7 ms·

Governments 'too inefficient' for future Moon landings

51 points by equilibrium 14y ago

gliese1337 14y ago
This seems to me a totally natural progression. Governments have the resources to do New Untried Things, to fund Pure Research and Crazy National Pride Projects, and so they do them because no one else can at the time that they are done. But good governments are supposed to be inefficient. Much as we hate bureaucracy, an efficient government is a terrible, scary thing. Inefficiency keeps it in check. So it falls to private enterprise to pick up where governments leave off.
drostie 14y ago
In my libertarian college days it seemed like bureaucracy was a horrible waste of resources, but the more and more I think about it, the more and more it seems like our social institutions are "memes" of a sort; a military which does not use bureaucracy loses wars to ones that do. A bureaucracy is thus seen as a natural consequence of marshalling very large quantities of resources. That is, a bureaucracy allows you to "ignore" details of the collective -- at Microsoft you don't need to know what Janet from down the hall is working on -- but then you don't feel like "part of" the collective per se, and so we have to have a system of managers to both protect you from the collective and to protect the collective from you (i.e. corruption & free rider problems). If you're less of a manager and more of a programmer then it's actually really nice to think about how we might use this to architect software and/or to collect nodes together. Capitalism might have an analogue for example in developing the same software multiple times, and taking the simplest and most elegant result.
- batgaijin 14y ago
  Haha, that sounds like the perfect competition for a startup country :P.
- stygianguest 14y ago
  Agreed. To some extend bureaucracy exchanges negative liberty (freedom from constraint) for positive liberty (the enabling force). The exchange has some overhead not only in terms of money, but we also seem to pay more negative liberty to obtain the ``same'' amount of positive liberty.
- ef4 14y ago
  Bureaucracy's strength is in getting repeatable results out of large numbers of unreliable human beings. There are places where that's the best strategy. But as soon as you're trying to do something unique or one-off or under-specified, bureaucracy impedes more than it helps. Which is probably why large bureaucratic organizations often get out-innovated by small organizations with far less resources at their disposal. Bureaucracy is a solution to a coordination problem that I would argue doesn't really exist anymore. Software is, in one sense, bureaucracy codified in mechanical form. It replaces and obsoletes human bureaucracy. The classic bureaucrat essentially applies a rulebook to his input information and passes output information to someone else. He is a human computer. Even the evolution of war leaves open the question whether bureaucracy is an asset or a liability going forward. War is getting faster and more targeted.
  - lutze 14y ago
    At least with a human there's the possibility they could be persuaded, reasoned with, or even corrupted. A computer on the other hand is utterly intractable. I'm not sure how that would help with unique, one off or under-specified problems. If you want your bureaucracy to be more adaptable, I'd argue you need to give it more flexibility not less.
    - ImprovedSilence 14y ago
      >> A computer on the other hand is utterly intractable I'm sure several people on here would disagree with that, as there are plenty of people good at "convincing" computers to do things they shouldn't be doing, or to do things that their owners don't want them to. You just have to be more of a black hat, less of a schmmoozer....
      - lutze 14y ago
        Yeah, should've probably put a caveat in that! I'd argue that even a hacked system is intractable though, as it still rigidly follows the rules no matter the outcome. That's usually what black hats are exploiting in the first place. If the problem with bureaucracy is rigidity, then replacing human agency with computed agency would only exacerbate that in my opinion.
- philwelch 14y ago
  Bureaucracy is a solution to a very difficult scaling problem. Dunbar's number is around the limit to the largest group that can naturally work together. Above that you need something else to scale, and bureaucracy is one of these things.
- arethuza 14y ago
  The main problem with a bureaucracy is that they appear to have a tendency to almost always decrease in efficiency over time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
- sageikosa 14y ago
  Von Mises analyzed Bureaucracy in a book aptly named (in English translation): Bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is a mechanism used to control costs in an enterprise absent measurable economic profitability (cost/revenue efficiency). In private profit-seeking enterprises with sufficient scale to have division of labor, subsets of the organization may be deemed "cost centers", these are the ones that get the most bureaucratic over time. Even regulatory compliance departments main goal is to constrain the costs of fines from non-compliance. The omni-present danger in bureaucratic management is that the mechanisms to maintain and manage the bureaucracy are themselves non-profit seeking, and tend to motivate growth in the bureaucracy. In private enterprises (barring regulatory compliance requirements), the overall cost of its bureaucratic functions impedes its profitability, and should tend to limit the size of the "cost center" budgets to maintain market profitability (or a failed enterprise). For government functions, the overall cost of the bureaucracy can only be paid for by tax receipts and public debt (and license and fines, which as the Chief Justic pointed out are effectively tax receipts). If there is no political will to constrain one of both of those, the bureaucracy will grow unbounded. Anyway, the short of it has nothing to do with marshaling resources, it has to do with constraining costs absent profit.
