When is...dear educated technologists...the last time you even slightly considered working for city government? Alas, our best and brightest aren't serving the people. They toil at advertising.
This is something the public can control. Make government positions competitive with corporate ones and you'll get a bunch more talented (and patriotic) "educated technologists" working in government. Likewise with teachers.
Not just competitive, but better paying. Take Taiwan and other East Asian countries—government service is desirable, high paying, and a really prestigious job. And lo and behold, their government services really do work very well.
This is why I'm fiscally conservative while also believing public servants should make market rates. Which also means pushing back against obsessing about total employment counts at x rate but rather focusing on the specific utility of individual agencies, policies, and projects.
Sadly public salaries and jobs in general are low hanging fruit targeted by short-sighted political campaigns while all other gov spending tends to be a black hole with zero measurable ROI and countless professional public grant/gov money consumers well aware of the lack of measurable ROI and crony/who-you-know-in-gov nature of spending. Or worse the phony claims of adopting 'private industry' to side step accountability via public-private arrangements which feature none of the benefits of markets (true competition, state anointed monopolies, market dominance disconnected from value provided to consumers, etc).
Most of which could be blanketly solved by hiring good people (the people who dispense and use the money) and not creating quid-pro-quo incentive systems by underpaying public servants.
Sadly, any senator/congressperson putting a bill like this would not hold their position after the very next election cycle. The lobbyists are too strong. However, I would vote for someone that ran on this platform.
This doesn't always work out. Case in point with Greece. Decades of cushy government jobs and tons of people flocking to those positions to be lazy and do nothing, with policies that amount to tenure so they'll never be fired.
I do agree that government jobs should be more competitive in the job market, just with caution.
I imagine there are a whole
bunch of “gov is inefficient” types who like having non-competitive rates so reinforce the narrative. This makes it easier for the public to support dismantling gov programs, etc.
I tried to do so but never made it past their interviewing - which was glacially slow and involved a 1/10th chance all things equal even when there were multiple identical positions open. From what I could gather in many cases the agencies were often at the mercy of poor organization from above.
Hey, same here. I live in a very low cost state, so the pay was fantastic (especially compared to what I get now), the job security was there, the benefits were amazing... Unlike some folks, I'm perfectly willing to work for the government (mostly for the benefits).
They really wanted me in that job, too. But then the state froze hiring and several months later the posting expired. It hasn't been re-listed since then and it's been nearly a year now.
I'm curious what job I would apply for to improve this situation.
I've made an effort to work for local governments. I've even made an effort to volunteer for local governments, and do this sort of technology work directly for them instead of as a FOIA-enabled personal project.
I've never seen a flicker of interest, or found a job posting that would leave any room for this sort of work. I've only ever seen indifferent hostility to the volunteering offers, and while I understand why that could be worse - bureaucratically - than paying staff, it's still not exactly systems making an effort to serve the people.
The US Digital Service was a brilliant and wonderful project to get technologists doing exactly this. It hired a lineup of top-notch staff and got a lot of great stuff done. And, yes, it paid government salaries and appealed to civic duty to recruit. It sounds like a wonderful place to work. Outside of that one national-level pet project from Obama? I mean, I got involved with a local technology/privacy group. They're currently considering suing the town for not following its own surveillance-restricting ordinances about street-facing cameras, because the town found implementing them too hard - and isn't hiring anyone who can, and wouldn't accept volunteer labor to do the work.
It's not just that advertising pays better, it's that advertising doesn't actively avoid working with people for this sort of task.
No, because they purposely fine you when you are a few kilometers about an arbitrary limit (let's say 55 km/h instead of 50 km/h) which is not speeding in any way and there is no data supporting any kind of increase of accidents at such levels of speeds.
On top of they they use all the dirty tricks in the books (mobile radars, radars right at the exit of a tunnel) which act like traps for anyone that is not constantly vigilant at their current speed. Let's face it, nobody is spending 100% of their attention on the speedometer while driving.
And when "normal" people around you get fined while you know for a fact they are not driving like crazy folks on the road, something is really, really wrong.
Sure that's a bad example, but he does kind of have a point.
