I don’t think it’s about accountability, after all democracy has more or less the same accountability mechanisms as a publicly traded company. Given the massiv

I don’t think it’s about accountability, after all democracy has more or less the same accountability mechanisms as a publicly traded company. Given the massive public interest, there is probably at least an order of magnitude more oversight of public offices than there is for private companies. In the end it’s the same challenge that every team, department, company has to solve: how to have people that care about their job? Here my impression is that that’s often not the case, leading to the effects you described. Given the often severely reduced pay in public jobs, compared with industry, I don’t find that overly surprising, you get what you pay for.