A story from a physicist friend working in a mid-size high-tech company:
There was a director-level organization of about 50 people trying to solve a technical research-level problem. The physicist found an innovative solution that was too simple and just worked. When he demonstrated it to everyone, he thought everyone would be very happy. On the contrary, his manager started having unexplained issues with him and he was shortly let go.
He has ultimately given up on corporate politics and is currently a physics teacher at a usual local college.
As the physics teacher, he found that the students in his class barely knew basic stuff (vector addition, etc.) from the pre-requisite courses. He tried to teach to cover up. He diligently and fairly checked the answers/solutions from the students in the mid-term exams, and found that practically no one passed.
He was shortly called by the college dean and heard back. The dean's primary concern was that irrespective of whether students actually learn or not, if so many fail the exams, the college would get shut down.
He is now forced to pass the students even while he realizes that by passing them now, he's setting them up for failure in the future if they actually pursue physics.
I surmise that if the Shirky Principle were to stop acting, say 80% of projects/institutions may just go away and should.
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In some cases, it's even worse -- Institutions invent fake problems that they allege to be the solution for and then of course never solve them.
On the one hand, your friend could just be experiencing a streak of bad luck or a series of bad organizations. On the other hand, after many years of life experience, when I hear a (first or second hand) account that takes the form “of course I was the reasonable one in every case and these N organizations were clearly behaving like idiots”, I’ve learned to consider the possibility that the speaker is just unusually difficult. The larger the value of N, the more seriously I consider it. And I’ve learned this the hard way.
As someone who (by the words of a collegue) put a lot of skill points into diplomacy: there are many clever people who just suck at communicating their solution to the right people in the right way.
And then when things don't work out they think it is about the facts (and granted: often it is) and not about the communications.
Institutional politics means it matters what you propose in front of whom in which order and in which way. This is especially true if you are not surrounded by idealists but by oportunists.
The mistake I made when I was younger was thinking that good communication was about being able to clearly and concisely convey the information in your head into another head.
I eventually learned that this was necessary but not sufficient, because "the right way" to communicate varies significantly based on social / political / cultural / emotional / institutional dynamics.
As a young man I simply didn't understand enough of those dynamics to be able to model the when and the why of communication (meta-communication?), even if I was good at the idea transmission part.
No, you can be a good communicator without being a manipulative asshole with an egoistic hidden agenda.
This is more about how communication works. Communicating ideas and intentions is always about shaping the words that leave your mouth in such a way the other side understands the thing you intended them to understand.
Inexperienced communicators will say what makes sense to them and be surprised when someone else in a completely different frame of mind doesn't pull the same meaning from those words. Wanting people to understand you and shaping what you say in such a way they get it is not a bad thing. You would also talk differently to your kid, than say to your co-worker. This requires to a certain degree that you can see things from their perspective. Now surely you could use this for manipulative reasons if you are a soul-less bastard, but that doesn't say anything about about the practise.
They very clearly state and demonstrate it was a scripted satire, and literally say it is a "fictitious interview" in the first sentence. That is as direct of a debunking you can get. Please just take the lesson and verify claims before spreading them.
You were not right, the sibling comment similarly clearly demonstrates that the skit is satire, not an actual conversation (being inspired by a single comment from a real politician does not make something a "conversation [that] actually happened, this video is just a recreation of it"). Again, please stop trying to save face and just learn from your mistake.
The poster pointed it out to correct you, stop it.
The details may have not been exactly correct, but the point still stands and your nerd sniping is not useful here, especially with the haughtiness mixed in.
Yeah sure, but communication is also something with a growing runtime cost, which is why starting into it with a realistic picture of the other person is important. Most people might ask one or two clarifying questions and stop asking after because they don't want to look like they are stupid.
And the way I like to look at it is that we should try to have a good grip on ourselves first, because this is what we can affect ourselves — how you start into a communication will greatly affect the reaction of the others anyways.
Especially in IT it is not rare that the answer to clarifying questions muddies the water even more, because explaining a thing often requires knowledge of other technical concepts.
I work in an educational context nowadays and the people entering my door might be anything between totally clueless and domain experts, and just by looking you won't necessarily notice who is which, so indeed you need to figure this out in a small exchange. Bad communicators would skip that step and talk the same to both beginners and domain experts until they maybe get the clue, but if you're unlucky by that point the communication has already ended.
No it’s not about that. I’ve seen this failure case over and over again. When you communicate, it’s not enough to explain a solution. You have to painstakingly help others internalize the problem. Once you’ve done that, and gained enough critical mass, you find that the solution almost communicates itself. It’s almost like magic when you see an organization shift its thinking like this
> When you communicate, it’s not enough to explain a solution. You have to painstakingly help others internalize the problem.
This is why I think startups or small groups of people are still able to outcompete bigger incumbents. So many people worry “if I share my great idea, someone will steal it and implement it!”
Far more often I’ve found it to be the case that I catch myself wondering if it would be less work to start a competitor to my current company based on my idea rather than continue attempting to translate it, broadcast it, and massage it into some form that convinces a critical mass of coworkers of its value such that it eventually turns into action.
At least by starting my own company, I’ll know pretty quickly whether it was actually a good idea or not.
> This is why I think startups or small groups of people are still able to outcompete bigger incumbents.
For sure. The overhead for communication is much lower. It’s possible to emulate this to some extent at a large company (I worked at AWS previously) by keeping teams small (6-10 people) while keeping team scope large (full lifecycle of an entire product family or vertical). For this to be successful I believe you need to give the team autonomy to decide what product and features to build, and room to fail without repercussions to allow for experimentation and calculated risk taking.
I actually quite like my organization and the people within it. They are all decent people that are mostly try to make the project/thing good and don't fight silly fights.
The reason I wrote what I wrote is because the need to consider more of the communicative context is something inherent to all communication, not just to (bad) workplaces. Most people would profit from recognizing this, even outside work, e.g. in a relationship.
Are there any resources you’d recommend to learn this? Or is this just something you have to learn through trial and error?
For context, I’m someone who has big blind spots in this area and trying to figure out how to overcome them. Typically, I just develop a set of internal “rules” or principles and then run everything through those rules/decision tree. I’ve been able to overcome a LOT of previous blind spots in this way.
The challenge is that few people are willing and/or able to articulate the principles involved. When I find a book or person who can and will explain the principles and patterns, I’m golden. If not, I’m lost at sea.
Any resources you could recommend would be greatly appreciated!
Not the parent, but I recently listened to an audio book by Matt Abrahams on communication that you might find interesting. Several of the anecdotes and evidence explained really hit home for me in regards to being able to communicate ideas in a meeting room.
One of the first stories describes almost the exact situation from the top comment in this thread, where someone with a great idea in an organization needed to communicate the idea to the rest of the team.
I'm usually not a fan of self help type books, but I think stuff like this is good to listen to here and there:
I am afraid I cannot point you at any single resource, I read anything I got my fingers on at some point in my youth and some of those where my parents relationship/communication helper books, including books on NLP, nonviolent communication etc.
I later studied philosophy and had a look on more formal preconditions of communications, e.g. foundational models of communication, for which a good starting point is probably this wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication
I found Niklas Luhmanns system theory extremely helpful as well, as it describes very well why we tend to fall back into different communicative modes once our social frame of reference changes (e.g. relationship vs friends vs family) and how we speak and act is tied to the function we voluntarily or involuntarily assumed within that relationship.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't go around overanalyzing everything, I just think human communication is extremely fascinating and complex and there is so many ways to look at it.
>On the one hand, your friend could just be experiencing a streak of bad luck or a series of bad organizations.
I've seen the same play out in several organizations, including the public sector. You don't even need to be cynical to know this is the case...
>when I hear a (first or second hand) account that takes the form “of course I was the reasonable one in every case and these N organizations were clearly behaving like idiots”, I’ve learned to consider the possibility that the speaker is just unusually difficult.
Probably based on different experiences, with different context.
Because in the context described (e.g. the educational example) this is par for the course - and any number of teachers and professors can attest that if you do your work too well and apply rigid standards, you're out of there in no time, or at least make enemies very fast.
>the speaker is just unusually difficult.
Of course, if the baseline is complacency, profiteering, and lack of standards, anybody who stirs those waters is "unusually difficult.".
The college example doesn’t seem likely though. Exams are set by central authorities and independently adjudicated. It’s not up to teachers whether students pass or not, and parents and education authorities look at exam results to judge colleges, not teacher assessments.
Not sure if you have in mind entrance exams or something that's not set by professors (he mentions mid-terms). Or perhaps you have your local example in mind.
This however is absolutely the case in my country, exam questions are set by the teachers, and are graded by them (well, often also by postgraduates given this task by the teacher so they can slack).
As for the US, I did a quick search now, and found this: "Unlike final exams, which are scheduled by the university’s Registrar, midterm exams are typically scheduled during class time by the professor. Some classes may have two midterm exams, in which case they are spread further throughout the semester. Professors outline these exams in the course syllabus, so they will not come as a surprise. The weight of each midterm exam on the final grade is also usually provided in the course syllabus. Many instructors are open to telling students about the format of the midterm exam, as well as the topics or themes that the exam will cover."
So looks like it's on the instructors, as the grandparent says there too.
I am not sure how colleges work, but even at reputable universities this happens. Professors who have big fail rates will often be reprimanded for this, regardless of whether it's their fault or not.
Yes, sometimes this genuinely indicates a problem with the professor in question, but often times this leads to a long chain of responsibility passing, where if say a Calculus professor was afraid to have big failure rates, the Fluid Mechanics professor will be in a tough spot where they can either push back and have high failure rates or be more lenient, after that the Aerodynamics professor will inherit the same issue and so on.
… what? I’ve been in (US) academia for most of my adult life and I’ve never once heard of an exam that wasn’t written and graded by the person who taught the class (and/or their teaching assistants).
This is pretty common outside of the USA. Many Euro universities and Indian universities do this to standardize results so student's GPA is comparable across the board
Oh, you really think this doesn't happen. Where I (in Australia) the conditions you paint were accurate for most of my life. In fact they remain accurate for Australian's attending Australian educational institutions now for the most part.
But about 20 years ago, Australia decided to adopt the US model for education - educational institutions should compete for student dollars, just like your local coffee shops compete for customers. This boiled down to allowing educational institutions to charge students what they wish for educating them and the money the government used to give the educational institutions would go to instead low cost loans, and upfront payments for enrolling students so the they didn't pay full price. It sounds reasonable on the surface, well worth a try.
But it was insane to try it in Australia because it has already been tried in the USA where the result was the student debt fiasco. The end result in the lower levels was exactly the same as in the USA, with educational institutions preying on student naivety giving away laptops in return for signing up to very expensive long term courses. Very few completed the courses, so they didn't get that long term money, but they didn't incur the expense of educating anyone either. They got the bulk of their income by getting the government money for signing up the students. The cost was advertising and the giveaways like the laptop. To your point, when the government attempted to clamp down by paying only for graduating students, they simply graduated them regardless of their grades. The model has since been abandoned, of course.
This predatory approach didn't work in the Uni's. I think Uni students and their parents are in general too smart to fall in a long term debt trap, and rendering Uni Bachelor certificate meaningless scared too many people - business and governments alike. But they could and did, and do play the same game with overseas students. Professors are under immense pressure to graduate them, so they get the degree they paid for. There I've seen first hand Professors (Professors in Education no less), sit down with an international student and re-write their assignments for them so they could pass them. They despised it. But the government had reduced funding of local students to force them to become "lean and mean", so to survive they had no choice.
You don't hear about this a lot because everyone involved on the education side is literally trying to keep their job. Broadcasting the educational institution they work for hands out worthless grades undermines that, so it's a conspiracy of silence.
Ironically Stack Overflow is one of the best-functioning sites I know of. Community issues, sure, but the pages load really quickly and the UI highlights exactly what it should.
But then there are some big sites which truly suck: massive load time and basic UI issues. Like outdated government/university sites, job application sites, Kroger’s online store (https://joshstrange.com/2024/02/11/krogers-digital-struggle/ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39345309). And I know some of these organizations suffer from inadequate funding, legacy systems, and/or compliance rules which make their sites’ issues legitimate, and I’m certain no developer could recreate them in a weekend. But I’m also convinced many of them have issues because of carelessness and/or inefficiency, and a few may be actively trying to emulate bad UX (probably to deter people from using them).
