Interesting. Worked as a contractor for the Social Security Administration under Obama and I noted a few things.
First off, "sclerotic" doesn't break. Much govie system behavior can be understood in terms of water delivery: suitably clean tap water is available in a Six Sigma level of quality *all the time everywhere*. (When it's not, as in Flint, it makes national news.) Similarly, govie systems typically have a small handful of clean-water-delivery equivalents. At SSA, it was making sure everyone in the US got their check on time. (By the way, this task is at least 3x as difficult as you think it might be. Two words: addresses and languages.) A secondary objective was Whatever the President Said. This varied from administration to administration, of course, but generally not *too* much, and the President knew he could only Say a very few things. (When I was there: speed up disability status determination. It happened, and it was a sophisticated technical endeavor not normally associated with "inefficient government.")
I was a solvent, really, as a contractor. I had a higher level of skill and education than my full-time govie colleagues, but I quickly realized they were far better at maintaining and piloting the system, even with their imperfect local views. Who to listen to, who to ignore, who to obey IMMEDIATELY, who you *actually* needed to talk to in order to do something, etc. My job was to unstick things--to use a military metaphor, I was Special Forces or a mercenary, doing jobs too sensitive or messy for regular Army, but those guys don't win wars and they certainly don't hold territory. If you put them in charge, they tend to break stuff by, say, getting rid of all doors in a country so they no longer have to waste energy kicking them down. That might be OK for a building (a single project), but it doesn't work at scale.
Most people who want to "make government more efficient" are entirely missing the point. The best way to make something more efficient is to fire difficult customers. Those are most citizens, when it comes to government. And nothing to do with temperament--difficult in the sense that there are millions of edge cases that have to be supported.
this is an important point which I discussed a bit in "Lying for Money" - the government is unique as a target for fraud, because it can't easily refuse to do business with people just because it doesn't like them.
And usually it gets around this, in the US anyway, by not liking *anybody*--part of the point of red tape is that it catches a lot of bugs before they get anywhere near the cash. Sure, once you're in you're In--but getting in is the problem. As a startup consultant, I've consulted with a few firms interested in government support. The government even has people whose job it is to steer said firms to the right funding programs and agencies! I've met some of those folks and I get a certain vibe from some of them. They're not *in* any kind of alphabet agency, oh no. But I have a feeling that they make a Call once in a while if something looks hinky.
Which is why governments love to establish or fund non-governmental organizations to do their dirty work for them. The problem is that general contractors take a big cut, and nonprofits have a pesky sense of mission independent of their funding.
I read (and thoroughly enjoyed) Recoding America v recently, and throughout found myself thinking - this is basically an American, tech-focussed, and less Stafford Beer-y (consciously at least) version of Unaccountability Machine.
apocryphally, John Coltrane once said to Miles Davis that he was really having trouble working out how to bring his solos to a conclusion and received the advice "have you tried taking the saxophone out of your mouth?"
Interesting. Worked as a contractor for the Social Security Administration under Obama and I noted a few things.
First off, "sclerotic" doesn't break. Much govie system behavior can be understood in terms of water delivery: suitably clean tap water is available in a Six Sigma level of quality *all the time everywhere*. (When it's not, as in Flint, it makes national news.) Similarly, govie systems typically have a small handful of clean-water-delivery equivalents. At SSA, it was making sure everyone in the US got their check on time. (By the way, this task is at least 3x as difficult as you think it might be. Two words: addresses and languages.) A secondary objective was Whatever the President Said. This varied from administration to administration, of course, but generally not *too* much, and the President knew he could only Say a very few things. (When I was there: speed up disability status determination. It happened, and it was a sophisticated technical endeavor not normally associated with "inefficient government.")
I was a solvent, really, as a contractor. I had a higher level of skill and education than my full-time govie colleagues, but I quickly realized they were far better at maintaining and piloting the system, even with their imperfect local views. Who to listen to, who to ignore, who to obey IMMEDIATELY, who you *actually* needed to talk to in order to do something, etc. My job was to unstick things--to use a military metaphor, I was Special Forces or a mercenary, doing jobs too sensitive or messy for regular Army, but those guys don't win wars and they certainly don't hold territory. If you put them in charge, they tend to break stuff by, say, getting rid of all doors in a country so they no longer have to waste energy kicking them down. That might be OK for a building (a single project), but it doesn't work at scale.
Most people who want to "make government more efficient" are entirely missing the point. The best way to make something more efficient is to fire difficult customers. Those are most citizens, when it comes to government. And nothing to do with temperament--difficult in the sense that there are millions of edge cases that have to be supported.
this is an important point which I discussed a bit in "Lying for Money" - the government is unique as a target for fraud, because it can't easily refuse to do business with people just because it doesn't like them.
And usually it gets around this, in the US anyway, by not liking *anybody*--part of the point of red tape is that it catches a lot of bugs before they get anywhere near the cash. Sure, once you're in you're In--but getting in is the problem. As a startup consultant, I've consulted with a few firms interested in government support. The government even has people whose job it is to steer said firms to the right funding programs and agencies! I've met some of those folks and I get a certain vibe from some of them. They're not *in* any kind of alphabet agency, oh no. But I have a feeling that they make a Call once in a while if something looks hinky.
Which is why governments love to establish or fund non-governmental organizations to do their dirty work for them. The problem is that general contractors take a big cut, and nonprofits have a pesky sense of mission independent of their funding.
I read (and thoroughly enjoyed) Recoding America v recently, and throughout found myself thinking - this is basically an American, tech-focussed, and less Stafford Beer-y (consciously at least) version of Unaccountability Machine.
‘I read it about a year too late because people kept recommending it to me and I thought “hmm computer stuff”’
☝🏽
Breaking the book review logjam by not writing the last few grafs of each review. Genius!
apocryphally, John Coltrane once said to Miles Davis that he was really having trouble working out how to bring his solos to a conclusion and received the advice "have you tried taking the saxophone out of your mouth?"