>Tech companies have a defined purpose, and they’re a vehicle for achieving that purpose. Google wants to organize the world’s information, and turning a gigantic profit while doing so is one of their operating constraints...
>But the U.S. government doesn’t have a defined purpose, just a long list of functions, and those functions aren’t regularly interrogated. It’s uncomfortable for modern Americans to ask what the ultimate goal of the government is.
Aside from the fact that this an "apples to oranges" comparison, I dont think the author is aware of the Preamble to the Constitution.
>"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
That the Constitution defines it as such is simply a matter of documentation of a purpose. You have to actually internalize a purpose and values system for it to be useful and “real” in the sense that it drives what you do as an organization. This seems a more proper distinction that feels accurate to me in making the author’s point but that is itself a hard point to falsify.
The other way to think about how to steel man the idea would be to think about how the government measures its success which is most likely by whether or not those in power keep staying in power? The bureaucrats who are subordinate to the government have much less (any?) stake in that measure so again it would be tough to think about purpose there.
>The other way to think about how to steel man the idea would be to think about how the government measures its success which is most likely by whether or not those in power keep staying in power?
The same is true for Google or any corporation, their success is primarily measured by their stock price, not by how well they achieve their ideals
Except that Google’s stock price is both in the hands of its employees and directly benefits its employees. They have a clear stake in it. Besides, this idea is separate from the idea around purpose in terms of values/ideals. This is purpose in terms of defining success. The goal is to steel man the idea, in contrast to what I’d probably call a straw man of purpose as represented in a line in the Constitution.
How so? What is the measure by which an employee of the government could point to in which improving it directly increases their livelihood? If I’m a Google employee and the way in which Google’s success is defined is Google’s stock price then I have a clear measure AND since my compensation is tied directly to it, if I improve that measure then I get more compensation. Hard for me to see any similar type of link in government.
I've read a ton of these kinds of libertarian pieces and I'm convinced after reading most that the authors are just not very well read.
I know it's daunting and difficult, but you have to read, digest, and have a dialogue with what has been written about government for hundreds (thousands really, but baby steps first...) of years, but I guess it's more fun to just write out fan fiction for Google running the world.
It's dangerous too. We've watched Silicon Valley completely strip industries like music, movies and gaming of a wide swath of its profitability. It's the birthplace of modern XaaS offerings.
It just doesn't sit right with me that someone would suggest a conglomerate like Google is more progressive than government. It reads like a love letter to the villain in every dystopic novel.
The music and movie industry were a mafia of media executives who squeezed artists and fought technological progress even as distribution methods were changing the fundamentals of the business. I don't feel particularly bad for their loss.
I'm curious if you have a source for the claims on movies or gaming. I couldn't find anything conclusive.
It is true that revenue in the music industry dropped substantially over time, although I am not sure about profitability. The music industry has moved to digital, so wouldn't that imply that the margins are better therefore potentially more profitable? Or is streaming more expensive than pressing physical cds?
On a personal note, I think Spotify is freaking incompetent as hell, as I constantly have issues with basic shit like their Shuffle feature. I'm close to unsubscribing with them.
Not only. Neoliberals have been busy striping government of its most basic functions, and lobbyists for said tech firms are the the ones that push for lowering taxes and deregulating. So yes, they won. Bigly. But not based on merit. Silicon Valley is not producing anything valuable.
And those jobs are running on $15 subscription MRR models. I'm not unappreciative, trust me. I just also don't appreciate that they have systematically obstructed competing services. And they've done all this using the same tactics we were tearing Microsoft apart for in the 90s over shipping Windows with Internet Explorer built into the OS.
Do a search through Google for a digital whiteboard, and once you scroll past several ads, one of the first links is for Google's Jamboard. How is this creating "trillions in value, and millions of jobs via direct and indirect employment"? It's funneling more utility into the Google service model, which is "free", because your data is not.
Big Tech is as much responsible for the dwindling payouts on music and movie royalties to artists, as it is responsible for the GDPR. It's as much responsible for us not owning the media we pay for, as it is now also responsible for the half-finished, nickel-and-dime microtransactions and advertisements that litter even paid services.
Facebook: I’ve got nothing. I use FB. I guess it’s been away to keep in contact with people and it employs thousands of people who all contribute to the economy. But I really don’t have a case for it being a value creating platform.
Apple: it ushered in the app economy but more importantly, it made the idea popular of having a computer in every pocket. Even services that would never have been popular without mobile made billions of dollars. Between its employees, suppliers, and third parties it’s also been a value creator.
Amazon (Disclaimer: I work for AWS): hundreds of thousands employees and the minimum wage is $15/hour for fulfillment center workers, not to mention its enabled third party sellers to reach millions, again a value creator.
Google: while Apple first popularized the modern smart phone era. Let’s be honest, Apple’s products are out of reach for most people in the world. Android democratized the idea of a computer in every pocket. Mobile payments have done wonders for 3rd world countries.
How is this creating "trillions in value, and millions of jobs via direct and indirect employment"? It's funneling more utility into the Google service model, which is "free", because your data is not.
If Google’s ads weren’t effective, would people be buying them? Are they more effective than the third world.
We don’t have to guess whether tech has created trillions in value. It’s reflected in their market cap. The five big tech companies are worth over five trillion together. Those stocks are in pension funds, 401Ks etc. The money people make directly and indirectly are the single handedly propping up the stock markets and those pensions.