In the blog post he estimated it's saved $60,000 in fines. That's a drop in the bucket at the scale we're talking about (a quick Google says the proposed 2018 budget for Chicago was $10.1 billion), but still a decrease. Not only would it cost the government money to employ someone to go through this data and find hotspots like this, someone to go out and evaluate the signs, presumably several someones during the approval process to change signage, and finally people to make and install that signage, but the end result would be to purely cost them more money by decreasing revenue from fines.
I don't personally think governments are inherently evil (though some do seem to try harder than others), but even from a purely capitalistic viewpoint that's a hard sell for anyone who cares about their budget. At the very very best I could see it becoming a token effort that's mostly marketing ("look, we're using big data to make your life better!").
It's a fair point that it's very difficult to avoid conflict of interest when doing your job better might mean your department has less money to use.
My suggestion: Remove the incentive by divorcing all fine (and similar things like seized goods) revenue from the government budget. Perhaps stipulate that it gets distributed to charities, or is split equally among taxpayers as a tax offset.
The government is the only entity that does not have to (and never should) follow capitalistic rules. The government is for the people, and capitalism, by definition, is not.
No, the government should be "THE people", not "for" or "by". We introduce many issues with representation of larger groups by very few individuals, that is precisely why democracy/government works best at a local scale rather than State or Nation-wide. It's not very hard to grasp why.
You will note that I did not say “earn a profit”. There is still a cost center here, and even governments (at least those at the local and usually state level) have to abide by a budget. Spending money one year that results in less money the next doesn’t fit into that model in most budgets.
I’m sorry for the confusion, I thought that was blatantly self-obvious.
It‘s not even about earning a profit. It should not be the goal of the government to collect (part of) its budget via fines, i.e. citizens breaking rules. Instead, it should always be the goal to have no need to fine.
And we can actually estimate how much the government actually saves if it does not need to fine (that much). Let‘s first look at the costs of the status quo:
- it costs X to check rules are followed (here: no cars park where they must not); this is mostly personnel costs\* but note that we may be talking about „manhours spent that could have been spent doing more sensitive/productive things“
- it costs Y to maintain the infrastructure to process and follow up on the fines (here: the $190 million IBM contract\* )
- it costs Z to collect the fines, process the payments (personnel costs), follow up on those that do not pay, court fees (process & personnel costs), jail costs (cause it‘s ’murica), and whatnot.
Now, if there are no\* fines to prosecute, here‘s a few ways the state can gain money:
- Citizens spend less time and money with unproductive work (here: paying fines), leaving more time for work (or relaxation which again increases productivity) and money to spend (raising economic output + sales tax).
- Officers, beuracrats, and judges can spend their time dealing with more important work.
- E.g. in the case of parking fines, businesses affected by cars parking in their way can instead do their business unhampered, i.e. be productive and this increases, again, economic output.
All of that increases tax returns (or reduces tax money spent for dealing with the fines).
\* Obviously, there‘s no way fines will drop to zero, because humans. But minimizing fines allows to minimize capital and infrastructure costs and increases economical output, thus there‘s a net gain that can offset the costs to reach that goal, if not immediately then within a few years.
Governments absolutely should be looking to make profits, it's just that they don't necessarily have to make them in dollars.
So say you were able to objectively measure the value a program produced (costs are usually already known). If a program costs 10 units for every unit of value it produces, maybe it isn't a good program. If it produces modestly more value than it costs, it's making society a profit.
> Governments absolutely should be looking to make profits
I understand what you're saying, but I think you're stretching the common understanding of "profits" and risking confusion because of it.
Absolutely, government should try to measure the impact of its actions, but expressing that in terms like profit can lead to undesirable consequences like the expectation that a successful self-promoter pretending to be a successful businessman can also be a successful president.
I would actually counter with the assumption that every endeavor should not be financially unprofitable. Like it or not, governments work on a budget. Aside from the federal one they’re also usually required to stick to it.
I was in no way implying the government was trying to make money off increased fines (quite the opposite with the last paragraph), simply that it would very likely end up costing them more than it saved the taxpayers to support such an initiative at a larger scale, and that would have a very nebulous gain.
Can you imagine being the Mayor of your department at work and proposing to your board of directors a multi-million dollar budget for next year that includes a huge carve out for evaluating all the petty fines and late fees you collected from customers because it’ll make them happier?