- rayiner 14y ago
  I think one of the problems people have with evaluating the efficiency of government is that most of the projects government engages in are necessarily very complex. The point of government research is to work on projects that are too blue-sky to be immediately interesting to industry, but the flip side of this is that such projects are inherentl difficult to manage. DOD projects are notorious for this. Every big DOD RFP asks for something literally nobody has ever built before. When I worked at a company that contracted for DARPA, the government literally didn't know what it wanted us to build because our work would inform their opinion of what was possible to build. You can't hold these sorts of projects to the same standard as implementing an invoicing system for a company that's basically the same as every other invoicing system ever made.
  - fleitz 14y ago
    Ok, how about a welfare system then, it seems to me that a government welfare ministry should distribute about 90% of what it takes in spending 10% on administration, when I looked into my government it was spending 55% on administration. Put this into perspective, once the US finished paying interest on debt, medicare and welfare there's no money left over for anything else. Science programs are one thing, but the government can't deliver 70 year old services with reasonable efficiency.
    - bluedanieru 14y ago
      You could get that kind of efficiency, or get closer to it anyway, if you just cut people a check. It turns out that's more effective at combating poverty than most social programs anyway. But it's politically impossible.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      It depends entirely on the structure of the welfare program. For example, the veterans affairs administration provides services, mostly health services, directly to veterans. In that case, you'd expect 100% to be overhead, because VA doctors and hospitals are paid out of overhead. Most federal welfare programs, however, involve cutting a check. Look at the Social Security Administration. It has a budget of about $12.7 billion, and administers $700-800 billion in benefits to 50-60 million people: http://www.ssa.gov/pressoffice/basicfact.htm http://www.ssa.gov/pressoffice/basicfact.htm That amounts to an overhead of 1.6%, or ~$250 per person served. Or, look at it another way. Total federal payroll is about $180 billion, for 2.15 million federal employees (a number that has fluctuated between 1.8 and 2.2 million for the last half century despite nearly a doubling of the population). That's about 4.7% of the budget, or 1.2% of GDP. Most of the federal government is not overhead. 95% of it is just taking in tax revenue from certain people and cutting checks to other people.
- Androsynth 14y ago
  > a military which does not use bureaucracy loses wars to ones that do. You couldn't be more wrong about this. The decentralized Vietnamese beat the (by-then) bureaucratic US. The US army during WWII was defined by its ability to delegate to the lowest possible level of the officer hierarchy and this was one of the major reasons it was able to beat the rigid and highly-centralized Nazis. The Confederacy came within a stones throw of winning the Civil War, which would have been the equivalent of two guys in their garage taking down one of the worlds largest Corporations. They lost because of the overwhelming differences in resources, but their agility and ability to promote talent allowed them to run circles around the North for the first two years. Winfield Scott and Hernando Cortes both won in Mexico because they distanced themselves from their respective governments. They were allowed complete freedom from bureaucracy because they went out of communication range of the politicians. Sun Tzu actually made a name for himself by beating a major neighboring kingdom with a tiny, but agile force. I could keep going...
  - drostie 14y ago
    The Civil War is a better example than Vietnam -- not only because public support died in the US with Nixon's "Guam doctrine", but because it wasn't a particularly existential struggle for the US -- that is, my point was that there is a "natural selection" of social institutions based on military defeats. (Also, South Vietnam was an interesting question in its own right: to what extent is a strong-man or dictator a "bureaucrat"? Chinese civilizations are a grand example of a clear bureaucracy with a central dictator, so the answer isn't trivially either "not at all" or "absolutely.") Just to be clear: I am not arguing against agility and I think that the central agile ability -- the ability to fail cheaply -- is probably the most important feature in many areas, including some military conquests. (One of the most interesting applications of cheap failure is interface design. If you can test a new idea cheaply it allows feedback loops which make you feel like you're really "interacting with something.") In any case, you've given me some food for thought, and thanks for that.
    - Androsynth 14y ago
      The Civil War is an excellent example, and the best example of the ones I gave.
sami36 14y ago
Maybe, This question is totally pointless. Because, it doesn't make sense to go back to the Moon. What for ? it's a desolate rock, we've been there many times already, brought back rocks, learned as much as we could about its geology that we possibly could. Going back to the moon is at best an entertainment proposition, it has no practical or scientific benefits. The fact that we didn't go back on the moon doesn't say anything about government. We might hold different opinions about its inefficiencies and bloated nature, but none of them are relevant to this debate Mars, on the other hand, holds a promise, although very remote & very premature that it might one day host humans, even possibly a permanent settlement.
