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People often attribute the government's inability to solve a problem even after throwing billions of dollars at it; as a sign of incompetence. While there is pl
by didgetmaster 3mo ago
People often attribute the government's inability to solve a problem even after throwing billions of dollars at it; as a sign of incompetence. While there is plenty of incompetence within government; I think the 'Preserve the Problem' response is mostly to blame.
If we 'solved' crime, homelessness, drug use, poverty, etc.; then budgets would decrease and political power would diminish. Those in charge of solving the problem often have the least incentive to do so.
- have_faith 3mo agoDoes anyone within the system genuinely feel threatened by the idea that something like "crime" can be "solved" to the point that they're avoiding solving too much crime? Same logic for the others.
- dmitrygr 3mo agoA LOT of crime can be solved. A huge percentage of perps are multi-repeat perps. Putting them away permanently would solve a lot of crime. "75% to 83% of released prisoners are arrested for a new crime" https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/2018-update-prisoner-recidivism-9-year-follow-period-2005-2014 https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/2018-update-prisone...
- tchalla 3mo ago… in the US
- skinfaxi 3mo agoYes, kind of obvious from the .gov right?
- numeri 3mo agoI read the comment you're replying to as saying, "in the US, but other countries may have different policies that result in lower recidivism, and that might change the conclusion; maybe people aren't inherently criminally insane, but can become useful members of society, if given a chance"
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- skinfaxi 3mo agoWhile I think your interpretation is possibly overly charitable, I agree my comment was unwarranted and unnecessary. I can't delete it at this point.
- tchalla 3mo agoThe overly charitable comment is exactly how I meant it. Let me phrase it a bit differently, if this study would be let’s say from Finland … it would have been the most straightforward comment to make. But it’s the US so it’s not. You don’t need to delete your comment. It’s not a big deal. We all have different days.
- whall6 3mo agoseems cruel and unusual…
- GauntletWizard 3mo agoUnusual? Only because we've made it so. Cruel? Nah. Locking someone up because they're criminally insane is less cruel than letting them roam the streets, both to the perpetrator and the people around them.
- blharr 3mo ago"Solved" (heavy quotes) because instiutionalizing dozens of millions of people with no improvement is a massive crime in and of itself. That's like those stories of LLMs saying "I fixed the vulnerability in your app" by deleting the project entirely
- dmitrygr 3mo agoWouldn’t you say that the lowered crime rate enjoyed by the innocent as a result is an improvement?
- srveale 3mo agoWhy not just incarcerate everyone between the age of 15-27, if what we're worried about is crime rate.
- dmitrygr 3mo agoBecause most of those people are not repeat violent criminals? We only need to incarcerate repeat violent offenders to reduce crime noticeably. This is not controversial. The data is linked-to above.
- RugnirViking 3mo agoIs it really true that in places with longer jail sentences (specifically, tile spent in prison) and/or higher prison populations as a share of general population that there is less crime?
- tcmart14 3mo agoJust to throw my two cents in. We could look at Singapore which does have harsher sentencing and low crime rates. However, there is a bit of caveat. Singapore has its red light districts where law enforcement sorta turns a blind eye. Its more of a, "so long as you keep your bullshit there, be classy about it and don't let it spill out, we will just conveniently ignore it."
- inigyou 3mo agoAmerica has the most people in prison (both absolute and per capita) and also some of the highest crime rates, so it seems the correlation is the opposite.
- dooglius 3mo agoIt's going to be a much more granular detail than all of crime. If your job is to investigate counterfeited 27B-6 forms, you are going to be threatened by that form moving to being filed digitally with cryptographic signatures.
- treis 3mo agoIt's not quite that black and white. You have fixed amount of policing resources and it goes to the most impactful crimes. If crime goes down then they start caring about petty stuff. If it goes back up then they stop. This applies more directly to something like foster care. My state is going through a budget crisis and anecdatally the result is significantly fewer kids coming into and remaining in care. It moves at the margins so a borderline case that might have resulted in removal before now doesn't. As you note it's unlikely that some problems can be completely solved. But our resource allocation is mostly fixed or varies based on circumstances beyond whatever problem is being solved.
- enos_feedler 3mo agoIf this is true then a restructuring of the entire organizations might help. It seems the flaws are built in.
- ElevenLathe 3mo agoThis is exactly what "defund the police" is (IMO) trying to say. The justice system (really it extends to the courts, the law itself, etc.) we have is corrupt. To really solve the problem that currently-existing policing purports to solve means scrapping it altogether and starting fresh, with fresh people, culture, goals, and processes.