Big Tech is as much responsible for the dwindling payouts on music and movie royalties to artists
Blame the people buying subscriptions not the tech industry. Before the rise of Spotify, by 2010. Apple and all of the rest of the industry was selling DRM free music you own. Apple still does through iTunes. People decided that they wanted subscription music.
You can still pay for music you own - DRM free through Apple.
Commercial movies have never been free of copy protection. Even during the analog days of VHS and Macrovision.
Even console games have always required third party manufacturers to license copy protection from the console makers. Well at least since the mid 80s.
The Constitution is meaningless without a culture that backs it up. For example, in spite of the 2nd Amendment you have more legal right to an abortion in this country than you do a firearm. That's not an argument or a judgement about the state of things, just an observation.
Right now there's a big debate about whether our government is structurally functioning for the purpose of literally murdering black people. To put it lightly, that's a very different function than to "promote the general welfare."
> The Constitution is meaningless without a culture that backs it up.
This is true for corporate charters as well, but it doesn't mean that either a corporation or a government "don't have purpose" without a culture that drives towards that purpose. You could also say that in spite of any corporate charter, the only true purpose of any public corporation is to provide value for shareholders, and the culture of many companies is often not aligned with that.
> you have more legal right to an abortion in this country than you do a firearm
Is there anywhere in the US that an adult needs a permit to get an abortion? Can your right to an abortion be taken away upon conviction of a non-violent crime? Does the government reserve some categories of abortion for itself and deny them to you?
Not every true statement is politically expedient.
The US government has been doing a pretty good job of not killing black people. It's mainly state and local governments that are getting criticism for it.
Also, the constitution that founded the federal government is not the same document that founds local and state governments. There are some things in it that the federal government has forced local governments to do, but in general, state and local governments have purposes outlined in entirely different documents. My state government's founding document didn't task my government with "promoting the general welfare".
Please. The Supreme Court has 5 justices that are looking for a reason to outlaw abortion. The president and the Senate have put judges on the bench with lifetime appointments that are pro-2nd amendment and anti-choice. Even most democrats won’t go near any meaningful gun control.
> For example, in spite of the 2nd Amendment you have more legal right to an abortion in this country than you do a firearm.
Still staying away from value judgements, I don't think this claim is obviously true (both are regulated), so it's maybe not the greatest example of your point.
For the sake of argument, I'm willing to accept the idea that gun rights and abortion rights are equally restricted/regulated. That would confirm my premise that the Constitution is powerless. Because only one of those things is explicitly guaranteed, but that explicit guarantee was not successful in warding off restrictions.
Court rulings on these issues are aligned with the culture at the time, not the letter or intent of the law.
The balance of firearm control to abortion control can still be viewed in accordance to whatever “promotes the general welfare” means. If I may extend compiler terminology to the legal code, there is a distinction here between the declarative preamble which defines the purpose of the USA and the procedural amendments which defines functions like freely available firearms for militias, banning private slavery and defining presidential lines of succession.
This is very much going off topic of the original point, as I figured it would, but it is well established jurisprudence in the US that the 2nd amendment doesn't mean that gun ownership is unrestricted. Just in the same way that the 1st amendment doesn't grant people unlimited freedom to slander or libel.
Because the US Gov has had a 60 year ideological assault on its validity and functioning (Goldwater was the first major presenting symptom), leading to practical results of dysfunction.
This is best illustrated by Reagan's phrase:
> “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem"
That is to say, if you wage an idea war on the idea of government, you'll have a government which doesn't work.
This is an idea often trotted out in these discussions but then you should ask how regions of the country such as California which for decades now have had essentially none of that assault in meaningful amounts and yet still is a largely dysfunctional entity. Or look at San Francisco.
Surprisingly, there are multiple causes to dysfunction. There's a certain tendency to prioritize the individual aggressively in the US - there are liberal failure modes as well as conservative failure modes.
My perspective is that California got eaten by NIMBYs and an ideology of trying to freeze in time to about 1970ish. Also, it seems that CAs adopted a lot of the neoliberal project, with commensurate successes and failures.
I also think that general expectations differ wildly from city/county to state to federal. Anyway. There are a hundred thousand books on "Why Does America Have Issues". This is what I've culled from my reading and observations of life.
edit: The GOP is most full frontal on it. The Democrats tend to approach things via "private contractor". Because, ideologically - in both of those cases - the private sector works better.
> My perspective is that California got eaten by NIMBYs and an ideology of trying to freeze in time to about 1970ish.
Yes, CA’s major problems are pretty directly derived from this, IMO. The public infrastructure issues are driven by extensions of the attempted time freezing as well as a uniparty lack of accountability.
I’m not sure how to interpret the “neoliberal project”. Do you have specifics there?
Sorry about the delay, while I like long ping times for thoughtful responses, this was beyond my P99 boundary.
The failure of the GOP to provide a POTUS candidate in 2016 that wasn't a flaming nutjob will lead to all sorts of uniparty failures across the nation. Having an orderly rotation of power helps clean out & potentially prosectute the bits of corruption that burrow in over time. I would actually speculate that a lot of the failure modes at play in government is downstream of uniparty government (there's a book "The Big Sort" which talks about how the USA has been doing assortive sorting and effectively moving from purple zones to blue/red zones): if we do a fishbone diagram of root causes, I expect it to be a major contributor. Of course there are loops of causation etc here.