- dsego 14y ago
  But the moon could be a good testing ground for a settlement. Also, some day a nice starport perhaps.
- pavlov 14y ago
  In addition to geological resources, there is water on the Moon that can be mined [1]. Building a Moon base is a reasonable proposition because it can serve as the stepping stone to other destinations in the solar system. The low gravity makes it more attractive to mine and build things on the Moon rather than having to uplift everything from Earth. [1] http://www.space.com/7335-water-moon-suddenly-attractive-destination.html http://www.space.com/7335-water-moon-suddenly-attractive-des...
  - fennecfoxen 14y ago
    Yes, but you know, instead of building a moon base to get to the planets so that you can build colonies or extract resources, you could spend that same money on Earth, be it on resource extraction (for the profit motive) or something else that the species finds valuable (for the betterment of humanity angle... e.g. there are sub-saharan african villages without clean water or sanitation, etc). The economists call it "Opportunity Cost" and all that. The opportunity cost of space exploration is kinda high, and humanity's resources are limited. I like space probes and space bases at least as much as the next citizen of the world, but they're not my priority.
jakozaur 14y ago
Hmm, I wonder if same apply to mega projects. Cost overran and miss deadlines a lot. What is the main reason? The fact that they are hard, because they are complex or because they are mostly managed by government. Perhaps, it is a combination of both, but would love to read some scientific analysis about that.
- Shivetya 14y ago
  Mostly because government is truly not accountable. Oh I mean we all read about how they have all this accountability built in but in the end it doesn't save us from what they do. The mentality of many in government is scary. The add in all the purchasing rules, inclusion of minority group requirements, cronyism, and more, and its no wonder why many projects are bound to cost more and have so much waste. An example of all that is wrong in US projects at least can be summarized by looking that the rail project in California. They are so hell bent on doing something that anything will do which in the end means nothing gets done except a lot of money is expended. Government has a spending problem in nearly all nations of this world. Politicians do not fear accountability because they know how to play groups off each other and how to buy off one group or another to keep themselves in place.
deleted 14y ago
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lostnet 14y ago
These government inefficiency arguments seem to ignore the fact that NASA relied significantly on the small handful of large Aerospace companies, yet those companies seem not to be involved in the private ventures that require expanding capabilities. I would look at the traditional space industry as similar to any unmotivated ~duopoly that is working in an industry with a pretty fixed income. Suddenly they look more like other problem sectors (say US cable internet? US cell? English Trains?) In those industries the only possible improvements are from government interference or public shaming with comparisons to efficient markets abroad. The monster in the room is that traditional government outsourcing is a model for constructing monopolies and trusts. The government avoids the complexity of proportionally paying a dozen companies for the same task and few companies can handle the complexity of working for the government. Once created these trusts/monopolies that can't compete for rational customers must still expand at 9% a year and are "too big to fail" and so based on lobbying that the question of failure could never come up. Outsourcing the government is like packaging up "government inefficiency" with sector destroyers and some legal skimming off the top. I would predict that as soon as one of these new companies is successful they will be sued for all the IP the big aerospaces refuse to use, then acquired, and then shelved.
deleted 14y ago
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newbie12 14y ago
The article gets one fact wrong-- George W. Bush called for a manned mission to the moon in 2020 and Mars thereafter, but was widely ridiculed, and unsupported in Congress. http://articles.cnn.com/2004-01-14/tech/bush.space_1_space-exploration-mars-mission-human-missions?_s=PM:TECH http://articles.cnn.com/2004-01-14/tech/bush.space_1_space-e... http://www.theonion.com/articles/bush-still-working-on-manned-mission-to-mars-quiet,18154/ http://www.theonion.com/articles/bush-still-working-on-manne...
alphadogg 14y ago
Right. Because large companies are paragons of efficiency? I'm really getting tired of the "governments are corrupt/inefficient/lazy" meme. There is a contingent of people on the right living in anecdotal evidence found in government, and ignoring anecdotal evidence in business. It's the hypocrisy that is most bothersome.
trustfundbaby 14y ago
I've always felt that government running things like space exploration was a bit odd . I think that government funded (all or in part) private enterprise is the way to go, it worked for Columbus and other early adventurers right?
- Avshalom 14y ago
  Well the reality is pretty much that anyway. It's not like NASA actually owns the rocket factories. NASA provides the direction, man power during the missions and cuts the checks but it's private* industry that does most of the R&D and construction. *well technically private but it varies from companies that exist purely on government contracts to companies like TI and boeing.
- dockd 14y ago
  When government does that, people say it should have no place in "picking winners". Is there really a way for governments to provide money to private enterprise without picking winners?