I think both sides are true. On the one hand, dysfunction exists in all organizations. On the other hand, it takes effort to maintain a high functioning organization and most people don’t want to put in the real hard work. Not only are most people resistant to change, but the gratitude/reward probably won’t be there. It’s far easier to complain and wallow in a stuck situation than to sit through the discomfort of pushing for change. Schools, non-profits, government programs, corporations, they all experience it. While I can’t say I support this way of life, I can definitely understand why it exists.
> gratitude/reward probably won’t be there. It’s far easier to complain and wallow in a stuck situation than to sit through the discomfort of pushing for change.
That's the job of management, that's why they get rewarded for that, and I have a feeling we have a lot of bad management.
“managing” their workspace and surroundings is the jobs of every senior person in a workplace. Having a line manager that cares and is good at their job helps, but if technical folks believe they can just care about the technical part of a job, they’re setting themselves up for failure and frustration. Getting a solution adopted needs much more than technical excellence, it needs communication, an eye for human factors, an idea of costs and tradeoffs.
Complaining about “bad management” is a symptom of a lack of awareness. There’s a lot of bad management, but there’s about as many technical people that just ignore all of those non-technical factors and then constantly complain that their solutions never make it anywhere.
In my eyes there is a good deal of victim blaming in that view. Time and again engineers pushing for changes, ignoring borders of teams or (sub-)orgs and the management hierarchy are met with highly toxic reactions, usually by managers who are seeing some kind of dangerous insubordination.
I’m a tech person by trade and spent more than a decade in operations - the ones that need to deal with the results of it all. And I can tell you that I’ve met a fair share of developers and ops people that would just ignore all constraints, to the point of blaming management that they required developers (and ops folks) to implement legal requirements. as an example: I’ve worked in an environment that managed sensitive (and legally privileged) data and people would rather circumvent security measures that made their work harder than take security up on the explicit offer to figure out better measures that would put less burden on ops. And the same people complained about the crackdown that followed. Yes, the rules made work harder. Yes, they could have been changed to make things less onerous. But security was reasonable, they were willing to invest time and money to work with the ops folks - so going around the because you know better is a stupid move. Yet people did.
I believe you. No doubt that this also happens. But I have also experienced developers pushing for simplifications (think customer service UI, extremely convoluted process for testing corrections, etc.) being put into their place, leaving no doubt that they were seen as "troublemakers".
So I just wanted to point out that aspect. Of course, things like that are showing a significant degree of organizational dysfunction, but that is big corp today.
I don't believe we're in disagrement. Yes, there's bad management which will resist all attempts to improve things. Quit, move on. You won't fix the place.
I'm specifically pushing against the stance of
> That's the job of management, that's why they get rewarded for that, and I have a feeling we have a lot of bad management.
It's just not. And with that stance, you won't get things moving forward because it displays a major disregard for other peoples motivations, priorities and constraints. It displays the assumption that technical solutions can be judged on purely technical merits while real-world tradeoffs are so much more complex. If you want to be able to move things forward, you need to work with the organizational structure, not shunt off work to them.
Besides “N”, another indicator you alluded to is the degree to which the aggrieved person is willing to take any responsibility for the outcome.
Sometimes gifted people can negotiate problems with a nervous college dean or engineering manager, so that their solution gets adopted. These problems exist in the world, and successful engineers will hopefully learn to cope with them.
I matured a different, if not opposite viewpoint: every entity acts in it own self interest, so if the incentives are not aligned, things will tend go south. It may work for a long period of time because of sheer will power and commitment to a greater good from the people involved in the organisation, but over time, everything will follow market incentives.
Public health care seems to be a primary example (and my family has been in the sector for more than 40 years); HC was good for a long period of time then it got progressively worse and nowadays it's just an item in your tax bill. If you literally don't want to die you better know someone on the inside which can push the right buttons or go private.
The money spent on law enforcement had a reverse effect on crime rate, the police actually got less efficient the more money they manage to extract from public funds. They got really good at getting more money from ridiculous speed limits and automated systems though.
Looking in the private tech sector my experience has been similar: the larger the organisation the more it resemble a government and the more inefficiency is tolerated. Within layers and layers of middle management it's easy to waste plenty of investors' money - albeit not indefinitely, like a government would.
I completely agree with your sentiment, but I think whether or not you did vector arithmetic correctly at a first-year undergraduate course level is not subjective.
You can go to N=1000 schools and see the same attitude.
It's an "unspoken understanding" that a big chunk of the students shall graduate even if most know shit, else there will be trouble from parents, the state, management, and so on.
Two is not a large value of N for the phenomenon you're talking about.
Also... is it really that hard to believe that a manager would defend their headcount and a community college would let standards slide in their hardest courses? You also have to consider the plausibility of the stories at hand before writing off the person who's complaining.
I don't think your skepticism is at all warranted.
> ...found an innovative solution that was too simple and just worked.
Yup. For years, the big boss exalted us to find the next generation solution. Mr big boss was original programmer, founder, and majority owner.
We had an Illustrator/CAD style program (ScenicSoft's Preps) for designing print production plans. My office was right next to big boss, to facilitate my efforts. I kept him in the loop on my progress.
It took a while, but I did exactly that. Reduced the majority of the design (image positioning) work to a simple form. Two views; fields on left and live preview on the right. What could be easier?
(These kinds of things almost write themselves once you find the correct mental model, which is typically the really hard part.)
I started demoing my solution to my peers and SMEs. Wow, Bravo, Amazing. Then I demo'd for big boss.
Big boss said nothing. Walked out. Never spoke to or even acknowledged me again. Ghosted.
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I've been noodling on a novel SQL JDBC wrapper thing. For ages now. Input stock SQL and output typesafe wrappers. I use it for all my own work. It's stupid simple and easy.
Every single person whose seen a demo just doesn't "get it". They expect an ORM or a template or a fluent API.
The reactions have really unsettled me. From my prior innovations, I'm used to pushback, debate, rancor, battle lines.
I just don't know what to do with blank befuddlement.
(Yes, I'm slowly working towards a FOSS release, as able.)
> I've been noodling on a novel SQL JDBC wrapper thing. For ages now. Input stock SQL and output typesafe wrappers. I use it for all my own work. It's stupid simple and easy.
Just wanted to say this seems like how I imagine using SQL. It’s well-known that ORMs are a bad abstraction. Although given that it’s well-known, there’s already a lot of alternate solutions, so I’m interested what yours is and why people may be “befuddled”.
Converts normal SQL DML statements into prepared statements and type-safe wrappers. For Java, that means subclassing PreparedStatement and ResultSet.
No templates, maps, annotations, DSL. Just normal SQL.
Apologies, a few weeks ago, I started yak shaving while implementing the build stuff (eg maven plugin). I'll try to focus, ship something beta sooner than later.
Your physicist friend solving the "technical research-level problem" should have evaluated whether it was a real problem, or a problem the company artificially created for themselves. If it was a real problem, and the company ignored his solution, then take the solution to market and become a competitor. If it was an artificial problem only found at that one company, then be very stingy about any effort you put into solving it. Give no free thought to the problem outside of work. Find some real problems to work on instead.
>> Your physicist friend ... should have evaluated whether it was a real problem ...
I do not have the facts around this, however knowing him, I would guess that it was a real problem.
>> ... and the company ignored his solution, then take the solution to market and become a competitor.
As you know, this is not so straightforward in practice:
* Not everyone is a entrepreneur, for whatever reason that is.
* Not everyone has a brand to be able to raise money.
* It may not be wise for investors to fund a project completing with an established/powerful mid-size company that owns a wide range in that space.
* Some projects may require large investments and teams especially when the other side is a big company.
* The big companies deploy all kind of schemes if they see a threat.
* One of the threats is the existing intellectual property rights in that space that the company would already have.
* As the invention was already made when the person was employed at the company, the invention as such likely already belongs to the company (as per typical employment agreements that most do not care to read), and this already forms a threat falling in the above bullet point.
* The corporate politics would start at the newly started company itself becoming an internal threat.
* And so on.
Hopefully you do not see all above as unreal, a fake problem. :-) Not to say there aren't successes -- We hear about those so often.
Yes. I said he should do this and that. That's more forceful and judgemental than I intended. I meant it only as a philosophy to consider, but didn't know how to soften my message while keeping it succinct.
I feel like people who have a choice are lucky. Sometimes the boss wants you to come up with a problem that won't solve it but will "work on a solution" specifically using your ideas, that way they can be even more efficient (work even less)
Yep, as an engineer I always put on my business cap before opening my mouth or setting priorities. The systems' inertia will steamroll an individual without thinking.
I have end-users that I think about every day when building my products, but then I have my customers that are ultimately prioritized.
Have a few engineering professor friends that have said the same thing regarding have to pass a certain % of their students, regardless of if they know the material or not. Generally it seems like colleges are just kicking this lack of learning / understanding down the line to prospective employers to vet.
> Institutions invent fake problems that they allege to be the solution for and then of course never solve them
I think lost companies that fail to find product/market fit go through this phase before they collapse. They try to live on pure willpower and reality-shifting.
> In some cases, it's even worse -- Institutions invent fake problems that they allege to be the solution for and then of course never solve them.
Why is that worse? In scenario A, you have an institution that fights to prevent a problem from being solved. If you ignore them and their politics, you'll have the problem that they protect.
In scenario B, you have an institution that fights to convince you that you have a problem. If you ignore them and their politics, you won't have the problem.
Consider how the reasoning proceeds if we do not take solving a problem as a Boolean. Also let's measure not just by whether the problem exists or not (or to what degree) but also by how much overheads or missed opportunity the society is having with the institutions even just existing.
In the scenario A, knowingly or unknowingly, they would tend to solve the problem partially. The others around would see their contributions so far and foresee their value for the future. If others discover or perceive that the institution is not holding any promise for the future, the institution could struggle to survive.
In the scenario B, the institution existing is entirely a lost opportunity for the society.
Hence the scenario A is typically better (for making progress with given amount of resources).
In scenario A, the problem is already solved, and the institution exists to prevent that solution from being implemented. That's the whole point of this comment thread.
Surely that is not better than lying about an imaginary problem?
>> In scenario A, the problem is already solved, and the institution exists to prevent that solution from being implemented.
In my understanding, that's one way.
Another may be to keep making slow progress to solving so that those around see the contributions and the relevance of the institution but not fully solve.
Another way may be to show their relevance even if the problem is not getting solved by convincing that the situation would be worse without them.
> In some cases, it's even worse -- Institutions invent fake problems that they allege to be the solution for and then of course never solve them.
Rather frequently, and worst of all, I think, when this isn't done by an institution but by the symbiotic organism that arises between a media interest and a political party.
This sounds similar to my own story in the blockchain sector.
I joined a major crypto project which was under-delivering on their promises to investors. In my own time, I built a prototype which would have allowed them to meet their promises and would have appeased regulators whom I presumed were breathing down their necks.
Win-win right? Perfect plan! What a genius move it was to use my skills in the most optimal way possible to wedge myself between this very cash-rich company and a large group of dissatisfied investors... with the backing of regulators of one of the wealthiest, most trusted nations on earth to add even more pressure! Surely, the company would be overjoyed, adopt my project, offer me a salary increase and a bonus package...
WRONG. They tried to cancel the project. I had to quit my job in order to pursue the project outside of the company... Then they spent years gaslighting their own employees and community to keep everyone away from my project to ruin my prospects... The tech worked perfectly; that was several years ago and it's still running. Never encountered any bug or hack which is very unusual for this kind of tech. That company I used to work for essentially ended up abandoning their own project (after spending many years wasting millions of dollars on like 30 engineers). With 15x the engineering capacity, they couldn't deliver in 3 years what I and a friend built in 1 year.
Now I'm demoralized from the entire tech industry and basically gave up on my career (until there is a complete political system change?). If this epic plan which was executed almost perfectly didn't work and there is no legal recourse for me due to institutional corruption, then what chance do I have in the future in such system? I will never get such opportunity again... And even if I do and it's executed perfectly, it's not going to work out in my favor because bad actors can essentially get away with everything.
Small question: I recall there being a named term for organizations that outlive their usefulness and sometimes become parasitic on their original mission. Is this the same as the Shirky Principle?
I was introduced to this term many years ago, so I think it's older than Shirky. Any idea what this might have been?
Addressing the second situation because it’s easier to bike shed about, I feel like your friend went to the dean with a problem rather than a solution.
You said it yourself, the dean’s primary concern was keeping the school running, which in contrast to letting some loser kids pass a physics class seems very reasonable.