The time-freezing is probably going to ease up as the Hippies in the Haight generation dies off: the rose tinted lenses are, I reckon, driving a lot of the situation in SF & CA, specifically.
Let me try to characterize what I mean by neoliberalism.
(1) Neoliberalism has a slangy meaning and a technical meaning. There's... some... overlap between those two. Let me dump Britannica's definition as, presumably, it's been vetted by economicists or other experts.
(2) Neoliberalism, ideology and policy model that emphasizes the value of free market competition. Although there is considerable debate as to the defining features of neoliberal thought and practice, it is most commonly associated with laissez-faire economics. In particular, neoliberalism is often characterized in terms of its belief in sustained economic growth as the means to achieve human progress, its confidence in free markets as the most-efficient allocation of resources, its emphasis on minimal state intervention in economic and social affairs, and its commitment to the freedom of trade and capital.
(3) One example of the neoliberal project is the mythic version of Silicon Valley: a free market with unconstrained innovation and minimal regulation (reality markedly differs, naturally, but the vision, the ideal is of more importance, since perception drives politics).
(4) That noted radical leftist publication[], the Financial Times, has a fascinating letter by the editorial board on April 3..
> Radical reforms — reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades — will need to be put on the table.
And the article goes on to describe the key reversals described, which would be the in practice* neoliberal policies. The FT has a pretty stringent content lock, so I doubt I can get that specific article shared publicly.
(5) One consequence of minimum regulation / high individuality is a concentration of power as the game is iterated over a number of years. So out of the gate, things are likely to be good for most, but down the road, inequality rises as the early winners force the playing field to let them keep winning. I speculate that the dominance of FAANG and their ability to buy out competitors is a good case study here.
Another economic theory is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordoliberalism, which is, roughly, similar to neoliberalism, but undergirded by the notion of welfare and regulation to manage social needs.
[] it's a business newspaper, comparable to The Economist and the WSJ, focused primarily on serving the investment community. It's extremely not leftist. The FT article surprised me a great deal. IMO it would be like the WSJ editorial board publicly suggesting that AOC is good, actually, and patriotic Americans should join the Democratic Socialists.
----
Circling back to my initial starting point: the undergirding of the second half of the 20th C political systems are an unhealthy regard for individuality in contrast to the community. That's one reason why, for instance, Utah can jump in strange ways to the rest of the conservative states. The LDS church places a premium on community. In the liberal areas, it often means that they have no mental tools to address homelessness appropriately, because proper addressing demands a wide-scale cooperation, and on the West Coast, balkanization & fragmentation of many towns/cities, counties, and states: proper solutions involve a wide agreement on housing, mental health, policing, job reentry, early career job support. Each of those are expensive, and the burdens fall unequally. Proper management is going to involve not* handing off contracts to someone's favorite non-profit or private company. Having an ideology that prioritizes "we can't do a government thing because Freedom Demands Private Markets" is going to cripple the motion forward on these topics. I live in Seattle, it's pretty painful seeing the deadlock in progress with homelessness. Millions sunk into programs paying off non-profits, no apparent improvement, no change beyond the local minima(Any meaningful change at this point would be good to see - it would characterize the local ideation as non-stagnant, actually capable of learning from failure....).
My point is the community needs to own - via our government that we choose - things that of broad interest, as well as legally reserve to the community the right to find that new topics are of broad public interest, and to dismiss the ideology that demands private companies and outsourcing.
If being the 5th largest economy in the world and contributing more tax dollars to the Federal government than it receives is largely dysfunctional, that sounds pretty awesome. California has tons of problems but I can't think of many less dysfunctional states.
For example, Texas has the second largest economy amongst the states, and would be the world's 10th largest economy, but IMO it's more dysfunctional than California because it's on the dole for $50bil annually from the rest of the country. They subsidize their low taxes by sponging off the other states, including California and New York. Also, Ted Cruz.
Texas is also hardly the worst offender. That would be Virginia at $10,301 per capita, compared to $304 for Texas. There is only one state (Utah) between Texas and California.
But if the people of California or New York (which actually is a big net payer) would like to vote away a lot of these federal programs and replace them at the state level at the option of the individual states, I imagine the people of Texas might concur.
“If being the largest economy in the world and extracting from its tax base the largest governmental budget in the world is dysfunctional, that sounds pretty awesome.” If this is the logic that defines a functional government, then the Federal government seems to be a massive success as well. I’m not sure why this would be the metric for a functional government, however.
Government dysfunction in SF/CA can be seen in the following:
> If being the 5th largest economy in the world and contributing more tax dollars to the Federal government than it receives is largely dysfunctional, that sounds pretty awesome. California has tons of problems but I can't think of many less dysfunctional states.
1. Simply being the 5th largest economy in the world doesn't say enough about how successful it is in its goals. Incidentally, California suffers from the worst amount of income inequality in the Union, and the highest rate of poverty. The income required to afford the median home in California is on average higher than just about anywhere else in the Union, even when you take into account the higher local salaries.
2. Because the largest Federal government expenditures are in 1) Social Security, 2) Medicare, and 3) the military (in that order), the states in the Union that will receive the most Federal tax dollars are the ones that have the most elderly people and the most military bases per capita. That California contributes more than it receives isn't a particular strong indicator of its health as a State. You could argue that states with more Medicaid recipients are more dysfunctional, but because Medicaid only constitutes ~15% of the Federal budget, it's less consequential to the variance than {SS, Medicare, Defense}.
