This is untrue of large private enterprises, which are quite capable of throwing good money after bad, engaging in wishful thinking, and all the rest of it. As

This is untrue of large private enterprises, which are quite capable of throwing good money after bad, engaging in wishful thinking, and all the rest of it. As another commenter pointed out, the difference with the public sector may rather be that private failures can be more easily hidden. I did one stint at a BigCo, during which they blew over $100M on a "platform of the future" project on which all their disparate software products were going to be developed going forward. It was obviously never going to work, yet they kept funding it and kept pushing it on all their software teams. Even though this was a massive failure, it was never announced as such or even explicitly canceled. It just crawled off to die alone somewhere. Official rhetoric was that the project had succeeded, and the executive who had championed it was promoted to run the entire software division of the company. Edit: so I think the salient difference here is not private vs. public, but large vs. small.