It’s also the reason why trusting straight-A students is using a flawed metric, there are A students and then there are students with A grades. We have more complex inspection processes to deal with this.
A better solution (full bike shed mode now), would be to help address the deficiencies in the class at an earlier level. Talk with previous teachers, get them feedback about what it is that kids are missing when they get to his class. Help them address the root cause of the problem.
“Dean, I’ve found X, fed it back to teachers Y and began to see a yoy improvement in the pass rate of class Z.”
I do not have all the facts of the situation at hand. However, I have no reason to believe that my friend would not have done all that. I do know for a fact that he is actively trying to teach the students those pre-requisite concepts himself.
The dean should have talked about digging into the problem as needed (my friend also could have been doing something wrong; knowing him, I know he would have readily accepted his mistakes if that were the case) and help solve, instead of forcing him to pass the students.
I do recognize that this story is not a good example of the Shirky principle. An educational institute is likely genuinely trying to solve the problem, which is to educate the students. That problem continues because fresh students keep coming in, not because the institute itself is preventing the solution. An educational institution cannot be expected to pursue inventing a solution that disrupts the education sector altogether.
A vice president once asked me how I was able to get effective change in large organizations when no amount of exhortation on the part of senior management had been successful. I pointed out to him that the people who resist the change the hardest are the ones who cannot see what their job would be post change. As a result the change is perceived as an existential risk to their own job and they will go to great lengths to sabotage the change because of that. This is the Shirky Principle embodied in individuals, and small groups some times too.
This is very true across all businesses layers. I remember some years ago implementing a CRM system for a small training company. The result was great and they successfully use it even today, however at the time we needed one the junior administrators in some of the discovery sessions so we better understand the processes they do,etc. She was absolutely petrified. Even though the system was meant to make her life much easier,instead she only saw it as her replacement. It took quite a bit of effort to convince her that she's staying. I had similar reactions in my team too when I announced that some processes could be completely automated. Instead of excitement,I received ' what will my job be like then?'.
> I had similar reactions in my team too when I announced that some processes could be completely automated. Instead of excitement,I received ' what will my job be like then?'.
That seems like a perfectly rational response. I think the problem is that we think of process improvements in abstract, aggregate, terms; but on the ground they affect real individual people and they are often forgotten in the excitement of saving the company money.
One of my first tasks at Equipmentshare was automating invoice generation, and we did a lot of that basically pair programming with one of the back office specialists that did that work manually - it was super, super fun, we made really good friends, and now, ten years or something later, she’s a manager overseeing whatever systems replaced what we built.
But it was driven by both sides being made clear from the beginning: nobody is losing any jobs here, the goal is to 10x the number of accounts we could do per back office person; their new jobs will be overseeing the software and dealing with edge cases.
I’m not sure this would’ve been possible to do in such a way if the company wasn’t rapidly growing though.
Makes me wonder: what are things that are easier like this in orgs that aren’t in growth phases?
That is a great example. And yes, if you're in an org where things are "tight" it gets much harder because people will assume the worst outcome is most likely. I've always been a fan of being honest with people, not everyone I've worked for or with shared that point of view. But being consistently honest helps when you're explaining things because it is more likely someone trust you enough to try the change you're proposing. Sometimes that means having the conversation of "Once we're done with this change, the thing you're currently doing won't need to be done. But since we want everyone to have a place after this change, these are the areas that will need help once the change is in place, and we're hoping you would help in one of them ..."
I had an engineer tell me once that the reason they wrote really obtuse code was because "when the layoffs come I'll be the only one who understands it so I won't get laid off!" They were quite pleased with that strategy. I pointed out that they would also never get promoted if their manager couldn't get anyone else to learn their code. This was something they hadn't really considered.
Yes. In many situations that has resulted in me having additional conversations with the folks who are asking for the change to be clear about headcount goals.
If they are trying to reduce staff (usually coded as 'increase operational efficiency') I want them to be up front about that in their messaging because I will be up front with that with the people who will feel that impact. It is often possible to actually increase efficiency without laying anyone off, to make sure that senior staff understands that you need to have a common way of evaluating efficiency (what's the baseline, what's the goal, what are the indicators, Etc.) because getting more done with the same people is often better than laying people off because of the latent effect of loosing institutional memory about things.
Your experience is one thing but the narrative is management absolutely don't care about losing institutional memory, they want somethong to put on their resume before they jump ship to the next gig
I assumed you were talking about Sun, and I read that as "extortion".
It reminds me of the vicious intimidation tactics that Sun executives made their poor sysadmin enforcers perform on their behalf, to ruthlessly coerce other reluctant executives and employees to run Solaris instead of SunOS!
I remember an all-hands meeting where Scott McNealy told everybody, "You're going to have to stop hugging your tree!"
After the meeting I went to my manager and demanded a tree: I never knew about any trees! Why did everybody get a tree but me? I want my tree! I promise I will not hug it.
One of my mentors was Steve K. at Sun who I consulted with about how badly Sun did changes. It really pissed me off that Sun wouldn't put NIS+ into SunOS because they were allegedly worried it would "reduce the incentive to migrate to Solaris."
I would say I was not particularly successful at being a 'change agent' there.
I think my problem is that the people that have little enough imagination that they cannot see what their job might look like after are maybe better replaced?
Fear cuts in before the rational mind can process, and it conditions subsequent actions - including the ability to visualise and appropriately weight potential positive outcomes. You need to apply energy to boot people out of the local minimum they've fallen into so that they can end up in the right place.
It doesn't really matter how well you can imagine your job afterwards, if the powers that be are more likely than not primarily imagining reduced labor costs.
Here is a fun book for you, if you want: "Who Moved my Cheese?"[1] An HR person shared it with me in the dot.com era as things were exploding around us and I found it pretty informative. Basically it seems humans see "bad outcomes" as more likely than "good outcomes". It could be an evolved survival trait or it could just be a tendency to be pessimists, but even WHEN you explain how someone's job will exist/improve/change with the change, they will not actually fully believe you.
For reasons I'm not entirely sure I understand, I tend to be pretty analytic about this sort of thing and until my role started including the need to help people understand change it had not occurred to me that fear would overwhelm some folks rationality. But once you can see it, it is really clear that that is where their head is and the anxiety is consuming them.
In the US where healthcare is tied to employment, the possibility of being replaced can literally be life or death.
Especially with efficiency culture where labor is often the first to be cut in the name of profit.
The fear is perfectly rational because managerial and C levels have made it clear that the person does not matter in the slightest. It would be foolish to outright trust management and is often how people are taken advantage of.
But the point would be to change their job so that they can produce more value? Otherwise nothing is won. It's supposedly hard to convince people that they will have a fit in the new organisation if they have been doing things the same way for ten years; or that there is magically other valuable things to do when their job becomes more efficient.
Surely the bush itself cannot be responsible for its own pruning, that would be a conflict of interest. Anyway, it's always best to start pruning at the top.
If the speaker can convince the listener they should find a job where they don't need to speak as part of the job description. Dishwashers and janitors give pletnly of job stability for people like those.
I was too abstract. I meant that when a message is misunderstood by a large enough chunk of the audience it's the speaker's fault for not knowing their audience and their needs.
To be clear, you demonstrated the bias I was referring to by casting doubt on the intelligence or job-worthiness of the listeners rather than recognizing what I said about effectiveness being improved if you can get your message to more people.
> As a result the change is perceived as an existential risk to their own job and they will go to great lengths to sabotage the change because of that.
It applies in some personal relationships too. Foster dependence, sabotage and discourage growth, maintain control. Yeah, ditch those people.
For organizations, you'd think that explaining the benefits for everyone, and making sure that everyone is on-board and can see themselves thriving under the new conditions (…or isolating and removing those who can't), would be the obvious first step, though.
Having had a career mostly in non-profits and NGOs (on the tech side of them), holy crap does this ring uncomfortably true. There are a few exceptions (de-mining NGOs actually do remove land mines rather than placing new ones, etc.) but the temptation for a whole lot of them to just become permanent fixtures of the problem can be overwhelming. It's how you get situations like where San Francisco spends what amounts to $28K per homeless person in the city per year to "address homelessness", and it get absolutely devoured by a giant NGO-industrial complex.
>$28K per homeless person in the city per year to "address homelessness"
Do you have a source for that number, or similar numbers for other cities? I believe you, just wondering if there's a breakdown or something. It's absolutely bonkers to imagine.
The problem with those silly numbers represented by bad faith actors is they’re akin to counting your bugs at the end of the year, dividing those into your annual budget and claiming you spent $/bug.
Think about what they’re claiming and how it would change if they were more successful - e.g. if by some breakthrough at the same budget level, they cut the number of homeless people in half —- their cost/person would look much worse…
That 57k would provide a huge runway for people to get their footing. Say 5 months of expenses, where they can maintain their address, phone, shower regularly, have a safe place to keep food, etc.
Once you lose your residence, those things snowball. How do you apply for a job without a permanent mailing address? Where do you keep your nice interview clothes? How can you be contacted when your phone was stolen from your locker at the shelter for the second time that month?
It's never that easy. You'd be surprised the number of homeless folks being in that situation because of things like addiction, mental health issues, etc. Just giving them the money is mostly not helpful.
Even if a percentage just burned through it on drugs, it definitely would be that easy for most of the situational homeless. It would also help to prevent others from falling down the addiction/mental health rabbit hole. Being homeless on the street is a highly stressful endeavor, that constant stress exacerbates the mental health issues, motivates drug use, etc.
Just handing over that money to people about to be homeless would do far more than paying administrators to badly run a shelter that homeless avoid because they get all their shit stolen regularly.
If today you give every homeless person in SF 50k, tomorrow we'll have even more homeless because tomorrow a new batch of homeless people will come to collect their 50k.
It's more or less the same in NYC. DHS budget is about $2.2 billion to serve 90K people in shelters, and that doesn't count all of the service spending from agencies not directly responsible for housing and feeding them.
Part of the problem is that if you actually just do the most efficient thing, giving people money to go find housing and food (and I understand some won't be able to manage that and need help) then you end up poking a hole in the idea of how our society works. Why should someone grind away barely surviving when they could become homeless and get UBI instead? Now you need to pay UBI for way more than just 90k people.
Not that I think we shouldn't try to solve the problem, shouldn't work towards UBI, etc. Just saying the shortest path from status quo to the ideal will break the system.
> Part of the problem is that if you actually just do the most efficient thing, giving people money to go find housing and food (and I understand some won't be able to manage that and need help) then you end up poking a hole in the idea of how our society works.
This is a cultural thing that is harder to change - but it does not result in this.
I live in Finland and the only reason someone is actually homeless here is because they refuse to take the aid that's given to them.
I can assure you, that no one who doesn't have severe mental issues WANT to live on social wellfare.
In the US, the homeless commonly refused aid too. Mark Laita, who runs the large yt channel where he talks to the homeless, has spoken at length about this.
Because of policies mandating to stop using drugs, follow a specific religion or give up their possessions and live in bunks without private spaces or storage for personal items.
Mark is intimately aware of those programs and the hurdles they can create, he works directly with many of them. However he has repeatedly had people who come to him begging for help, and then they do nothing to actually realize that help. Even the most basic "Be outside your motel room I bought you at 11am to get in the car I will send that will take you to the counselor I'll pay for" and then they ghost it.
At the end of the day, they would in fact rather live on the street doing dope rather than live in a (paid for) motel room (or even apartment) and work a job.
A lot of Americans think they want to sit around doing nothing all day, but having done that on medical leave, and observed other people, my remark is, people hate ennui.
And most people can't get enough stimulation just from social media or TV, so given infinite leisure time, a lot of them are going to go stir-crazy and want to do _something_.
Look at all the elderly people who are constantly craving _some_ stimulus in their lives.
People think that the natural state of others if given no challenge in their lives is indolence, but having met a number of people looking for social safety nets, most of them just want the ability to get out of the pit they're in...and even the ones who think they want to just not care forever, everyone I've ever met who ended up in situations like that, had to find _something_ to stimulate themselves, sometimes including developing crippling addictions to feel _something_ for a moment.
I don’t know how many people that is. Understanding the quantity would be very useful for shaping policy.
I do think in the US there could be much more multi-generational trauma from our cold heartless system. Honestly some people are owed a lifetime of relaxation.
I think some studies have refuted this and found that most often if you house people they become productive. But those are very small studies and I am skeptical they could scale that well or persevere long-term, it will just bother too many others who are not benefiting from it, and people will find ways to manipulate the system and steal from it. But UBI is inevitable, we will have to figure it out or watch our civilization fail.