> For example, Texas has the second largest economy amongst the states, and would be the world's 10th largest economy, but IMO it's more dysfunctional than California because it's on the dole for $50bil annually from the rest of the country. They subsidize their low taxes by sponging off the other states, including California and New York.
Okay, but no one here is arguing that Texas is a paragon of functional state governance. The argument is that California is a dysfunctional government. Both Texas and California can be dysfunctional for different reasons! On the flip side, Washington has no state income tax, is less dependent on the Federal government than California, AND enjoys a lower poverty rate. Ditto New Hampshire, Utah, Minnesota, Vermont, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Virginia.
A ranking of states by "quality of life"[1] ranks California at 19th.
Yes, agreed on all points. The parent’s post is exactly what you expect to see happen when the point gets read strictly as being made through the lens of the false dichotomy of left/right, Democrat/Republican, etc. They construct an arbitrary measure which defends their in-group and then without prompting bring in an example of their out-group being worse.
The broad point I was trying to make is exactly that government dysfunction is NOT tied to a singular political party’s attacks on the institution of government. It’s something deeper and more fundamental, represented in both parties.
Do you honestly believe that it’s a good faith argument that housing affordability is not under control of local governments?
Almost all of the “other states send their homeless to SF” stories are primarily tall-tales. I’ve yet to see anything document it as a major source of SF’s ills with anything even approaching hard data and not anecdotes.
That some of the infrastructure projects receive Federal funding does not excuse the local control of those projects being massively over budget and/or behind deadlines. Not to mention the cost differential as compared to infrastructure costs in other developed countries.
Are state budgets and pension obligations now primarily the realm of Federal control as well?
What if I add in education outcomes? https://www.economist.com/special-report/2019/06/20/public-e... Is this also outside of state control? What is inside state control that could be referenced to understand the successes/failures of state governments?
> Do you honestly believe that it’s a good faith argument that housing affordability is not under control of local governments?
In California, yes local government hands are tied by prop 13, as is, in a sense, the state government.
> What if I add in education outcomes? https://www.economist.com/special-report/2019/06/20/public-e.... Is this also outside of state control? What is inside state control that could be referenced to understand the successes/failures of state governments?
Exactly, it's hard to have a functioning local government when hamstrung by a federal one that is actively dysfunctional.
> In California, yes local government hands are tied by prop 13, as is, in a sense, the state government.
Prop 13 stops state and local governments from working towards affordable housing how? Even if you can establish a link between the two that I can’t see, I’m curious how you think that a state law is not in some way a part of state governance? Isn’t this definitionally a part of the failure of CA state government?
> Exactly, it's hard to have a functioning local government when hamstrung by a federal one that is actively dysfunctional.
So why can MA have great public education? Does the Federal government treat CA differently than MA?
> Prop 13 stops state and local governments from working towards affordable housing how?
It doesn't, but it does make them less effective in the long run. CA has a much higher than average rate of just...empty housing because of how Prop 13 incentives things. It can also make property acquisition more difficult.
Functionally you have two ways to make more affordable housing: build more housing, or build specifically affordable housing. In CA, Prop 13 makes the first option less attractive to developers, since it costs very little to hold on to "existing" land or housing. An empty mansion costs relatively little because property taxes are so low. But selling, renovating, or redeveloping it will suddenly bump the property taxes.
So you're left with option 2: create specifically affordable housing. This puts further limits on redeveloping, and state housing projects are both morally questionable and really expensive, so you either need to raise taxes a lot (but you can't raise property taxes, which would be the "right" tax to increase based on the tax-as-a-behavior-incentive idea) to pay for it.
> So why can MA have great public education? Does the Federal government treat CA differently than MA?
I'm a bit confused here. I'm not particularly familiar with CA's educational system, but it appears to be solidly "above average" on the whole, with college education being one of the best. Not everyone can be rank 1.
> Goldwater was the first major presenting symptom
Can you please elaborate? I'm briefly aware on who Goldwater was and his influence on Reagan's election, but this phrase puzzles me. (I'm not from the US, maybe I lack some context)
A lot of libertarianism was invented in the late 40s as a response to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. "How do we avoid totalitarian states" - their answer was to simply remove the power of government to regulate/oppress/etc. It is important, IMO, to recognize the root problem that Libertarianism was aiming at solving and not laugh it out of the room.
Anyway, this dovetailed into the prior opposition to FDR's New Deal, and misc refugees from the USSR such as Ayn Rand. Remember, this was during the Second Red Scare and McCarthyism. The Conservative wing of both parties choked on the Free Speech and Civil Rights movements. Goldwater happened to agree and win the 1964 nomination of the Republican Party. He was roundly defeated, in part because Americans broadly disagreed with him. A lot of his campaign alumni and supporters went on to be influential in the 70s and beyond. A lot of today's old partisan hands in the GOP trace were either in that campaign or mentored by people from it. Much of the GOP history since Goldwater has been how the "Rockefeller Republicans" were turned out by the Tea Party or its ideological forebears.
Note that all of this essentially wound up reorienting the Republican, Democrat, and regional politics in the US to the configuration you see today. For sourcing - Kevin Kruse is a historian at Princeton - he's tracked this reconfiguration and has the documentation of how this played out. I'd start with his documentation if you want to dig into it.