51 points by equilibrium 14y ago

This seems to me a totally natural progression. Governments have the resources to do New Untried Things, to fund Pure Research and Crazy National Pride Projects, and so they do them because no one else can at the time that they are done. But good governments are supposed to be inefficient. Much as we hate bureaucracy, an efficient government is a terrible, scary thing. Inefficiency keeps it in check. So it falls to private enterprise to pick up where governments leave off.

drostie 14y ago

In my libertarian college days it seemed like bureaucracy was a horrible waste of resources, but the more and more I think about it, the more and more it seems like our social institutions are "memes" of a sort; a military which does not use bureaucracy loses wars to ones that do. A bureaucracy is thus seen as a natural consequence of marshalling very large quantities of resources. That is, a bureaucracy allows you to "ignore" details of the collective -- at Microsoft you don't need to know what Janet from down the hall is working on -- but then you don't feel like "part of" the collective per se, and so we have to have a system of managers to both protect you from the collective and to protect the collective from you (i.e. corruption & free rider problems). If you're less of a manager and more of a programmer then it's actually really nice to think about how we might use this to architect software and/or to collect nodes together. Capitalism might have an analogue for example in developing the same software multiple times, and taking the simplest and most elegant result.

batgaijin 14y ago
Haha, that sounds like the perfect competition for a startup country :P.
stygianguest 14y ago
Agreed. To some extend bureaucracy exchanges negative liberty (freedom from constraint) for positive liberty (the enabling force). The exchange has some overhead not only in terms of money, but we also seem to pay more negative liberty to obtain the ``same'' amount of positive liberty.
ef4 14y ago
Bureaucracy's strength is in getting repeatable results out of large numbers of unreliable human beings. There are places where that's the best strategy. But as soon as you're trying to do something unique or one-off or under-specified, bureaucracy impedes more than it helps. Which is probably why large bureaucratic organizations often get out-innovated by small organizations with far less resources at their disposal. Bureaucracy is a solution to a coordination problem that I would argue doesn't really exist anymore. Software is, in one sense, bureaucracy codified in mechanical form. It replaces and obsoletes human bureaucracy. The classic bureaucrat essentially applies a rulebook to his input information and passes output information to someone else. He is a human computer. Even the evolution of war leaves open the question whether bureaucracy is an asset or a liability going forward. War is getting faster and more targeted.
- lutze 14y ago
  At least with a human there's the possibility they could be persuaded, reasoned with, or even corrupted. A computer on the other hand is utterly intractable. I'm not sure how that would help with unique, one off or under-specified problems. If you want your bureaucracy to be more adaptable, I'd argue you need to give it more flexibility not less.
  - ImprovedSilence 14y ago
    >> A computer on the other hand is utterly intractable I'm sure several people on here would disagree with that, as there are plenty of people good at "convincing" computers to do things they shouldn't be doing, or to do things that their owners don't want them to. You just have to be more of a black hat, less of a schmmoozer....
    - lutze 14y ago
      Yeah, should've probably put a caveat in that! I'd argue that even a hacked system is intractable though, as it still rigidly follows the rules no matter the outcome. That's usually what black hats are exploiting in the first place. If the problem with bureaucracy is rigidity, then replacing human agency with computed agency would only exacerbate that in my opinion.
philwelch 14y ago
Bureaucracy is a solution to a very difficult scaling problem. Dunbar's number is around the limit to the largest group that can naturally work together. Above that you need something else to scale, and bureaucracy is one of these things.
arethuza 14y ago
The main problem with a bureaucracy is that they appear to have a tendency to almost always decrease in efficiency over time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
sageikosa 14y ago
Von Mises analyzed Bureaucracy in a book aptly named (in English translation): Bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is a mechanism used to control costs in an enterprise absent measurable economic profitability (cost/revenue efficiency). In private profit-seeking enterprises with sufficient scale to have division of labor, subsets of the organization may be deemed "cost centers", these are the ones that get the most bureaucratic over time. Even regulatory compliance departments main goal is to constrain the costs of fines from non-compliance. The omni-present danger in bureaucratic management is that the mechanisms to maintain and manage the bureaucracy are themselves non-profit seeking, and tend to motivate growth in the bureaucracy. In private enterprises (barring regulatory compliance requirements), the overall cost of its bureaucratic functions impedes its profitability, and should tend to limit the size of the "cost center" budgets to maintain market profitability (or a failed enterprise). For government functions, the overall cost of the bureaucracy can only be paid for by tax receipts and public debt (and license and fines, which as the Chief Justic pointed out are effectively tax receipts). If there is no political will to constrain one of both of those, the bureaucracy will grow unbounded. Anyway, the short of it has nothing to do with marshaling resources, it has to do with constraining costs absent profit.