Goodwill is one thing, but who is ever going to approve that?
You've stumbled upon another capitalist dogma: that if you can't measure it (like, for instance in this case, the happiness of your road users), it has no value. I would argue that his numbers show that his efforts have prevented 600 fits of rage among the citizenry. That's gotta be worth something, right?
Can you imagine [spending money] because it’ll make [people] happier?
Again, government is not a business and should not be run as one. So yes, I can.
No. Maybe if you maximized your time 100% toward earning money. Maybe (but almost certainly not). But if you did that, you'd be in the back of a Maybach or a 7 Series, working, and someone else would be driving. And they could do the speed limit.
Because the people who should be working hard to change government simply aren’t. In the US, city governments ARE “the people”. If you have a city council, start going to meetings. It’s a great way to see how your local government actually works (or doesn’t work), and you might even meet some interesting people in the process. Otherwise, run for local office or try to get on a board or a commission. It’s not sexy, but this stuff, especially things like transportation and zoning, have the most impact at the municipal level, and it’s remarkably easy to get involved.
My city has a thing called a target area. The idea being to spiff a region up, and rotate them to keep the city vital and livable overall.
They send a facillitator, who gathers interested people. Some projects get identified and everyone does their part. The people in need of city resources or people get an introduction and help navigating things.
Everyone else plays a role. Labor, outside (not city budget) fundraising, planning, feed the people, organizing, whatever.
My group used it's few years well. Traffic flow changes, a small park made from abandoned property, refurbish the school play areas and equipment.
It took a bit of time and some sweat, but not too much.
And I can drive through today and see that net good.
Some of the people I worked with did exactly what you just said, and for basic, make it better, reasons.
Because it goes completely against the interests of local governments. You will be amazed to see how large a portion of your city and police department's budgets are from fines.
That's true of some fines in some places, but to be clear, it's not really true of parking fines in Chicago. The graph in the article indicates there's about $1 million dollars in tickets issued each year. That's around $ .30 per resident and less than one percent of the billions in revenue the city takes in each year (https://www.cityofchicago.org/content/dam/city/depts/obm/sup..., see page 23 in particular) I did notice that fines in general amount to $300 million a year, so other fines might well be inflated.
I believe the y-axis on that graph (assuming you refer to the last graph) is the number of parking tickets, not the dollar amount of fines. So more like $50 to $100 million in parking fines per year.
You're absolutely right. The graph could have been clearer, but I should have double-checked my assumptions and that $.30 per resident figure should have been a red flag. I apologize for that basic error.
Looking into this more, it sounds like, while there probably is a perverse incentive because more tickets equals a significant increase in revenue, the biggest problem is the punitive fines for minor non-traffic offenses that tend to compound for poorer residents: https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2018/02/how-does-c.... Note the headline is a little misleading, they seem to mean "non-moving violations".
You’re not wrong, not in the slightest. The benefit is the system allows concerned citizens to step in to make improvements at very little cost.
Democracy requires constant vigilance in many forms. This is one such form.
Matt, we salute you and your efforts! I hope this encourages others to get involved in improving their local government (and perhaps even creates reusable tooling for use at scale [“citizen oversight as code”]).
They could be. And having a beer or two with govt people will reveal these kinds of desires and ideas.
I have had those chats in the past. Got involved in a legislative effort and was given a sort of insiders view, tour.
What gets in the way, the number one thing, is money. Not lack of it so much as priorities and ripple effects.
Fixing the signs is a net public good. The ripple effect might be revenue targets going down, and the priority being that revenue being made from inane parking tickets all make for a bit of a mess.
The number two is people forgetting or ignoring who works for who and why. There are lots of little fiefdoms, all closely guarded. Barriers where there really should be collaboration.
And on that note, collaboration can be expensive. Sure, we can step out of your way on this, but about that school levy...
Because it's nigh impossible to get someone to understand something (much less actively do large amounts of work to fix it) when their income (or department budget) depends on them not understanding it.
The government is a collection of people with the own motivations. It is more likely that people working in the government would use their time to further their own personal beliefs than to fix a problem that does not affect them