> it will just bother too many others who are not benefiting from it
The bit this comment misses is that the people who are not getting anything from it would be the people who pay for it. You can’t create such a strong incentive for failure and not expect failure to increase.
The thing that frustrates me about that is that the people who pay for it will get something from it. They get cleaner, safer streets. This leads to more sustainable street-level businesses (because there's more foot traffic), which leads to more choice and better prices. Overall it's just a higher quality of living.
Now, as a well-off person who can afford to (perhaps sometimes grudgingly) pay more taxes, it's not hard for me to see that. But I can see how it might be difficult for someone who is barely scraping by to adopt my perspective.
The basis of your premise is correct. If people are sufficiently deprived, some non-trivial portion of them will become highly anti-social, often violent, often criminal, and otherwise just disruptive to society. Even if it’s entirely their own fault for ending up that way. But you’re missing a couple of things.
Firstly, if you reward people for failing, you’re incentivising more people to fail. So the problem isn’t that a poorly conceived welfare program wouldn’t manage the anti-social aspect of society properly, it’s that it would create more of it.
Secondly, the people in the middle who pay for everything have a choice about how to manage this problem. They can take the big social safety net approach like an idealised Scandinavian system. Or they can take the heavy handed law and order approach, like say Singapore or Saudi Arabia or even Japan, which are some of the safest places in the world.
So yes, managing depravation at the bottom has a benefit for society. But the threat of “give us money or we’ll just rob you all the time and otherwise ruin society as much as possible” isn’t specifically a good argument for the type of policy you’re advocating.
> Or they can take the heavy handed law and order approach, like say Singapore or Saudi Arabia or even Japan, which are some of the safest places in the world.
I feel like you are conflating two things here that are not related. These places can take the heavy handed law and order approach they have because they are some of the safest places in the world. Unsurprisingly, at least in Japan, it’s nearly impossible to not have some form of housing if you want it. Even the lowest convenience store job will give you enough income to pay for the rent on a one-room apartment.
This just seems like a completely insane take to me. Every country that manages to combine a hard on crime approach with an actually effective police force has incredibly low crime rates.
Singapore is the most expensive city in the world, has no minimum wage, and doesn’t have a universal welfare program. It also routinely hands out prison time and caning (which is rather gruesome if you weren’t familiar with it) as punishments for crimes as minor as graffiti. That combined with an effective police force, a very high police to resident ratio, very low corruption, and there’s no question at all why their country is so clean and safe.
> Every country that manages to combine a hard on crime approach with an actually effective police force has incredibly low crime rates.
You have a source for that? And a theory that shows what is cause and which is effect?
Anyway, crime is fairly low here in Norway too but we definitely do not have Singaporean style punishments. So even if 'hard on crime' works there appear to be other methods.
> You have a source for that? And a theory that shows what is cause and which is effect?
Out of the top 10 lowest crime countries in the world, you have two micro states, Armenia (which has its own unique problems), and 7 rich countries that are either overtly authoritarian and very hard on crime, or are far more authoritarian than most westerners would be comfortable with (especially with regards to their justice system) and also very hard on crime (those being UAE, Qatar, Taiwan, Oman, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore).
What is the cause and effect? If people think they are likely to be caught for committing a crime, and that the punishment will likely be severe, then they are less likely to commit crime. This is simply common sense.
> Anyway, crime is fairly low here in Norway too but we definitely do not have Singaporean style punishments. So even if 'hard on crime' works there appear to be other methods.
I’ll just directly quote my parent comment.
> the people in the middle who pay for everything have a choice about how to manage this problem. They can take the big social safety net approach like an idealised Scandinavian system. Or they can take the heavy handed law and order approach
Though I will add that the social safety net approach seems to only work in rather limited circumstances. I doubt Singapore for instance would be able to implement such an approach, even if they wanted to.
I have a pet theory which says wealth and political stability over long periods of time and cultural homogeneity together lead to lower crime rates and this doesn't indicate anything about how law-abiding these countries citizens are or how big their social safety net is. And those countries still remain higher crime rate than countries who are both hard on crime, have an effective police force and have citizens who believe someone is watching them and will severely punish them even when they are out of the FOV of a CCTV camera (God in Islam. Christianity doesn't count, you won't be punished cause Jesus died for your sins).
Cultural, religious and ethnic homogeny are all obviously very beneficial for social stability, and I think the homogeny of Scandinavia is one of the main reasons that its social approach to managing crime has been so successful up until now. With the other major difference being that involuntary institutionalisation is rather high in those countries, where a lot of the anglo-sphere has instead opted to just release those people to live on the streets. These are however massively controversial ideas to a lot of people.
Singapore also proves that you can establish an incredibly high level of social stability without that homogeny though (and even with massive inequality), as the composition of cultural, religious and ethnic diversity they have has been a source of instability and violent confrontation for nearly every other country in the region.
I haven't seen anybody in this thread suggesting that there are only two variables involved in managing crime rates. This discussion is about two different general approaches to the problem, each of which have their own complex set of variable to manage.
It's your suggestion that the low-crime jurisdictions that take the "hard on crime" approach can do so because they are just naturally low-crime jurisdictions and they have the luxury of being able to implement any policy they want that I consider to be rather insane, and completely in conflict with all of the data on the topic.
> The thing that frustrates me about that is that the people who pay for it will get something from it. They get cleaner, safer streets.
At what price? What alternatives exist to them?
As I have gotten older I have slowly been getting tired of supporting people who not only do not pull their weight, but also whine and demand even more from those of us paying for the services they receive. Not only they are not grateful for receiving social services that their taxes are unable to fund, they also have the stones to blame those of us paying for everything for all their problems.
I think we already allocate enough money to solve the problem. Spending more will likely just reinforce the industrial homelessness complex. We need to change how the money is spent.
But also, clearly what we spend money on isn’t fixing the problems. The homeless know that better than we do. They’re right to complain.
The government cleans the streets regularly, so relocating unclean people into places the city doesn't clean isn't going to make the city any cleaner. You probably haven't had much experience being around people who can't take of themselves and haven't got anyone caring for them. Whatever properties they inhabit will become blighted and swarms of insects like cockroaches will infest everything nearby.
You'd first need to help them live with dignity. For the genuinely homeless the only social environment that's equipped to care for them are mental hospitals. Secondly you'd have to recalibrate your expectations for what productivity means. A person who isn't functional enough to to work with a manager to help a corporation achieve its goals, can still make meaningful contributions to society. Even if it's simply by helping their own self and then telling their story. Like the stories of the people with encephalitis lethargica who came back to life by taking the drug l-dopa. It didn't exactly help them rejoin the workforce, but it brought hope to humanity.
You don’t have to house the people in very desireable locations. If becoming homeless means that you instead get relegated to a massive concrete block, most productive members of society would do their hardest to leave as soon as possible. Those that don’t (for a variety of reasons) are at least off the streets.
That situation would be significantly better then a temporary bunk in a warehouse which is the best case scenario given all the problems with way homeless people are provided with shelter in the US.
In SF at least it is the same problem; charities (housing associations, homeless shelters, etc) tasked with reducing the problem don't effectively solve it as it would mean those organisations would get less funding.
Fixing the problem and "fixing" the way you feel about the problem aren't the same thing.
Never watched Fox News, so I'll take your word for it.
I live in SF and consider myself fairly left-leaning. I see individual homeless people. I see large encampments. I see drug-addicted people on the street screaming at and being aggressive with people, or at best mumbling nonsense to themselves. We spend $57k per homeless person per year, and the problem does not seem to be getting better.
I don't see how we can blame Republicans for SF's failure to house people, when Democrats and progressives dominate city politics. I'm not going to accuse our leadership of intentionally spending more to do less, lest some "undeserving" person gets a free handout, because I don't think that's what's happening.
Maybe instead of sliding down the path to Godwin's Law and making weak rebuttals, you actually explain how Republicans are at fault for SF's homeless problems?
What would I rebut? I never blamed SF on Republicans. The other poster did. I was implying there is a strong 'US Christian' attitude to be more outraged by accidentally helping someone that doesn't need it, that outweighs being 'Christian' and helping those that do need help. I'm not sure Christians are even glossing over this anymore. And this does lead to more bureaucracy to ensure this doesn't happen, and that is done by the legislatures when they create the organizations.
Then the other guy brought up "SF". A single word argument as if that was a 'rebuttal'. His 'rebuttal' was actually three words, "SF", "New York".
What are they implying by their one word argument?
I say something about Christians/Republican's, they just respond "SF". As if "SF" is in itself an entire argument against anything liberal or progressive and hence why we need to return to 'Old Testament' Bible values. "SF" is just another dog whistle for them, that we shouldn't be 'soft' on people.
You are bringing up actual problems. But what Republicans 'hear', is 'be more harsh on people'. Don't solve those problems, put them in jail.
And that despite Godwin's Law, this seemed very much in line with how Republicans argue (debate, market), they repeat the same short slogans over and over again. For so many years people have over used calling each other 'Nazi', that now we can't make any comparisons or someone brings up 'Godwin'. When there are actual real parallels that we should be pointing out.
So. My error is maybe lumping all Republicans in as Evangelical Christians.
I guess the problem is you listed a lot of different problems, and they all combine into something bad. But the article was about each individual program/organization trying to maintain itself. So I'd say this is one of those 'multi-polar' problems where each organization is trying their best, but they solve for a local minimum that is not optimal.
Is it really a single program spending $57K per person? Or is that number from adding up a number of programs? And it is all these different organizations, each solving part of the problem in-efficiently. And never solving the root problem, because that is out of the scope of any one program.
And, even if someone just handed me $57K in cash, could I afford to live in SF?
Isn't SF somewhat landlocked? hard to expand housing? And isn't housing somewhat geared towards the rich that skew right? Is it really progressives trying to keep away housing?
This is a bit all over place.
We could talk details about:
1. real world SF problems,
2. or how Republican Marketing techniques really do follow the Nasi playbook Goodwin or not,
3. or how organizations in general get stuck in some local minimum of bad incentives.
There is no one rebuttal to this thread. It is complex, and Republicans boil it down to a slogan, that is exactly what that nasi quote says to do.
Yes. Guess that is the problem. You try to cover the host of issues brought up, then you look scatter brained. One side just throws a lot of BS out there, it takes energy to try and respond, and the responder looks confused.
It becomes a question of what you count as spending and who you count as homeless so it gets difficult to pin down something everyone will agree on. A couple of posters already linked the Hoover study but obviously not everybody is going to run with Hoover. San Francisco's annual budget includes (these are all approximate) $420m for permanent housing, $60m for immediate shelter, and $120m for homelessness prevention, so we're talking roughly $600m plus a large chunk of the $250m that's budgeted for mental health interventions. So we're talking close to a billion dollars a year out of a $14 billion city budget.
The denominator becomes tricky too, in that SFO has an estimated given-night homeless population of about 8000, about half of whom are rough sleepers (people literally camped out on the street/under bridges). Note that this is a high proportion of rough sleepers compared to most cities where it's about a quarter of the homeless population. That translates into about 32000 people experiencing homelessness at some point in a given year (at least that's the rule of thumb I remember from -- wait for it -- working at a homelessness NGO years ago). So the most naive calculation shakes out to $850m spent on 32000 people, or just north of $27K.
Obviously this has some problems, in that at least some of the homelessness prevention money is hopefully preventing a non-zero number of people from becoming homeless (though in my more cynical moments I wonder). But then again somebody who's only homeless for a month shouldn't need a full year's spending.
TL;DR: it's complicated and there's not a single answer everybody agrees on, but in terms of orders of magnitude it's "tens of thousands of dollars per person per year" in most large US cities, with SF as an outlier on the high end.
(If you really want to get depressed, look at European cities like Amsterdam or Berlin which have homelessness rates approaching double most US cities' and even higher expenditures.)
> (If you really want to get depressed, look at European cities like Amsterdam or Berlin which have homelessness rates approaching double most US cities' and even higher expenditures.)
Could you please provide some links to those figures? The last figures about homelessness in Berlin I know were below 2000 individuals [1], which does not strike me as shockingly high. But things might have changed.
2000 is the population of the city's shelters; the rough sleeping population was about 10K the last time they counted (right before the pandemic). And remember that's a much narrower definition of "homeless" than the US uses.