rayiner 14y ago
I think one of the problems people have with evaluating the efficiency of government is that most of the projects government engages in are necessarily very complex. The point of government research is to work on projects that are too blue-sky to be immediately interesting to industry, but the flip side of this is that such projects are inherentl difficult to manage. DOD projects are notorious for this. Every big DOD RFP asks for something literally nobody has ever built before. When I worked at a company that contracted for DARPA, the government literally didn't know what it wanted us to build because our work would inform their opinion of what was possible to build. You can't hold these sorts of projects to the same standard as implementing an invoicing system for a company that's basically the same as every other invoicing system ever made.
- fleitz 14y ago
  Ok, how about a welfare system then, it seems to me that a government welfare ministry should distribute about 90% of what it takes in spending 10% on administration, when I looked into my government it was spending 55% on administration. Put this into perspective, once the US finished paying interest on debt, medicare and welfare there's no money left over for anything else. Science programs are one thing, but the government can't deliver 70 year old services with reasonable efficiency.
  - bluedanieru 14y ago
    You could get that kind of efficiency, or get closer to it anyway, if you just cut people a check. It turns out that's more effective at combating poverty than most social programs anyway. But it's politically impossible.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    It depends entirely on the structure of the welfare program. For example, the veterans affairs administration provides services, mostly health services, directly to veterans. In that case, you'd expect 100% to be overhead, because VA doctors and hospitals are paid out of overhead. Most federal welfare programs, however, involve cutting a check. Look at the Social Security Administration. It has a budget of about $12.7 billion, and administers $700-800 billion in benefits to 50-60 million people: http://www.ssa.gov/pressoffice/basicfact.htm http://www.ssa.gov/pressoffice/basicfact.htm That amounts to an overhead of 1.6%, or ~$250 per person served. Or, look at it another way. Total federal payroll is about $180 billion, for 2.15 million federal employees (a number that has fluctuated between 1.8 and 2.2 million for the last half century despite nearly a doubling of the population). That's about 4.7% of the budget, or 1.2% of GDP. Most of the federal government is not overhead. 95% of it is just taking in tax revenue from certain people and cutting checks to other people.
Androsynth 14y ago
> a military which does not use bureaucracy loses wars to ones that do. You couldn't be more wrong about this. The decentralized Vietnamese beat the (by-then) bureaucratic US. The US army during WWII was defined by its ability to delegate to the lowest possible level of the officer hierarchy and this was one of the major reasons it was able to beat the rigid and highly-centralized Nazis. The Confederacy came within a stones throw of winning the Civil War, which would have been the equivalent of two guys in their garage taking down one of the worlds largest Corporations. They lost because of the overwhelming differences in resources, but their agility and ability to promote talent allowed them to run circles around the North for the first two years. Winfield Scott and Hernando Cortes both won in Mexico because they distanced themselves from their respective governments. They were allowed complete freedom from bureaucracy because they went out of communication range of the politicians. Sun Tzu actually made a name for himself by beating a major neighboring kingdom with a tiny, but agile force. I could keep going...
- drostie 14y ago
  The Civil War is a better example than Vietnam -- not only because public support died in the US with Nixon's "Guam doctrine", but because it wasn't a particularly existential struggle for the US -- that is, my point was that there is a "natural selection" of social institutions based on military defeats. (Also, South Vietnam was an interesting question in its own right: to what extent is a strong-man or dictator a "bureaucrat"? Chinese civilizations are a grand example of a clear bureaucracy with a central dictator, so the answer isn't trivially either "not at all" or "absolutely.") Just to be clear: I am not arguing against agility and I think that the central agile ability -- the ability to fail cheaply -- is probably the most important feature in many areas, including some military conquests. (One of the most interesting applications of cheap failure is interface design. If you can test a new idea cheaply it allows feedback loops which make you feel like you're really "interacting with something.") In any case, you've given me some food for thought, and thanks for that.
  - Androsynth 14y ago
    The Civil War is an excellent example, and the best example of the ones I gave.