I'm not a historian but my understanding is that Goldwater was the first major Republican candidate to go big on the whole "the government can't solve problems, the government is the problem" political meme, when he ran for president in 1964. Meaning, the notion that governments doing stuff, any stuff, is inherently bad. It dovetails somewhat with libertarian thought but only in the most handwavey, BS ways possible, because somehow the result is always less fiscal responsibility and even more wasted money.
Republicans have leaned on this talking point hard ever since then, in part to justify tax cuts for their donor class (but not spending cuts, ironically). They also use it to justify inaction, because if the government takes action, then that's the government "doing something", which is bad, get it? This is a much easier argument for them to make than actually coming up with alternate solutions to things. It's nihilism disguised as trying to save people money, but the reality of the last 56 years has been lower taxes for their donor class coupled with vastly increased government spending, which is the opposite of anything resembling fiscal conservatism.
I don't know the story about republicans and their donors, but, coming from the USSR, I have to admit that I find Reagan's "A time for choosing" speech extremely convincing.
And it’s not even big tech. It’s like 4 companies with great pr and monopoly-like market power, being judged mostly on the basis of Naive public perception and brand awareness.
Oracle and SAP and Infosys are big tech companies by any reasonable definition of big. You’ll be hard pressed to find technologists who would decscribe those companies as competent. And there are some amazing teams within those orgs that do stuff which is genuinely more impressive than hacking out protobufs from 1030am to 415pm with an hour long lunch, which is just to say that even within tech there’s a lot of PR/brand sentiment shaping opinions of people who should know better.
Uber is big tech, but still loses money hand over fist.
And even if we limit ourselves to the few companies with the most competent PR — the faangs — are they really so competent? Or are they just extracting value from near-monopoly market power?
But it isn't, because the competition still works. Incompetent private organizations fail and go away and lose only the money of their investors and not unwilling third parties.
> Incompetent private organizations fail and go away
I'll keep that in mind next time I read a thread about tech consulting shops or ISPs...
> and lose only the money of their investors and not unwilling third parties.
Well, there's also the employees, anyone invested in massively managed funds that include the private organization, etc. Who are all willing participants. But really only in the same sense that you, too, could get a graduate degree in a STEM field and immediately emigrate to another country.
> I'll keep that in mind next time I read a thread about tech consulting shops or ISPs...
ISPs are as they are as a result of government regulations. I don't know what the problems with "tech consulting shops" are supposed to be, but they sound like something people should stop doing business with until they go away.
> But really only in the same sense that you, too, could get a graduate degree in a STEM field and immediately emigrate to another country.
Except not in that sense at all, because emigrating to another country -- which may not be any better -- is a dramatic high-cost change to your entire life, whereas not investing in or working for a particular company is the default state that happens if you do nothing.
> but they sound like something people should stop doing business with until they go away.... because emigrating to another country -- which may not be any better -- is a dramatic high-cost change to your entire life, whereas not investing in or working for a particular company is the default state that happens if you do nothing.
This sequence of thoughts expressed so closely together powerfully demonstrates how fundamentalism results in motivated reasoning that retards certain conclusions in one context and hyper-charges rationalization in the opposing context.
If you don't like market capture in the USA, you have the simple choice of simply stop doing business with the USA. Just like businesses always have the simple choice of simply stop doing business with abusive counterparties.
How is it that you think an individual leaving behind their friends and family and everything they've ever known and picking up and moving to an entirely different hypothetically better country which may or may not even accept them as a citizen is on the same level as choosing Canonical over Oracle?
>>>> Incompetent private organizations fail and go away
The point is that a private organizations often continue to exist despite incompetence because other (competent and highly profitable) organizations are not able to efficiently executing on the choice to end a business relationship.
The point is this: ending a business relationship can take as long, or even longer, than an individual executing on the choice to emigrate to a new region.
Ask any bank that has been continuously trying to move off of big iron since the 90s whether switching off of mainframes is, to use your words, a "dramatic high-cost change to your entire organization".
> ...leaving behind their friends and family and everything they've ever known...
Yes, and so is breaking a long-term business relationship...
My point is NOT that citizens should be expected to move between countries. My point is that your expectation about the efficiency with which firms can execute on their preferences is just as flawed as the expectation that labor can efficiently execute on its preferences (by e.g. moving between countries).
So, no, incompetent private organizations do not fail and go away. That baseless religious belief of market fundamentalists has no basis in reality.
> The point is this: ending a business relationship can take as long, or even longer, than an individual executing on the choice to emigrate to a new region.
There is a massive difference between something which is theoretically possible and something which is actually common.
And I would challenge you to even identify such a situation that didn't come about as a result of regulatory constraints or a government-granted monopoly.
> Ask any bank that has been continuously trying to move off of big iron since the 90s whether switching off of mainframes is, to use your words, a "dramatic high-cost change to your entire organization".
And yet even that isn't as difficult as emigrating, it just requires them to spend 2% of their revenues to migrate when the status quo is only costing them 1% of their revenues.
Meanwhile you've managed to choose an example which is a result of a government-granted monopoly and regulatory constraints. Under a sane copyright system a copyright that predates the 90s would have expired by now and enabled competition. And the reason they're still using mainframes unlike every other industry that has moved away from them is that they're subject to complex regulatory requirements that at the same time makes them change-averse and isolates their own industry from competition which allows them to absorb the inefficiency themselves.