(look at European cities like Amsterdam or Berlin which have homelessness rates approaching double most US cities' and even higher expenditures)
I live in Berlin and this is highly misleading. Amsterdam and Berlin are major drug centers and people move specifically for the supply and public services. Half of the Berlin homeless are from Eastern Europe and moved here for this reason. Other areas make up most of the rest. The number of homeless Germans in Berlin is very low. This has been widely reported and confirmed by recent census and interviews. The expenditures also include refugee (unplaced or unhoused) spending for people from Ukraine, Syria, and many other areas. Here are the real numbers: https://www-genesis.destatis.de/genesis/online?operation=abr...
I take it you have not been to Amsterdam or Berlin. I live in the latter and, while there certainly are homeless people, it is absolutely nowhere even close to SF per capita.
I've lived in both, I just don't have the blinders towards the homeless population that native Europeans seem to.
Amsterdam has basically the same population as San Francisco (~820K) but 10K homeless people as opposed to 7K.
Berlin is of course much larger (3.6m), but is literally called "the capital of homelessness" in NGO circles because the homeless population is so absurdly large, 10K rough sleepers (which is the only population the city bothers to count) and another 30K homeless by the US definition.
Yeah that's one reason I don't like volunteer stuff.
That's not up to good intended people to fix things, that's the role of government.
You often find righteous people in NGO, those people often have the motivation to change the habits of homeless people and the poor, like it's a crusade to re-educate them to a virtuous path or something, that's religious in a way.
Those people actually reinforce stereotypes, and poor people who need help, become even more sensitive and stigmatized.
Government agencies are usually the worst of all for the Shirky problem. At least nonprofits and for profits have competition. Government agencies are impossible to get rid of once created.
Hi, I'm not sure if this is the right thread to ask this question, but how did you get started with tech career in non-profits? Does the field provide competative compensations?
I went to a bunch of their websites and looked in their "careers" section, and sent my resume to the ones that were hiring devs and sysadmins. It helps to live in DC (they're very thick on the ground there).
Compensation is about half what you get in a "tech" company, but the job security is better, the hours are much better, and the benefits tend to be great.
Guy had a very simple project. He came to me and asked for "help." I found an external vendor who specialized in solving that problem (building a basic product extension) and got it done in two weeks.
When I gave him the solution, he immediately stopped talking to me and wanted nothing to do with me.
It turned out he had gone to a VP, cleared a 50 person team to work on this problem. He had a weekly call with like 10 people (tiger team he called it) to do nothing but this and nine months later they released the solution and had a giant party.
Everyone got credit, high fives all around.
AT that point I realized that work is a huge scam at large corporations. He was optimizaing for a "promotable event" that "spreads the credit far and wide."
Nothing to do with solving the problem efficiently.
I have a similar story while working at a large well-known tech company many years ago. A major project in my group had a critical dependency on an important project owned by a VP in another group, who had several engineers working on it for many months with no delivery date in sight.
Me and another guy replaced that external dependency with our own complete implementation, created over a two-week marathon coding session. It worked great, met all the acceptance criteria, and we shipped it. My VP was quite pleased, as it was a big win for the company.
This precipitated one of the ugliest and most out-in-the-open political battles I have ever witnessed in a large company. When the dust settled, we were allowed to use our own implementation, begrudingingly, but no one else was. I did not stick around long enough to know if the other VP ever actually managed to ship anything. It was quite the farce.
I decided I NEVER wanted to manage anyone at a large or even medium sized tech company.
Politically there is no winning:
- Your peer competitors (other VPs) are after you
- Your direct reports are after you (or you are accountable for them)
- The direct reports of other VPs are after you
- Your CEO is after you
You only have ways to lose. I dont know why anyoner would ever want one of those jobs, they are horrible.
Yes I was going to say something similar because articles like this make it seem like a mysterious problem. In reality the reason this happens is because people want profit and the most profitable thing to do is unfortunately to drag a problem out. This literally happens even with individuals, you can give someone a task and he will try to explain to his teamlead that he has to research this all day even though he already knows the answer and he might do another hour on it. In general we have a problem that solving things quickly and permanently is not profitable for the individual/company.
>In general we have a problem that solving things quickly and permanently is not profitable for the individual/company.
This is also somewhat tied to the issue that if you work in a salaried job and do overtime when there's a lot to do, you don't get to do undertime when there's nothing to do.
The 9-5 job schedule is a holdover from industrialization where time at work is directly proportional to work output.
For knowledge workers to be the most efficient they need some downtime, if you're going to ask them to do way too much in crunch time. But we don't give it to them. Instead if there's nothing to do for a while there will be layoffs.
So instead everybody needs to appear busy and important.
The institutional preservation instinct can cause perverse incentives but it is useful and allows large organizations to be trusted to do things that can't be addressed by startups.
If you have work that requires something to exist in more or less its present form for years or decades at a time it would be a disaster if one of your key vendors pivoted or went bankrupt halfway through.
> the most profitable thing to do is unfortunately to drag a problem out
... which is why our medical intitutions would rather manage chronic conditions than cure or prevent them
... and also why our "defense" institutions would rather manage chronic, unwinnable conflicts rather than see any side achieve victory (Ukraine, Syria, Gaza, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan) ... and also why our weapons / aid keep appearing on both sides of various conflicts
>and also why our "defense" institutions would rather manage chronic, unwinnable conflicts rather than see any side achieve victory (Ukraine, Syria, Gaza, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan) ... and also why our weapons / aid keep appearing on both sides of various conflicts
Huh? Citation needed. I've never heard of American weapons/aid appearing on "both sides" of any of these conflicts. Generally, these kinds of conflicts come down to Western weapons being used against Russian and/or Iranian weapons. Ukraine is quite obviously a proxy war between the West and Russia.
The reason the Ukraine war isn't being fought to win is because of the spectre of nuclear weapons use by Russia. Broadening the conflict carries that real risk. In Gaza, it is being fought to win, by Israel, but the cost is that they're losing the information war, as many countries accuse them of genocide. Afghanistan was a clear win by US forces, but then turned into the US propping up the civilian government they tried to institute with 20 years of military assistance against the domestic insurgency, and that failed when the US finally pulled out and the government collapsed to the Taliban. (Basically, the US wasn't willing to resort to the brutality needed to completely eliminate the enemy and change the local culture, so the whole project was doomed.) Iraq was a success; Saddam's government was destroyed and a new civilian government instituted, though it was at a huge cost and under false pretenses, but that government still stands today and many Iraqis (everyone who was oppressed by Saddam) are happier with the current situation.
I have seen similar forces at play in different organizations.
I used to view them with disdain but at some point I had the idea that social and organizational engineering is also engineering and that wielding the system for one’s benefit is actually a skill.
I am not good at it but I need to call mastery where I see it.
I do have a sense of morality and know where I stand in terms of power dynamics.
These however exist and function, with or without my consent, and are less black and white than the weapons dealing metaphor. For example, a single mother in such an organization, if able to operate with influence, creates opportunities for her family and for her children’s futures. Nothing to do with the morality of arm dealing.
I got invited to an enterprise architecture brainstorming session and they wanted to know my opinion about the multi-cloud, multi-repo, ETL-pipeline-driven reporting solution they had cooked up.. with two separate Kubernetes clusters included.
I suggested that a column store index and a PowerBI report is literally all they needed.
Didn't get invited to the next meeting, all further communications were silently ignored.
I don't think this is really the issue at play here. Rather the engineers wanting to work with Kubernetes, cloud, and other stuff that's hyped, instead of a boring solution that works.
We can change the language but human biology is tethered to meat space and has not evolved beyond the same old obfuscation. We raise functional illiterates who can only relate to the world through learned helplessness and pandering to supply side to solve their last mile problems.
Large scale infra projects, internet, sure, I get that. Making every fruity drink and sandwich for us? Come on what is this, high school? This cultures economy is rooted in infantilizing Disney vibes. Mush some berries and strain them; assembly lines for drinks is a huge resource wasting low effort economic idea. Sell plain seltzer and let people figure it out.
We’re way over industrialized and coddled to insulate brand investors. Pseudoreligious belief in unreal things to arbitrarily compute values from. None of this is divine mandate. Just the result of propaganda.
"On the count of three, I want everybody to take care of their own damn kids!"
It would be nice. I'd love to make my own kombucha, but I have no idea where I'd get a SCOBY. Someone else might not have the space - too much stuff, in this consumer-driven economy, or not enough dwelling, starved of missing-middle as we are - or time (working those 2 jobs to afford rent, or private school, or insurance of one form or another). These are fixable issues, of course. I would really like to fix them. We have to convince people to buy less stuff, let people live near them without paying exorbitant housing costs, reverse the giving-up-on public institutions, abolish private insurance for universal risks, etc., etc.
I would like that. The problem is that so many people will fight tooth and nail for the devil they know. They've even convinced themselves that this is the best of all possible worlds (that propaganda).
For the kombucha, you can grab a bottle of your favorite brand and use a bit of it to start your own culture. You'll also need some tea for flavor, sugar to feed it, and some cups to ferment in IIRC. It's been years since I've done it, but it is pretty straitforward and low effort. Go for it!
Oh he's "solving the problem efficiently", just not the problem he purports to be solving. It's all about misaligned incentives in large orgs: people act out of their own self interest, and if the incentive mechanisms are designed incorrectly (or evolved over time into a misaligned framework), you get situations like these. The higher-levels in big orgs typically do play an outright zero-sum game for positions of power, with the object-level problem/domain being mostly a nuisance.
I think it might depend to some degree on what the corporation does. Engineering companies that produce actually necessary hardware (transformers, generators, transmission lines, large machines, etc.) seem to me to be less susceptible to quite this sort of boondoggle in their core operations.
No less susceptible to bribery and corruption though and their ancillary operations like IT do seem to suffer as you describe.
I am one of those external vendors who did solve a big problem in a now billion-dollar company (though it was a tenth that size when I got involved).
The "proper solution" which uses a "proper" development stack (not MySQL/Delphi) has been in planning for the past 5 years, in fact they have had two other development teams on it and have changed the stack they are going to use twice. The solution to date has been to erode the product carving off the easy parts into other systems while leaving the complicated bits as is.
The new team are quite good however and I am really hoping the guys will get some traction soon as I am hoping to retire next year. And before anyone asks, Yes, they have known my retirement intentions for the last 3 years
>I found an external vendor who specialized in solving that problem (building a basic product extension) and got it done in two weeks.
>It turned out he had gone to a VP, cleared a 50 person team to work on this problem. ... nine months later they released the solution and had a giant party.
Was your solution really good enough? Or as good as the in-house solution?
At one big tech company I previously worked at, they frequently expended a lot of resources coming up with new solutions for things, because their new solutions might perform 5% better than something more off-the-shelf, of course at a much greater cost. They started recognizing this after a while and tried to cut down on it.
It really depends but there are benefits to homegrown solutions. People do chant nih syndrome and all that but without more details about your situation I can day not every outsourcing is worth it.
That shouldn't really be surprising at all. And in some cases I'm not even sure it's a bad thing.
Not sure what level of management/responsibility this guy was at, but if we wasn't executive level, he probably stands to personally benefit more from engaging in these sorts of shenanigans than if he were to do the thing that's best for the company.
And really, in that situation, why should anyone feel ethically bound to be efficient and do what's best for the company? It's not like the company cares about you. If it's "efficient and best for the company" to kick you to the curb, the company will do that. Why should the rank-and-file show loyalty?
The company executives almost certainly have it in their power to set incentives so doing the most efficient, best-for-the-company thing is what's going to give each employee the biggest reward. If they're not doing that, that's their problem.
But on a higher level, where we have a big societal problem that needs to be fixed, I would agree that optimizing for your own profit, at the expense of solving that problem, is selfish and immoral. I just don't think it's worth any hand-wringing at a low-level company-inefficiency level.
> And really, in that situation, why should anyone feel ethically bound to be efficient and do what's best for the company?
They should do what is best for society. Companies with lower parasite load operate more efficiently, allowing higher production of goods and services for lower price, leading to a wealthier society.
> The company executives almost certainly have it in their power to set incentives so doing the most efficient, best-for-the-company thing is what's going to give each employee the biggest reward.
They do not. This is a ridiculously hard unsolved problem. The alignment problem may actually be the hardest problem we have.
> Companies with lower parasite load operate more efficiently, allowing higher production of goods and services for lower price, leading to a wealthier society.
This may be true. But I think it would be wise to consider an alternative:
Companies with lower parasite load operate more efficiently, allowing higher extraction of wealth from society at large to the owners and leaders of the company, leading to a more unequal and poorer society.