- didgetmaster 3mo agoI don't think that anyone believes that some problems like crime and poverty can be solved such that it completely goes away. By 'solving', I meant take action such that the result is obvious in that the problem is greatly diminished. And yes, I do think that individuals and departments feel threatened that they will be impacted if something like that actually happened.
- cwmoore 3mo agoThe homeless provide a visible incentive to work harder and pay more in rent, and property owners and other taxpayers certainly engage city services (mostly enforcement) in competitive battle for the big bucks. There’s a lot of unrecognized coercion built into the incentive structure underneath the f** y* money tiers. About 50,000,000 hours every day are spent in incarceration, and however many salaries for corrections jobs. The same kinds of system have been around since medieval times.
- deelayman 3mo agoThe article is written from the perspective of a business / management consultant, rather than a public policy shop perspective. In general, I think social problems move slowly, and solving them in a three year business plan isn't realistic. You'll see many agencies use a version of Mayne's Framework or Contribution Analysis to report on progress for big social problems. It's not that they perpetuate their own raison d'être, it's that they are addressing path dependent social problems, and changing a system with embedded systemic memory within a vast number of crevices (public, private, and cultural) to hide those memories is orders of magnitude more effort than creating the system at the start.
- MattGrommes 3mo agoI'm genuinely curious about even a hypothetical more detailed example of how some group would go about preserving a problem like homelessness, even unintentionally. I can't wrap my mind about how it would actually happen beyond simplistic sayings. I live in Portland, OR where we have a large homeless problem and I continually hear that the groups being given money to help are incentivized to keep homelessness high for their own purposes. Like, obviously people who are paid like to keep getting paid but how would they go about making this happen when their job is the opposite?
- treis 3mo agoYou start by fixing the problem of people sleeping on benches and in tents. Then you go to those in cars, then those crashing on a couch, then those living 8 to a house, then families with small places, and so on. What the problem is keeps expanding until the resources allocated to it are spent.
- jerlam 3mo agoOften, the homeless programs provide aid to the homeless with food and clothing and health care, not necessarily to make them not homeless. It is much harder and expensive for homeless programs to create shelters or homes. It is also difficult if not illegal to force people into housing.
- MyHonestOpinon 3mo agoIn your example, (it seem to me that) is not that the problems is expanding (getting worst) but it is reaching (helping) more people.
- inigyou 3mo agoBut they're not even doing that. It's not the case that tents and benches have been solved and the definition expanded. There are still people sleeping on benches and in tents - more than ever before.
- SoftTalker 3mo agoIn the homelessness example, it's not so much that the programs and groups want to justify their continued existence (though that might be happening too). It's that the programs themselves incentivize more of the problem. When they give things to homeless people, such as food, shelter, clothes, social services, even needles and a "safe place" to get high in some cases, and often with few or no conditions, they make being homeless more tolerable. Word gets around, and people who could not feasibly be homeless where they are are drawn to Portland because they will get more support there.
- foolswisdom 3mo agoWhile preserving problems is undoubtedly a natural incentive, I think Hanlon's razor applies here. Just today I was reading Competent Bureaucracy - Rebuilding State Capacity (<https://cdn.sanity.io/files/d8lrla4f/staging/cf7eedaf5d21d2746030c5b0599338fceef5ed4c.pdf https://cdn.sanity.io/files/d8lrla4f/staging/cf7eedaf5d21d27...>) on the topic of agency structure promoting success (the author has done a nice amount of work in the past - e.g. https://www.statecapacitance.pub https://www.statecapacitance.pub into this history of this topic).
- wombatpm 3mo agoPournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: every organization has two groups of people. The first group cares about the organization's main goal. The second group cares about the organization itself. Group two always wins, takes control, and writes the rules. So NGO’s go from combating homelessness to being the organization about homelessness. I sometimes think organizations should be set up with hard end dates. At which point the organization is disbanded and resources redistributed. If the problem still exists a new ord should be created with a new scope and new timeline.
- edoceo 3mo agoSimply: the Bureaucracy exists to perpetuate the Bureaucracy.
- cwmoore 3mo agoI am not aware of any real tests of effectiveness of these organizations, but I am a huge proponent of progressive UBI so that the systems might actually serve people with chronic or recurring need and not simply being dragged along. What we do as a democracy is cede the status quo to paternalistically penalizing the poor out of contention, and is pretty ethically corrupted bh it’s own effectiveness.
- grim_io 3mo agoBig Pharma is trying to preserve cancer. Wake up sheeple!
- edoceo 3mo agoGoldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’ https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patie...
- izacus 3mo agoFamously, a pharma company.