Let the likes of Robinhood do half the things they want to do and see how many banks still using mainframes are left in ten years.
Nor are companies like IBM by any means the most egregious offenders. What they offer is expensive (some might say overpriced), but for the banks it's worth it over the alternative which is nonetheless actually available -- as proven by the fact that some banks don't use mainframes. Which is why even IBM has to keep coming up with better mainframes with faster processors and lower energy consumption and newer features instead of resting on their laurels.
> So, no, incompetent private organizations do not fail and go away. That baseless religious belief of market fundamentalists has no basis in reality.
The long list of companies that have actually failed due to incompetence and gone away would beg to differ.
There are several big tech companies who are not good at anything other than making and managing money. Inertia machines like IBM, Oracle, and probably some other ones you can think of...
I have no actual idea about the state of the AI industry, but I was under the impression IBM was doing pretty well there, as well as in quantum computing R&D. But that's based largely on the obvious products they provide in those fields.
I don't think I'd miss Oracle if they ceased to exist tomorrow, though. Aside from VirtualBox.
Congratulations, you’ve discovered the idea of competition and why it makes the free market better! Failures fail and go away, and what you’re left with are the successful organizations that know how to do things!
Unlike in government, where failure is often rewarded with an increased budget and a chance to try again next year with more money.
I think you've been down-voted because your statements read like shallow (neo-liberal) propaganda rather than insightful observations.
A sufficiently well functioning government is necessary for a market to be well functioning and vice versa.
> Failures fail and go away, and what you’re left with are the successful organizations that know how to do things!
This isn't generally true and is dependent on what you define as a failure.
The private sector is exploiting, polluting and destroying natural resources all over the world even with regulations. Some of it are honest mistakes and ignorance, but much of it are "trade-offs".
The general and consistent quality of products and services in prosperous societies is enforced by regulations. Your food is (very) healthy, your houses are solid.
Similarly workers are being exploited all over the world. The only reason there are places where people are (close to) guaranteed to live decent, free lives is based on decades of activism, unions and governmental action.
There are also things where the government is just strictly more efficient than markets. Mostly projects and services which are very long-term oriented such as education, police, military, infrastructure, public transport, foundational research etc. They all have two things in common: They are based on collaboration rather than competition and they achieve long-term goals.
You see there is a balance here between the short-term gains of the competitive markets and the long-term stability of the collaborative governments and non-profits.
As with many things this can be simply observed from nature and evolution. Both competition and collaboration are important strategies of survival.
> A sufficiently well functioning government is necessary for a market to be well functioning and vice versa.
But "well functioning" in this context only means something like "efficiently prices externalities" and doesn't require the government to e.g. build housing projects, as opposed to just not passing zoning regulations that make the market price of housing unaffordable to begin with.
> The only reason there are places where people are (close to) guaranteed to live decent, free lives is based on decades of activism, unions and governmental action.
This is frequently claimed, but there is a long history of laws being passed requiring something right after the major players in that industry already agreed it was a good idea (and then started lobbying for it instead of against it because it would increase compliance costs for smaller competitors).
> Mostly projects and services which are very long-term oriented such as education, police, military, infrastructure, public transport, foundational research etc.
I'm inclined to think that these things would happen more often in the private sector if people weren't constantly kept on a treadmill of ever-increasing costs for housing, healthcare and education which require people to work long hours just to survive with no surplus.
If more of people's time was their own then they would experiment on their own without need for external funding, and have a surplus of wealth to pool and invest into those types of endeavors. It's what some billionaires do already, but can you imagine how far we would get if the resources of the middle class were allowed to go to that instead of just keeping ahead of artificial scarcity?
I really like your last thought and I agree with it. Essentially this would increase diversity and just sheer mass of thought, innovation and likely happiness. Mostly on small but sometimes on bigger scales.
The getting there part is what many disagree on though. I certainly don't know how and I suspect most people don't really know either.
Almost all of the scarcity comes from purposeful regulation. We limit the supply of housing, we limit the supply of doctors, we give tax incentives for employers to provide low deductible health insurance that makes patients price insensitive and causes costs to balloon etc. The recipients of the money (e.g. landlords/existing homeowners, the AMA, drug companies) lobby hard to keep the status quo, because the money is going to them. So it's not easy to fix, in the sense that it's a political problem to get the change into law, not in the sense that we don't know what to change to fix it.
Those companies do have to convince people to keep paying them money, otherwise they would cease to exist. The government is unconstrained by even that requirement.
The US government has no incentive to succeed in the way that you or I understand it: i.e. by producing something of value, operating an organization efficiently, or achieving a useful result. I mean, the government as a whole might in some abstract sense, but the individuals that comprise the government certainly do not, and the individuals are the underlying reality here, not words in the Constitution or whatever.
“Success” in the government is defined solely by justifying your continued budget to a bunch of other people who are largely as unaccountable for results as you are. “Great success” is achieving an expansion of your budget. And the best way to achieve an expansion of your budget is to figure out how to blame your past failures on having too small a budget.
As a mentor of mine once said: “The private sector is about cost minimization. The government is about cost justification.”