Probably not all companies are in the second way, but to think all are in the first way sounds naive to me.
> The alignment problem may actually be the hardest problem we have.
Hah, reading this makes me think you already understand that your assertion about companies operating efficiently is false. Yet you wrote it...
> Companies with lower parasite load operate more efficiently, allowing higher extraction of wealth from society at large to the owners and leaders of the company, leading to a more unequal and poorer society.
Only in a non-competitive environment where there are substantial barriers to entry. While this may describe many corporations I suspect it describes very few tech companies (Meta, Alphabet, Amazon and a dozen others perhaps).
> Hah, reading this makes me think you already understand that your assertion about companies operating efficiently is false.
If we take the story at face value I think this is unethical and antisocial behavior. The person was dishonest, claiming to be working on a problem but actually was avoiding the best solution. The person was wasting resources, taking significantly more time and money than what is required to do the job. By wasting them on nothing-work we are robbing the actually big and important problems from access to those resources.
A more charitable interpretation was that this person had a massive attack of cognitive dissonance when you told them what you found and was not able to reconcile it.
They convinced themselves that “their” solution was actually a better fit/safer/more performant/etc and justified in the expense and effort. And it may have been, in all honesty. But likely not enough better to justify the time and expense.
The empathetic view is that we all suffer from this delusion, but some of us are better and recognizing it and circumventing it than others. Part of it is age/maturity/experience. Part of it is innate.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not excusing this behavior. I abhor it as much as you clearly do. But sometimes it can help with dealing with these types of people to reframe it as less malicious and more incompetence.
You can use open ai to solve your LLM needs (if you legitimately have LLM needs) but an in house solution may be a whole lot more future proof, even if it’s more expensive up front
> Nothing to do with solving the problem efficiently.
Unless you were solving world hunger or fast homomorphic encryption, this guy's promotable event sounds like it's way more impressive than whatever technical desiderata you were helping them to solve efficiently.
Seriously, the guy sounds like some kind of corporate Robinhood.
That is some purity test thinking right there. I'll play - posting on HN is diverting your time and attention from helping feed the hungry, ergo posting is ultimately the same as contributing to world hunger.
Posting on HN may be a vice but what that guy did was akin to a scam (crime). Also posting on HN is not doing good due to inaction where what that guy did was doing bad due to direct action.
I think that's a little harsh. What the guy did was create a lot of value for himself and the team of 50 under him. That was all at the expense of the company, but so what? It's just a company. Companies don't matter, people do.
I think the real issue is why did that company's culture and reward structure allow this to happen? It should be more "profitable" for an employee to come up with the most efficient solution. The fact that it wasn't is the company's failing.
> That was all at the expense of the company, but so what?
If somebody steals a plane or burn a building, so what? Insurance will pay.
> I think the real issue is why did that company's culture and reward structure allow this to happen?
It would be a positive outcome (for society) this kind of company (that rewards inefficiency and poor of work ethics) going bankrupt.
But it's complicated because there is a lot we don't see. Companies matter to, they are made of people and people depend on them to provide goods/services or income.
The company in question could set incentives so the two-week-one-person solution is rewarded much more than the nine-month-fifty-person solution. If they are incapable of doing so, then perhaps the best outcome for the economy is for that company to collapse under the weight of its own inefficiencies and incompetence, and be replaced with companies that can do the job better.
There's no net loss to the economy here. If billionaires could own the means of production, fire all the humans, replace them with robots/LLMs, and keep all the money, they would. Paying those funds to workers instead of stock buybacks is one of the only ways those megacorps contribute to the economy.
Surely people engaging in unproductive labour is a net loss to the economy? Do you have some odd definition of "value to the economy" that is not the sum of the efficient market price of the goods and services?
A dollar in the stock market is not the same as a dollar spent on goods. Money back to billionaires becomes the former, money paid in workers' wagers predominantly becomes the latter, and is significantly more effective.
I don't wholly disagree with you, but I think it's more nuanced than that.
A dollar returned to investors and re-invested in a new technology that ends up saving everyone two dollars seems like a pretty effective use of that dollar, much more than putting that dollar in an employee's pocket who intentionally didn't do the most efficient thing.
Now, I'm not sure of the odds of that outcome. Maybe most of the time that dollar ends up getting wasted on funding Theranos or buying Twitter.
Regardless, I wouldn't fault an employee for doing something that's maximizes their own interest over the company's. Just means the company is bad at setting incentives properly. Not saying it's easy to do that, but none of us should value a company's welfare over our own. Sometimes the company's welfare aligns with ours, but not always.
> Surely people engaging in unproductive labour is a net loss to the economy?
You mean unproductive labour like running a casino, producing tobacco, building superyachts, etc?
> In 2017, clothing worth £28.6 million was incinerated by Burberry to maintain their brand’s exclusivity.
There is a term, "Real Economy". playing on the stock market is not real economy, producing steel is. In the last 30 years, a huge change took place - we had something called Financialization, now the 'real economy' is only a small fraction of actually economy, and is dwarfed by financial markets and various bullshit.
Depends what the alternative use of that capital is. What “value” led Elon to buy Twitter and flush it down the toilet? When people have enough money, they stop valuing money much when they make decisions.
Having more and more money in the coffers of a tiny group of billionaires is actually deeply anticapitalistic because it prevents market forces from working.
Single-handedly taking your stock from 70 down to 30 is not something you can do if you can’t afford it. It’s bumped back to 53 or whatever, and lots of external stuff has happened too…but I think it’s hard to deny that his actions caused a massive dive in the stock price.
Anyway, my point was that Musk, Bezos, Gates, etc. can afford to act freely in ways (constructive or destructive) that violate all the behaviors that economics textbooks posit as being universal.
My experience is the opposite: while the Big Exodus didn't seem to happen, anecdotally the people in my online chat circles post fewer Twitter links than before.
I'm actually curious about HN posts: has the frequency of Twitter submissions changed since Musk's acquisition? Or, probably more usefully, has the average number of points per Twitter submission (or maybe number that make the front page) changed?
Sorta? Less wealth probably does mean less effective altruists giving half their earnings to AMF and governments giving less in foreign aid, but it's a rather indirect effect with a fairly large divisor.
Its definitely very bad though, something like this is much worse for the economy than a few welfare queens.
This is 100% accurate to my experience working as a software developer for the US federal government.
Important humanitarian mission (I worked in the asylum and refugee org) filled with true believers, dedicated civil servants with a heart for service, managed by career middle managers.
18F, USDS, interesting smaller contractors, and all the "innovation" orgs direct hiring software devs like me were aimed at supporting the mission, but it felt like they were never going to win over the system of 9 digit contacts to support the status quo.
This appears in the biggest way in the financial sector. The US financial sector is now about 12% of employment.
The US used to have a much simpler financial sector, due to strict regulation.
* Banks could not do brokerage, and brokers could not do banking. (Glass-Stegall)
* Banks could only do boring stuff - transactions and loans.
* Utilities were mostly rate of return regulated, paid dividends, and had stable stock prices.
* Utility ownership was simple - there was a limit of 3 on ownership tree depth. (Utility Holding Company Act)
* Stocks traded much more slowly. There were no hedge funds, leveraged buyouts, private equity (which is leveraged buyouts under another name), or high frequency trading.
* Major companies could have only one class of voting stock, a NYSE rule. (Ford Motor was grandfathered in, being older than the NYSE).
* Home loans came mostly from savings and loan companies, which could pay higher interest rates than banks.
All that held from 1940-1980, arguably one of the greatest periods for the US. Then came financial deregulation.
The big effect was that if you wanted to make money, you didn't go into finance. You went into manufacturing.
Not just US, seems to have happened fairly broadly across many countries. It's what I like to call "the financialisation of everything". "Everything" is perhaps a bit exaggerated, but it sounds nice.
On a lot of these issues I feel we're all stuck on some rollercoaster ride that almost no one really likes, but also no one really has the courage to stop. Stopping would mean large changes, and our political systems have become so risk-averse and voters have become so unforgiving that nothing ever gets done.
Right. Because it's exuberant margins. Starbucks and Delta both operate with their core businesses as adjacent to their financial business in accruing customer deposits now. Multiple corporations are now bundled loyalty programs - Amazon Prime, Uber One, Lyft Pink
> On a lot of these issues I feel we're all stuck on some rollercoaster ride that almost no one really likes, but also no one really has the courage to stop.
As Will Emerson says in Margin Call:
"Jesus, Seth. Listen, if you really wanna do this with your life you have to believe you're necessary and you are. People wanna live like this in their cars and big fuckin' houses they can't even pay for, then you're necessary. The only reason that they all get to continue living like kings is cause we got our fingers on the scales in their favor. I take my hand off and then the whole world gets really fuckin' fair really fuckin' quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do but they don't."
I want to recommend two books on this subject, of contrasting if not tangential subject matter. “Debt: the first 5000 years” by David Graeber and “This time is different” by Reinhart and Rogoff. They differ drastically in perspective, but both discuss capitalism with a very long- term view. To respond to the posts above, I want to say that it almost always feels like a rollercoaster ride when up close, and that financial “innovation” and liberalization usually leads to corrections of varying degrees.
Most of the rest of the developed world had to rebuild from the ashes of WW2 during that period as well, giving us a massive advantage in exports. We also didn't have those pesky environmental regulations weighing everything down.
* Since 1970 the US has been printing money and dumping it into asset markets. This makes it easier to make money in finance
* US industrial policy has been to squeeze manufacturing talent, especially with environmental policy, which means it moves to foreign industrial hubs.
Those 2 factors alone mean that manufacturing can't compete as a cash cow. It is rather obvious at this point that the big winners in the US are not going to be manufacturers. What is necessary to achieve success is to have a good-enough story for why the Fed should give you money, be that access to the bond market and the Fed's belief that pumping money into the bond market generates wealth or a good reason why the Fed should bail you out when you go bankrupt (Silicon Valley bank, the '08 crisis, etc). How is a manufacturer supposed to get in on that in the same way the banks do? This has surely been clear enough to the people involved since the mid 90s.
You're also looking at a period (1940-1980) when every other industrial power had just had their factories demolished in WWII, so the US was in an unusually advantaged position to make money from manufacturing.
The United States is certainly not solely responsible for the demolition of all of the factories of Europe. Sure, they played a majority role in the bombing of Germany, Czechoslovakia, occupied France, and Italy, but that is not the full picture and you know it. The British bombed, the Germans bombed, the Soviets bombed, and massive ground campaigns carried on by all of the above with the profligate use of artillery didn’t help either.
Cowen has a counterpoint that whilst finance has grown as a proportion of GDP it has remained very close to 2% as a proportion of wealth, which honestly seems pretty reasonable.
1979 was a terrible year. My parents moan about it every Christmas,
There was a widespread belief that things needed to change, and economic growth had to be a part of that.
In the US, Reagan pushed deregulation. in the UK, Thatcher went to war with state owned industries. The USSR began experimenting with open policies. China embraced capitalist style economics.
1974 was pretty shitty in the UK too. The IRA was bombing pubs and shops several times a week, the coal miners union took advantage of the oil crisis to demand a massive pay hike, and went on strike, crippling the economy. The government couldn't give the miners union what they wanted because the other unions were watching and waiting, so instead the whole country switched to a 3 day working week and rationed street lighting (creating a kurfew).
Personally, I think the 3 day working week is a great idea though.
this is a bunch of spooky correlations and conspiracy style "just pointing out facts" thinking.
show me a causal relationship between the depth of utility ownership, the percentage of employment being in the financial sector, and the problem described in the article. please.
You missed a key thing: before the 70s there was a limit on the amount of cash in the system, but after the US jettisoned all ties to gold there was no limit on how much money the financial system can create. That's why the US dollar has seen more inflation in the past 50 years than in the 150 years before that.
Lawyers & economists contribute more to GDP than farmers...yet most lawyers & economists are a net negative in real terms while farmers provide food, essential for life.
If GDP was the end all be all of measurements, why is Russia winning the war despite having a fraction of GDP compared to its western opponents?
Sure seems like the wrong things are being measured...and rewarded.
GDP was a good measure for a while (or reasonably good enough). This ceased to be the case in the last 10-15 years; and I think it can be said now that it has become completely useless.
There are the edge cases (heavily financed/resourced countries) like Ireland, Singapore, Qatar, etc... and then you have Western countries "manipulating" the numbers. For example, your rental payment goes into the GDP; even if you are not renting -__-. So if you are sitting on your ass doing nothing in your own home that because of the financial bubble is now worth $2.5 million and $10k of rent, you are adding $10k/month to the GDP of said country.
