years has almost immediately resulted in a resurrection of the bad behavior by private corporations it was meant to stop.

hackernewds 3y ago
Doesn't imply the opposite isn't true either. Spending on "fixing" the homelessness crisis in SF has ballooned as expected and a lot of nonprofits and agencies well positioned to take advantage have benefited from the unhoused bull market
- lisper 3y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39495635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39495635
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  The fault here lies with the SF electorate, who collectively wants their housing investment to be protected and homelessness to be fixed. Actually, I would argue that this isn't even a conflict, because SF homeowners probably do not want a durable solution to the homelessness crisis. That would require bulldozing the suburbs. They instead want SF to sweep the homeless under some proverbial rug so that their presence does not tarnish the value of their homes. House them, but house them somewhere else. This isn't even an instance of the Shirky principle, it's just people using words in confusing ways.
moneywoes 3y ago
examples for illustration please

csomar 3y ago

I don't think the examples were exhaustive. As I read it, the writer tries to extrapolate and generalize his principal to everything and everywhere as some sort of natural law; so it'll affect governments, unions, companies, etc...

crabmusket 3y ago
I think that's a fair and charitable reading, that maybe they've just overgeneralised a bit, or maybe just haven't chosen the exact mix of examples they "should" have. The ideological lean, though it may have been completely innocent or accidental, stood out to me.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

A lot of examples in the comments are NOT the Shirky Principle. The Shirky Principle is about how an organization wants to self-perpetuate. The comments are just blaming any government program that might be miss-managed, or under-performing, for any number of reasons, regardless of any relation to Shirky. Shirky != Government. Any organization can underperform for many reasons. There can just be multiple groups with conflicting incentives. or "multipolar traps" https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

dclowd9901 3y ago

I think the broadest definition of the role of government is to regulate. With that in mind, it would mean that the government (and its agencies) would be intentionally failing to regulate well so that there is a perceived continued need to regulate? As asinine as that sentence sounds, it actually seems to be exactly the state we're in right now. We have tons of government and tons of regulation, and yet we still see corruption and criminality everywhere, and people begging for more regulation to undermine it.

danmaz74 3y ago

This is also the perfect example of survivorship bias: all the institutions which effectively solved a problem don't exist any more today, as they were shut down or repurposed and renamed.

bryanrasmussen 3y ago

huh, yeah it implies that without unions companies wouldn't need any of that pesky management, just like without traffic lights cars wouldn't need brakes.