So the consequence is that “failure” in the government doesn’t really mean you failed to achieve your result. It means you failed to properly document and justify your costs. If you have all the proper documentation and followed all the proper procedures and yet you still failed to achieve a result, that’s okay! It’s obviously not your fault, and since you’re so good at following procedures the government will happily entrust you with more money to fail with next year.
Actually judging whether you’re any good at producing results is way too complicated and subjective for any government funding office to evaluate. And subject to liability and discrimination concerns as well. But it’s easy and unambiguous to verify whether you followed the proper procedures!
I think this weekend is as good as any for people to take time and read the US Founding documents, because it seems like a lot of the philosophy the US was founded seems to be unclear to a lot of people. This article and a lot of comments seem to misunderstand the role and purpose of the US form of Federal Republic government. Its worth reading the lot chronologically IMO.
I object to the notion that Facebook users are Mark Zuckerberg's "constituents." They have no representation in corporate governance, no ownership of the data Facebook appropriates from them, and no rights on the platform aside from the paltry few that are guaranteed (and rarely enforced) by whatever governments they live under. Users of Facebook (and most other large corporate networks) are vassals or subjects, not constituents.
They have the right to not do business with Facebook. This is massively more power than a citizen has over it's government. If I had the right to not pay my taxes if I was unsatisfied with government services (not actually saying this is reasonable) then the government would be a lot more responsive to my needs.
There are few analogies that are unassailably perfect, but I stand by mine. Ideally, if I leave the USA and renounce my citizenship, I am no longer subject to its jurisdiction. Likewise, when I left Facebook, I should no longer have been subject to its jurisdiction. But you and I both know that neither of these statements are true. The USA has a vast surveillance network that spans the globe. Its government has a disproportionate impact on the internal politics of other nation-states. Likewise, Facebook's dominance over social networking and the internet itself means that it influences everyone, not just its own users.
Facebook is run as a dictatorship from the board room down to the users. Sure, we can leave - and people have been leaving nation-state dictatorships since antiquity. But, like a powerful nation-state, just because you can stop being a Facebook user doesn't mean you escape Facebook's reach, and just because I _can_ (and did) leave Facebook doesn't mean that Facebook will somehow be responsive to the needs of its users.
That’s not material to whether Facebook has a lord/vassal relationship with the users. Benevolent monarchs and/or docile subjects do not change the facts about an organization‘s structure.
My point is that it is material to whether Facebook has a lord/vassal relationship with the users.
If the majority of users was like you, Facebook's behavior would have to change. The unfortunate reality is that the majority of users is NOT like you.
Ask yourself: if Facebook, acting in its capacity as a supposed "monarch", began charging $50 for its product, do you think users would silently just accept that and pay up? They are vassals after all, right?
I think history has shown that monarchies are hardly aloof of their people for long. There are certainly limits to how far the king can go, but that doesn’t change the fact that he is a king.
But this isn't unique to monarchies, this can be true of even the most democratic societies. With enough apathy among the people, the leaders can get away with anything. The fundamental problem appears to be that the users (constituents) either don't share the same values as you do, or they do and are simply apathetic.
That Facebook appears to be impervious to its users can just as easily be explained by general apathy of your average user, rather than a lord/vassal relationship.
No, this is about the facts of the organizational structure, not about shared values or passive consent. Users are not Facebook's constituents, they are its subjects. They have two choices: submit to Facebook's board of directors, or leave. The authority of the board room over the users is nominally absolute. There's no representative body that is accountable to the users, there's no ownership or stake in their own data or in the assets of Facebook itself.
What you're not understanding is that the authority over the users is NOT absolute, because "or leave" is the mechanism by which users can influence the strategic direction of a company. That's the accountability. That's why we call this "voting with your wallet". To the extent that Facebook is the way that it is, it's because it's meeting the needs of a lot of users on the planet.
There's obviously no "ownership stake", because that doesn't make any sense: I don't have ownership stake in my toothpaste provider. But I can stop using their product if their product sucks.
People could leave King Louis XIV’s France. That didn’t make the Bourbon dynasty any less of an absolutist entity.
And yes, it’s impractical to think of users as having an inherent ownership stake in contemporary society, but it’s one mechanism by which users could gain true agency in social networks. Another would be a representative body elected by users that has the power to appoint board members. It’s these sorts of formal, institutional structures that distinguish autocracy from democracy.
Refusing to use a single product is not nearly the same as leaving a country. Drawing a similarity between the two is like comparing apples to nation states.
The reason private markets generally work pretty well at delivering goods & services is because people have variety, and exercising choice is generally feasible. Anti-trust law is generally rooted in rectifying situations where this ceases to be true.
> Another would be a representative body elected by users that has the power to appoint board members.
What you're describing here is a government agency — and if your argument is that a government agency can run a software product better than a private corporation...it's a bold claim, even if it's a coherent argument.
I never said it was “the same” to the individual, it’s just a similar governance model. The domain of a kingdom and the domain of a corporate social network are distinct, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore that they’re both autocratic in their respective domains.
Facebook keeps making its core product worse, probably because of short termism in their corporate goals. Pretty funny to see the article hold them up as an example of good governance.
When it comes to state IT projects, I've got a theory that part of the reason government seems cumbersome is often the state has to serve everyone.
Someone's doesn't speak English? Doesn't have a computer? Doesn't have a phone? Doesn't have an e-mail address? Doesn't have a credit card? Doesn't have a bank account? Doesn't have an address? Is completely deaf? If that means they can't use amazon.com so be it.