> Why is Russia winning the war despite having a fraction of GDP compared to its western opponents?
This was a huge eye-opener for me, the fact that we are spending 20x more on the military industrial complex and yet it cannot supply enough shells and bullets for the war, to me, indicates that all of our posturing is a bad joke.
Either there is huge waste and abuse in the system, or we've literally set Ukraine up to lose.
Throwing money and war materiel at Ukraine doesn't ensure victory. Clearly the lack of it will ensure failure. But weapons are mostly only as good as the training of the people wielding them.
On top of that, there's fear of nuclear weapons taking the stage. If the US military went head to head with the Russian military, and we didn't have to worry about MAD, I think it's reasonable to assume that the US would win. But is the Ukrainian military, supplied with Western military supplies (and even Western military advisors), a better fighting force than the Russian military, even with a home-field advantage? Unclear.
And on the other hand... when the war started, a lot of people assumed Russia would achieve their objectives within a few weeks, or at most a month or two. Ukraine has turned out to be much more capable than initially expected.
> ...and yet it cannot supply enough shells and bullets for the war
It absolutely can, but politics, as usual, gets in the way. And, as I said, shells and bullets are necessary, but not sufficient.
The object was to break Ukraine's toys. Mission accomplished. Putin attacked Ukraine to prevent being eclipsed by it.
Zelenski became, rich, powerful AND popular much faster than Putin. He was insanely jealous. Consumed. Ukraine was on a path to eliminate corruption and join NATO and then easily become far more wealthy than Russia. It would have consumed Russia by the will of the people on both sides of the border.
Zelenski created his own media empire before he was thirty years old. Then he created a new political party and it beat all the others. He is preferred by the people. He accomplished more in a quarter of his life than Putin could in all of his and was going to help Ukraine achieve prosperity. Putin just wanted to stop that. Period.
Putin gave an "explicit warning that Russia perceived NATO's eastward expansion as a threat to its national security" as early as 2007 in his Munich speech [0]. The Russo-Ukrainian war began in 2014 with the ouster of Yanukovych, who was pro-Russia and opposed closer ties with the EU [1]. Zelensky became president in 2019 and initially promised to end the Russo-Ukranian war, but instead continued to pursue NATO protection and in August 2021 "urged NATO members to speed up Ukraine's request for membership" [2]. Russia escalated the Russo-Ukrainian war and invaded Ukraine for a second time in February 2022 [3].
Is it a surprise to you that all of the countries that have historically been imperial subjects of Russia seek protection from the possibility of that eventuality coming to pass again? Is it surprising after Georgia in 2008 and Crimea/Donbas in 2014 that Ukraine would want some assurance of security and independence for the remainder of their country?
Whereas the nonsense you're providing us here is not hallucinated (by you), but rather cut-and-pasted from the usual pro-Russian sources.
Putin gave an "explicit warning that Russia perceived NATO's eastward expansion as a threat to its national security" as early as 2007 in his Munich speech.
And as a result (in combination with other factors) Ukraine's NATO aspirations were effectively halted by 2009. Simply put - some hawks in the U.S. wanted it, but it never got traction in Europe - not even after the initial invasion in 2014. In other words - in regard to the NATO-Ukraine question Putin had by that time already achieved a successful, non-violent containment strategy. But ultimately he opted for the full-scale invasion in 2022 anyway.
Why? Because it was never his real reason in the first place.
The Russo-Ukrainian war began in 2014 with the ouster of Yanukovych, who was pro-Russia and opposed closer ties with the EU.
First, it wasn't an "ouster" - he fled to escape likely imminent charges of corruption and complicity in murder. Second - if you really believe that whatever happens in the internal politics of one country is a "reason for", or can "provoke" another country into launching a full-scale invasion -- then I don't know what to tell you.
> if you really believe that whatever happens in the internal politics of one country is a "reason for", or can "provoke" another country into launching a full-scale invasion -- then I don't know what to tell you.
what do you mean? internal politics is just a label and the issue will most certainly not be contained by a border.
> in regard to the NATO-Ukraine question Putin had by that time already achieved a successful, non-violent containment strategy. But ultimately he opted for the full-scale invasion in 2022 anyway.
Beginning in 2019, Ukraine went full-press on seeking NATO membership. In fact, they "voted 334 to 17 to amend the constitution to state Ukraine's strategic objectives as joining the European Union and NATO" [0]. Again, Ukraine went as far as amending their constitution to codify the goal of joining the EU and NATO.
Now, was that Putin's "real" motive for the 2022 invasion? Who knows, I'm sure there are a number of reasons. Putin frankly denied Ukraine's right to exist. But regardless, it is very clear that his rhetoric over the past 17 years, and subsequent actions, are at least consistent with the NATO issue.
> First, it wasn't an "ouster" - he fled to escape likely imminent charges of corruption and complicity in murder.
There was a revolution in Ukraine in 2014 and he was overthrown. On February 22, 2014 the "Ukrainian parliament voted to remove Yanukovych from office by 328 to 0" [1]. He fled that evening. I have no doubt corruption and any number of other things led to the revolution. Regardless, he was very anti-EU and pro-Russia and his removal from office directly led to the 2014 Crimea invasion and the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war. In fact, Russia began organizing troops outside of Ukraine the very same day Yanukovych was voted out and the invasion began 5 days after his removal [2].
> Second - if you really believe that whatever happens in the internal politics of one country is a "reason for", or can "provoke" another country into launching a full-scale invasion -- then I don't know what to tell you.
If one country has been saying for nearly 2 decades that if another country joins NATO it means war, and then that country ratifies their constitution to seek NATO membership, and then a war happens, is it really that surprising? When the two countries are already at war over allegiances in the first place?
> If one country has been saying for nearly 2 decades that if another country joins NATO it means war, and then that country ratifies their constitution to seek NATO membership, and then a war happens, is it really that surprising?
I don't recall any direct threats of war. In fact, in the first few years of the war, Russia denied that their soldiers were even in Ukraine. They tried to portray the war as a civil conflict within Ukraine.
As to indirect threats and vague hints of total annihilation, Russia has been threatening everyone in Eastern Europe over everything they don't like; from EU and NATO to insignificant things like parking fines that their diplomats have been raking up, and this bullshit has been going on straight from USSR's collapse in early 1990s. Russia's permanent unwillingness to offer peaceful and mutually respectful relations is a key driver behind Eastern Europe seeking closer relations with Western Europe. Handing national sovereignty to Russia over threats is not a serious option.
Ukraine's mistake is not that they seeked NATO membership, but that they underestimated the Russian threat and didn't hurry with EU and NATO integration like other countries did.
Beginning in 2019, Ukraine went full-press on seeking NATO membership.
We've gone through this already. Yes, Ukraine wanted to join NATO - but the bigger fact was that Europe was against it. So it wasn't going to happen.
If one country has been saying for almost 2 decades that if another country joins NATO it means war
Have you actually read the Munich speech? It doesn't even mention Ukraine, and doesn't come close to using the belligerent language that you're saying it does.
I suggest that you develop a practice of reading original source materials, such as for the the 2007 Munich speech, directly -- rather than uncritically relying on random snippets from Wikipedia quoting what certain pro-Russia commentators (like Mearsheimer and Cohen) say about them.
I’d start by saying that the Russians aren’t winning the war, it is in a period of stalemate, like 1915 or 1916. Accepting tens of thousands of casualties for incremental movement of a front line, over time periods that allow the side withdrawing to first build new fortifications to fall back on, is not a recipe for success. The Russians are digging deep into Soviet-era stockpiles, rolling out tanks built in the ‘50s and ‘60s (T-55 and T-62, respectively). Each of these is much less well equipped to face Western-style military hardware than more modern variants. Russia’s ability to replenish its stockpiles is at even more a disadvantage than the West, and meanwhile Ukraine has been tooling up to build shells of their own.
The U.S. has (had?) colossal stockpiles of shells and ammunition. There is a false equivalence between the ability to supply the Ukrainians at a rate of 10,000+ shells a day for years on end and the ability of the United States to engage in a major conflict. The Russians are also having trouble keeping their artillery pieces adequately supplied. The calculus is about the acceptable rate of drawdown of stockpiles in relation to the increase in the likelihood of a near-peer conflict arising due to the support given by the very drawdown of those stockpiles. If we give everything we have to Ukraine, and they lose, for whatever reason, then we have disadvantaged ourselves.
However, any major conflict between the United States and a near-peer adversary wouldn’t be so heavily reliant on artillery as this current war is — the U.S. has spent decades building an Air Force that can dominate the battle space in ways that artillery alone cannot match. As Ukraine is set to receive several squadrons worth of F-16s this year, I believe we will see things change. Planes can interdict resupply and troop movements in ways that are beyond the capability of artillery. SEAD aircraft can target and destroy SAM radars to allow large strike packages to accurately blow bridges and rail lines with a much greater radius and accuracy than any other conventional munition.
It is very cynical realpolitik, but Russia’s armed forces have been gutted with this approach.
Well sure, but in Russia’s case, the average income is incredibly low and their wealth disparity is even more extreme than in the USA. I don’t know how any of that relates to the war point
There would be nothing wrong if money wasnt created out of thin air to cover the GDP increase. It's basically the central bank stealing from people and claimimg that low inflation somehow helps.
It doesnt.
Its's a hidden tax on everyone, that eats GDP growth.
> We (mostly) don't create money out of thin air. We borrow it
This is the same thing - when you go to the bank to get a loan, the money is created out of thin air. It simply appears in a database. It is not the money someone has deposited in the bank. The only reason the bank has to keep reserves is for stability in case of bad loans.
It is strictly not. All money is borrowed. This seems like free/unlimited printing when the interest rate is 0%. But when the interest rate rises, this has real consequences and you can't print your way out of a 5.5% interest rate.
This is why US politics got heated about finance as of late. If inflation doesn't come down, the US will have to "print" that money. Essentially rendering the Fed to the likes of Pakistan, Turkey and Argentina.
Problem with inflation in every country is not that it needs to be above 0. It's actually much higher than they publicly say. With not giving you real numbers, they lie officially to get richer. Intentional
Why would small inflation be good for anyone bar the centtal bank? Small inflation is ignored by everyone.
If there was no artificial inflation (central bank racket) you could ignore it as well.
Inflation encourages investment because if you just sit on your money it gets eaten away by inflation. Once you’re Oprah-rich inflation is the rate at which you’re losing net worth. This is my non-economist understanding.
Inflation affects the value of currency, not assets. Oprah isn’t sitting on billions in cash, presumably. Those billions are invested in assets, which typically inflate at a rate similar to inflation. This is why one of the best hedges against inflation is owning things like real estate and equities. The value is separate from any currency you can denominate it in.
The benefit of mild inflation, to phrase what you wrote a little differently, is that it encourages people to create assets with substantial intrinsic value as a way to dispose of currency. Everyone wants to own as little currency as possible. There are many positive externalities to asset creation.
> Inflation encourages investment because if you just sit on your money it gets eaten away by inflation.
People shouldn't be penalised for saving money.
"Oh, but just invest it!"
With investment comes risk. Why shouldn't people be allowed to save without risk or having their savings melted by lost purchasing power through inflation?
Inflation is a hidden tax and theft of those furthest from the newly "minted" money to benefit those that are closest to the source i.e. banks and large borrowers.
I do wonder if this conventional wisdom is actually true, though. Somewhat relatedly, there was once an idea that if you lower taxes for rich people, they'll invest more, and those tax savings will trickle down to the middle and lower classes and be a boon for them. But we know it doesn't actually work like that.
Why would you adjust for M2? Inflation exaggerates GDP growth. M2 doesn't.
If you measure a country and M2 and GDP go up together, that's important to know, but you don't "adjust for M2" and pretend that GDP didn't actually go up.
Hmm, let me ask you this. It we double the money supply because say, banks are allowed to loan more to each other, but that money doesn’t make it to the average consumer, does CPI go up and does GDP go up?
ok, maybe too abstract an example. If a bank makes a loan (creating new money) to loan to some rich guy, who decides to pay 1B to buy a bunch of Microsoft stock, that counts as growing the GDP, even if the majority of the money just stays in the financial sector and never drives up the price of anything measured by CPI.
It saw tremendous inflation, just less than the 70s and 80s, and this due to two different things.