sami36 14y ago

Maybe, This question is totally pointless. Because, it doesn't make sense to go back to the Moon. What for ? it's a desolate rock, we've been there many times already, brought back rocks, learned as much as we could about its geology that we possibly could. Going back to the moon is at best an entertainment proposition, it has no practical or scientific benefits. The fact that we didn't go back on the moon doesn't say anything about government. We might hold different opinions about its inefficiencies and bloated nature, but none of them are relevant to this debate Mars, on the other hand, holds a promise, although very remote & very premature that it might one day host humans, even possibly a permanent settlement.

dsego 14y ago
But the moon could be a good testing ground for a settlement. Also, some day a nice starport perhaps.
pavlov 14y ago
In addition to geological resources, there is water on the Moon that can be mined [1]. Building a Moon base is a reasonable proposition because it can serve as the stepping stone to other destinations in the solar system. The low gravity makes it more attractive to mine and build things on the Moon rather than having to uplift everything from Earth. [1] http://www.space.com/7335-water-moon-suddenly-attractive-destination.html http://www.space.com/7335-water-moon-suddenly-attractive-des...
- fennecfoxen 14y ago
  Yes, but you know, instead of building a moon base to get to the planets so that you can build colonies or extract resources, you could spend that same money on Earth, be it on resource extraction (for the profit motive) or something else that the species finds valuable (for the betterment of humanity angle... e.g. there are sub-saharan african villages without clean water or sanitation, etc). The economists call it "Opportunity Cost" and all that. The opportunity cost of space exploration is kinda high, and humanity's resources are limited. I like space probes and space bases at least as much as the next citizen of the world, but they're not my priority.