But if it means they can't register to vote, or can't get a driving license? That's a different matter.
So state projects IT have to support things like mailing Spanish-language braille-printed letters, when Amazon can just send an e-mail.
It's a grave error to confuse effectiveness with desirability. Hence the irony of the phrase: "At least he made the trains run on time."
Big tech's competence is only an asset as long as their financial interests are aligned with free, democratic society. As the epicenter economic activity increasingly shifts to China, this will eventually stop being true. What then?
Companies can segment their market and offer different products to different people based for different prices based on all kinds of aspects. They can even reject customers and block them from doing business at all.
Governments are supposed to serve 100% of their citizens. They can't pick and choose. In some contexts, they can't even prioritize.
That alone radically changes how they have to approach everything.
memetic immune system and hormesis are cool metaphors to use for institutions, but probably just metaphors -- not sure how to use these as specific prescriptions for change
'lack of a driving purpose' rings false -- amazon was a book company, that doesn't connect to buying whole foods or owning all of e-commerce. companies and governments both adapt and take on new projects when they're working.
US government leadership dulled hanlon's razor this spring by achieving high marks in both malice and incompetence
create cultural change by replacing stale process and leaders constantly
There's no one simple reason, but a big contributor is compensation. Government pay for high skill professions like computer programmer, mechanical, electrical, and aerospace engineers, etc is far below what good people in those fields can make working in private industry. Often people in those fields work on government contracts, where the US Govt will pay 3x or more than their already high total compensation for the privilege of their time.
I should know, I'm one of those professionals. I started out working for the government, then eventually became a contractor (doing the exact same job in the exact same building that I had done for the government! for 30% more money!)
It was hard to not take that offer of the additional money, especially when the government would go out of its way to infantilize its employees.
As a sibling comment pointed out there are different forms of accountability. Voting and protesting are forms we're familiar with in the US and Europe, but there are other ways too.
In Singapore, you can more easily submit written feedback to the government, I've heard that things like potholes actually get fixed faster this route than in the US where you might have to string some activism to put pressure on the city.
From my point of view, government is far less accountable than a typical private corporation. Voting is occasional and highly manipulatable. The same people shuffle around different posts. It can compel revenue through pointing guns at people and locking them up in cages.
It's not like a business that has to meet payroll to survive by attracting customers. That's accountability.
In addition to this, voting means that you're participating in the same polity as people that might have completely different interests from you. Sometimes the majority is wrong (as has often been the case in history). In a democracy, there is no recourse for the minority. With the private sector, the minority in theory has the option to break away.
Don't get me wrong, democracy is great, but it is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
Comparing governments to companies is like comparing sports teams to referees. Referees have scored zero points since the inception of the game. They must suck!!!
I wouldnt go that far. How often do you hear product managers talk about 'scope creep', 'minimum viable product', 'launch first and fix bugs later'. The government's job is literally bug fixing and maintaining legacy code base. Big tech are not good a this, you can't rewrite social institutions via roadmap.
".. for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country. Our contribution to the Nation is quite considerable." - Charles Wilson, CEO of GM, testifying before Congress in 1953.
Private enterprise is the result of relentless evolution by natural selection. Government is not. The fact that one is able to run circles around the other should not be a surprise.
This is pretty laughable in the context of modern startups, where a small group of VCs choose the winners in advance and no one else really has a chance to compete until many years later when the "winners" run out of VC money. But even disregarding this recent development it's not like government is immune to the influences of a shifting society - otherwise we'd all still be living in monarchies.
As a general commentary on your style, characterizing something someone says as "laughable" does not promote dialogue. We have enough ugliness out there, let's make an attempt to be civilized.
That said, the world of business if far too complex for a single rule or statement to fully encompass every aspect of it. What I can say, with absolute certainty, is that the world you are referring to, the world of VC's, and the companies they represent, are but a rounding error in the business megalopolis.
Yes, sure, they have created a few massive high flying companies of great influence. And yet, if you take stock of the entirety of businesses, from the corner grocery store, through construction contractors, garbage processors, laboratories, hospitals, architects, engineering firms, transportation, manufacturing, medicine, chemical plants, shipping, publishing, household products, consumer electronics and, yes, web and software development, you will find it dwarfs the VC sphere. And yes, that ecosystem very much responds to natural selection. Brutally so.
Government, by comparison, evolves at a glacial pace.
Big Tech just happened to be at the right place at the right time right now. There’s no competence that got them there other than the fact that the entire country is in quarantine and than happens to work out well for companies that can sell to people at home.
Clorox is also doing very well right, but the author doesn’t use that as an example because it’s too clear and obvious that luck is at play there.
Big tech did not foresee this, it just happens to help their businesses, in part because it skews the playing field their way.
It's clear why this should be the case. Government is a low accountability sector (voting is an exceedingly feeble control mechanism compared to market feedback) so it will accumulate bureaucratic dead wood over time. The same thing happens in big companies but the market provides an eventual mechanism to replace them.
>But the U.S. government doesn’t have a defined purpose, just a long list of functions, and those functions aren’t regularly interrogated. It’s uncomfortable for modern Americans to ask what the ultimate goal of the government is.
Aside from the fact that this an "apples to oranges" comparison, I dont think the author is aware of the Preamble to the Constitution.
>"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."