- wat10000 3mo agoThat report proposed three pretty reasonable approaches to this problem, and none of them were "avoid curing diseases."
- jryle70 3mo agoThey asked a tough question that needs to be addressed. It's as necessary as "is there a place for assisted suicide?" question. They proposed 1) Address large markets; 2) Address disorders with high incidence; and 3) Constant innovation and portfolio expansion. Does that sound like to you they proposed not curing patients?
- oatmeal1 3mo agoNot quite, but big pharma promotes preventive screening in excess of what is justified. They don't care if false positives create stress and unnecessary, dangerous procedures that eliminate the benefit of screening. They just want to make sure before you die they get a chance to sell their most expensive drugs.
- yongjik 3mo agoThe interesting twist is: now what does that tell us about people who say they will cut the waste of government incompetence?
- HPsquared 3mo agoIt becomes a "problem farming" situation. Someone who profits from a problem existing, will work to preserve the problem either consciously or unconsciously, or perhaps even just through a process of evolution. This applies to both public and private spheres. Just as justice systems farm criminals, dating apps farm romantically frustrated people and so on.
- al_borland 3mo agoProblems like those don’t just get “solved” one time. They require ongoing maintenance to keep levels low/manageable. If that isn’t understood by those in government, I would say that is a level of incompetence. This can play out in a couple ways. People can avoid solving the problem, because they think at that point the work is done forever. This is incorrect. People can also be scared (for good reason) that whoever is in charge will mistakenly assume no maintenance is needed after “solving” a problem and let everyone go. This would be incompetence in leadership. I see both of these things play out on a smaller scale at work all the time. We keep solving the same problems, because ever time it’s “solved” people move on to new projects the upkeep falls behind, and the problem grows again.
- DrScientist 2mo agoIndeed. You could go even further and say that the modern Western preference for whack-a-mole politics rather than long term competence is one of the reasons that countries like China is on the rise.
- skipants 3mo agoAm I wrong in thinking this comment is absolutely bonkers? It's basically a conspiracy theory. When I lead teams and thought of how to motivate them to get certain things done, like code quality, I found it best to frame why certain things got done as a mixture of constraints and incentives. ie. What was preventing people from doing a thing and what motivated them to do thing. You're basically arguing that there's no constraints to these problems and that people are incentivized to proliferate them. Do you distrust people that much? Isn't it easier to surmise that there could be a lot of constraints and not a lot of incentives to solve these issues? Or heck... just a shit ton of constraints than incentives? I mean... there are people who are incentivized to keep drug use going: drug dealers and kingpins. And I'm sure there are some with their hand in governments. But there's no way that's the default.
- fwip 3mo agoYeah, it's a little bonkers. I've run into it a few times IRL, and I find that it tends to come from the kind of guy mocked in this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/ That is, somebody who is basically unfamiliar with the subtleties of the problem, thinks of an "obvious solution" for it, and then assumes that anybody who doesn't do it isn't trying to solve it.
- QuiDortDine 3mo agoPossibly the dumbest take I've ever seen on HN. Like politicians are going "without the homeless, I won't have anything to do anymore!". Like the street workers are thinking "shit, what'll I do if this goldmine dries up"? Ridiculous.
- Ferret7446 3mo agoIt's just an incentive problem. If the people in the government would get fired or lose their personal income if they did not deliver results, then they would be effective like you wouldn't believe. As it is, they're spending other people's money on other people's problems with effectively no accountability.
- galaxyLogic 3mo ago3 groups are suspect: Doctors, Police and Firemen. If they did their job well, they would have no job. Politicians too, by having big problems they guarantee they can get people to vote for them by promising to solve those problems. But people are getting smart to that. The Who said it well: We won't get fooled again. Doctors have their Hippocratic oath. Do police and firemen have something similar, or don't they need it?
- childintime 3mo agoWhy stop at them? Lawyers, politicians, psychologist, bookkeepers, the list goes on and on. Why? Because our GDP includes them. Look the numbers are higher. It doesn't matter if your work promotes a parasitic outcome. The system produces it's own problems and then diligently works to solve them... Yeah, right.
- brabel 3mo ago> If we 'solved' crime, homelessness, drug use, poverty, etc.; Crime is really hard to solve, but many cities in the USA and elsewhere have managed to largely do it. Homelessness is something I think is very much an American problem among developed nations. It’s always shocking to see the campgrounds in American cities, some of the richest in the world, coming from Europe. I suspect it’s mostly related to drug abuse and the lack of social assistance for those in need which the Americans are allergic to solving due to the culture of freedom, or autonomy at all costs (which somehow gets interpreted as not having to pay taxes to help those in need).