jakozaur 14y ago

Hmm, I wonder if same apply to mega projects. Cost overran and miss deadlines a lot. What is the main reason? The fact that they are hard, because they are complex or because they are mostly managed by government. Perhaps, it is a combination of both, but would love to read some scientific analysis about that.

Shivetya 14y ago
Mostly because government is truly not accountable. Oh I mean we all read about how they have all this accountability built in but in the end it doesn't save us from what they do. The mentality of many in government is scary. The add in all the purchasing rules, inclusion of minority group requirements, cronyism, and more, and its no wonder why many projects are bound to cost more and have so much waste. An example of all that is wrong in US projects at least can be summarized by looking that the rail project in California. They are so hell bent on doing something that anything will do which in the end means nothing gets done except a lot of money is expended. Government has a spending problem in nearly all nations of this world. Politicians do not fear accountability because they know how to play groups off each other and how to buy off one group or another to keep themselves in place.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

lostnet 14y ago

These government inefficiency arguments seem to ignore the fact that NASA relied significantly on the small handful of large Aerospace companies, yet those companies seem not to be involved in the private ventures that require expanding capabilities. I would look at the traditional space industry as similar to any unmotivated ~duopoly that is working in an industry with a pretty fixed income. Suddenly they look more like other problem sectors (say US cable internet? US cell? English Trains?) In those industries the only possible improvements are from government interference or public shaming with comparisons to efficient markets abroad. The monster in the room is that traditional government outsourcing is a model for constructing monopolies and trusts. The government avoids the complexity of proportionally paying a dozen companies for the same task and few companies can handle the complexity of working for the government. Once created these trusts/monopolies that can't compete for rational customers must still expand at 9% a year and are "too big to fail" and so based on lobbying that the question of failure could never come up. Outsourcing the government is like packaging up "government inefficiency" with sector destroyers and some legal skimming off the top. I would predict that as soon as one of these new companies is successful they will be sued for all the IP the big aerospaces refuse to use, then acquired, and then shelved.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

newbie12 14y ago

The article gets one fact wrong-- George W. Bush called for a manned mission to the moon in 2020 and Mars thereafter, but was widely ridiculed, and unsupported in Congress. http://articles.cnn.com/2004-01-14/tech/bush.space_1_space-exploration-mars-mission-human-missions?_s=PM:TECH http://articles.cnn.com/2004-01-14/tech/bush.space_1_space-e... http://www.theonion.com/articles/bush-still-working-on-manned-mission-to-mars-quiet,18154/ http://www.theonion.com/articles/bush-still-working-on-manne...

alphadogg 14y ago

Right. Because large companies are paragons of efficiency? I'm really getting tired of the "governments are corrupt/inefficient/lazy" meme. There is a contingent of people on the right living in anecdotal evidence found in government, and ignoring anecdotal evidence in business. It's the hypocrisy that is most bothersome.

trustfundbaby 14y ago

I've always felt that government running things like space exploration was a bit odd . I think that government funded (all or in part) private enterprise is the way to go, it worked for Columbus and other early adventurers right?

Avshalom 14y ago
Well the reality is pretty much that anyway. It's not like NASA actually owns the rocket factories. NASA provides the direction, man power during the missions and cuts the checks but it's private* industry that does most of the R&D and construction. *well technically private but it varies from companies that exist purely on government contracts to companies like TI and boeing.
dockd 14y ago
When government does that, people say it should have no place in "picking winners". Is there really a way for governments to provide money to private enterprise without picking winners?