First, companies just began making shitty products. Use glued and compressed pulp instead of wood, use fructose instead of glucose, use bleached and desiccated wheat, use chips instead of anything mechanical, use cheaper less pure and thinner metals, etc. in the realm of food there was also shrinkflation.
Second, the USA exported much of its inflation as dollar imperialism.
Today, making products of less quality is nearly impossible without sacrificing sales, and the USA has run out of countries to add to its empire while simultaneously having sanctioned enough countries that they’ve now formed their own trading bloque. All of this means that dollars are staying at home after printing and that dollars are starting to come home from the rest of the world. This follows after the government shutdown parts of the economy and concomitantly printed trillions. So, there’s now rather high inflation once again.
Deregulation actually played less important a part of all of the financialization of the economy than did the transition to debt-based economics. The inversion of time in money is a dance with the devil, and the devil usually wins that dance.
I may have exaggerated slightly, but it's a touchy subject because investment is the legitimate way by which rich people get paid for being rich, which is how class works in capitalist societies. The long term sustainability of investment supply / demand dynamics have deep implications for the legitimacy of this enterprise, its winners and losers, and the policies that prop them up (or don't).
It also doesn’t sound bad if one calculates that 2.4% annual inflation would exceed 100% over 30 years, and one considers that below about 2% is often harmful to the economy.
'exponential doubling time' is the effect that devalues money by 3/4th's within a average 'work life' effectively putting a lower limit on profit in order to actually grow wealth
Because everyone wants to bank/invest with the US. The money is being pushed in, not pulled in. If it were being pulled in, rates would have to be relatively high to pull it in, but they are not, so it is being pushed in.
Why is money being pushed in? Put yourself in the shoes of a wealth-weighted non-US citizen. Wealth weighting is critical for understanding many aspects of economics yet systematically under-discussed to make the economy seem more altruistic than it is, but that's another story. So you have a bunch of money and you're outside the US. You want to preserve or grow your wealth, but your local government keeps devaluing the currency to pump the real economy, or hiking taxes, or there's a labor party that you think might get in power and do those things, or your government is literally called the Chinese Communist Party and is ideologically predisposed to confiscating your wealth tomorrow. Where do you put your savings? Some of it you still keep locally, for practical reasons, but the rest you invest abroad. Where? A peer country with the same issues? A developing country where investment never comes back? A small banking haven that will fold at the first sign of hard power? Or do you send it to the rabidly capitalist country with a 50 year track record of delivering investor returns and dozens of aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines to put between your bank account and the New Workers Collective of Yourlandia? That's right. You send it to the USA.
What happens when the money lands in the USA? It pumps assets, because that's what the money buys, and it dumps exports, which now must compete with a literal money printer for access to talent and resources. Asset holders do great. People who sell services to the asset holders do OK. People who build shit for export, though, oof. Software, chip designs, and movies might be lucrative enough that they don't have to care (thus far) but in general, oof.
"We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now all we do is put our hand in the next guy's pocket." - The Wire
That's exactly right, but it's extremely important to understand the macro that drives this so that you can understand how the macro affects you and make informed guesses about where it is headed. For example, I wouldn't bet on this dynamic collapsing tomorrow.
That's right. Because the productivity of the capitalist system has absolutely zero reason to be tethered to one or 2 elements on the periodic table that is mostly for jewelry.
You're getting downvoted by the fintech crowd I'd assume. May be an argument for them is they see themselves as more manufacturing than finance, perhaps.
The Clay Shirky talk, "The Collapse of Complex Business Models" is play on "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter (as mentioned in the post).
Another great person to study in systems and complexity is Jane Jacobs.
One parallel is see is people "warning" about the impending population collapse (which we desperately need), but what we need to do is actively restructure our society to handle it gracefully.
There's a paper from Stefan Savage's group a while back where they were able to estimate overall revenue of a few big spam-generating pharma/counterfeit product networks, and it looks like the anti-spam industry is vastly bigger than the underground spam-generating industry, and had no desire to shut off the ultimate source of their revenues.
There's a reason we don't see many of those emails anymore, and it's not because of any action by anti-spam companies - it's because firms whose products were being counterfeited convinced the credit card companies to shut off the banks handling payments for these purchases. (most evidently went through a couple of banks in I think Azerbaijan) Evidently all the viagra spam was coming from people who also hawked fake Gucci stuff...
>There's a paper from Stefan Savage's group a while back where they were able to estimate overall revenue of a few big spam-generating pharma/counterfeit product networks, and it looks like the anti-spam industry is vastly bigger than the underground spam-generating industry, and had no desire to shut off the ultimate source of their revenues.
This doesn't follow. The US army has a vastly bigger budget than the Taliban or Viet Cong, yet it still lost to them. Revenue is only a relevant factor when the battle is symmetric. For spam there's no reason to believe it is. Spammers are basically guerilla fighters because they operate as criminal networks in areas with lax law enforcement. What's the "anti-spam industry" supposed to do? Send in PMCs?
>There's a reason we don't see many of those emails anymore
Yeah, they've been replaced with phishing emails and scams instead.
People copy someone's profile, pretend to be them, say they're them to their friends and ask them for money. With AI voice changers, it even sounds like them.
Your example doent make sense.
Those who spend spam for profit will do it anyway - they dont care if tools that detect spam exist or not. In fact those tools limit the ability of script kiddies to enter. It is a cat and mouse game.
A homeless person can steal some electic wires and pipes and fixing it will cost a lot of money. So you say that we shouldnt fix it?
The root problem is not that I'm receiving spam emails, but that people are sending them.
Symantec etc. have no business interest in getting people to stop sending spam emails. In the case of the pharma/counterfeit emails that were so common 10-15 years ago the fix was quite simple, but didn't come from the anti-spam industry - it required finding an aggrieved party (brand owners) with enough clout in the financial world.
As you point out, fighting spam is an asymmetric game of whack-a-mole, where spammers can easily adapt to countermeasures. Forcing spammers to get a new merchant bank to handle their credit card transactions flips the asymmetry and makes them do all the work; as a result you no longer see spam advertising viagra.
Getting rid of ransomware would be quite easy, in theory, if you could tank the value of bitcoin, since few ransomware gangs are able to collect ransom the traditional way in bags of cash. And a large fraction of other phishing attacks could be prevented by putting stricter controls on gift cards.
Systemantics by John Gall has some insightful and surprising gems that feel related to The Shirky Principle, I guess because they're both related to complex wetware systems.
> Complex Systems Tend To Oppose Their Own Proper Function. My favorite axiom. Your city has a problem with trash building up on the streets so it sets up a waste management company. The company starts out by collecting trash daily, but then they shift to a Tuesday-only schedule. Next, you get a notice saying that the company will no longer service your building unless you buy their standardized garbage cans (to ensure that the robotic arms on their trucks can pick them up). Eventually, the waste management union goes on strike and the trash starts piling up on the street again anyways.
> People In Systems Do Not Do What The System Says They Are Doing. The stated purpose of a king is to rule a country, but in reality they spend a lot of time fighting off usurpers.
This one feels related to the Shirky Principle:
> A System Continues To Do Its Thing, Regardless Of Need. The Selective Service System continues to require all 18-year-old male US citizens to register for the draft, even though the US hasn’t had a draft in 51 years.
> Complex Systems Tend To Oppose Their Own Proper Function. My favorite axiom. Your city has a problem with trash building up on the streets so it sets up a waste management company. The company starts out by collecting trash daily, but then they shift to a Tuesday-only schedule. Next, you get a notice saying that the company will no longer service your building unless you buy their standardized garbage cans (to ensure that the robotic arms on their trucks can pick them up). Eventually, the waste management union goes on strike and the trash starts piling up on the street again anyways.
That analogy is bit weak because strikes don't go on forever and trash pickings always resume. The city is not in the same state of perpetual trash everywhere it was in before setting up/contracting the waste management company.
Also weird example because it's basically describing the process of improving efficiency.. picking up trash every day is a waste of human resources and petroleum. Non-standard cans waste the potential benefits of automation. Poor labor relations are wasteful by hoarding the benefit of an enterprise away from the workers who make it a viable endeavor, and shunting responsibility for the workers' healthcare, retirement, safety nets, and wellbeing onto society.
Thanks for the perspective. I agree that improving efficiency is a fair counterargument.
> picking up trash every day
Yeah, I think that Gall should have started with "twice a week" instead of daily (he might actually use "twice a week" in the book, and the "daily" reference is an error on my part). When you start from bi-weekly to weekly, I'm not sure if the improving efficiency argument holds up that well. I could see twice a week being as efficient as once a week.
Not sure about the automation argument in terms of improved efficiency. Brazilian trash collectors work very quickly and do not rely on automation. However I think they're also subjected to more occupational hazard by personally handling more trash. Maybe they're not more efficient. Even if you are more efficient, does the "anergy" (i.e. shifting the problem) idea mean that your improved efficiency essentially enables the community to generate far more trash per capita?
Re: unions to be clear, there's no moral judgment intended. It's just another example of the system opposing its own intended function. The purpose is to collect trash, striking workers is one of the ways that the system opposes itself. Also it might be relevant to remember that Gall was writing back in the 70s. I'm pretty sure there strikes were a lot more frequent back then.
You can replace the trash collection example with the US federal taxation system if the details of the trash example are distracting. Think of all the ways that the taxation system is set up to push against its own clear goal of collecting tax revenue. It's not really about explaining why it is that way, the most profound insight for me is this curiously common phenomenon of a system opposing its own purpose. One day I dream of coming up with a rigorous analysis of this in terms of entropy
I don't think Gall would disagree with you. He says "systems tend to oppose their own function". He doesn't flat-out say "systems don't work." He would probably explain its functioning in terms of these axioms:
> A Simple System, Designed From Scratch, Sometimes Works.
> A Complex System That Works Is Invariably Found To Have Evolved From A Simple System That Works.
He might also direct your attention to this one:
> The Total Amount Of Anergy In The Universe Is Constant. Gall defines anergy as the negative of energy. See also clonal anergy. “The sum total of problems facing the community has not changed. They have merely changed their form and relative importance.”
You have reduced the trash on the streets, but where did you shift the anergy by reducing the "trash-on-street" issue?
The real fun IMO is contemplating all the other axioms in combination with the trash collection system:
> New Systems Mean New Problems.
You started out with a trash problem, and now you've got a union problem. Maybe also a powerful mafia-connected monopoly problem.
> The Bigger The System, The Narrower And More Specialized The Interface With Individuals.
To the waste collection company I am surely just an address, 1 trash bin, 1 recycling bin, and 1 compost bin.
The purpose of the waste management company is not to manage waste, it is to gain control of waste management. That's the difference.
If you have a problem, often your solution just means you have the same problem but now lack the agency to control it.
Once the waste management company has control, they can then extract the majority of surplus from the problem being solved so that if your cost if the problem is unsolved is x, your cost if the problem is solved becomes x-ε.
The surplus ε shrinks as the waste management company gains more control of the process. With sufficient control, ε can even go negative.
The net result is that you have not created surplus for yourself. You have just found someone to transfer the surplus to.
Government departments are not immune to this structure. It's a fundamental property of organizations. It's why you'll find empire building in private companies too.
Interestingly, this happens even if you remove the profit motive, say by making it a government entity or a non-profit with fixed pay structure. The surplus just goes into diffuse inefficiencies instead of being efficiently channeled into someones pocket.
Maybe it's just that people still profit from bigger organizations by means of prestige, influence, etc. Whatever the cause, most organizations seem to try to grow to the size equivalent to the value of the solution, not the cost of delivering the solution.
These all boil down to “any collection of organisms will act the same as one organism”. It will focus on survival and self interest first. It’s an emergent property from the incentives of the (potentially well-meaning) individuals
Useful for thinking through questions like “does my organization/city/etc need this new team/committee/department to exist?”
> The stated purpose of a king is to rule a country, but in reality they spend a lot of time fighting off usurpers.
This quote applies to more than the people at the top. I thought office backstabbing and power plays happened at the senior management level when I was young, which left me unprepared for how much subterfuge and infighting came from ICs trying to be king of their little circle within a company. Recognizing and getting away from the people who compete by putting others down is a valuable skill in the workplace for anyone, not just the king.
Yes, totally applies to everyone within the system. When I first read that I immediately started pondering how my actual work is different than my stated role. The example of the king is just the most quickly grokkable example IMO
It also maybe implies that the selective service is responsible for it's own funding and ignores that it's entire a creature of DoD and Congress. It's hardly a bureaucracy run amok for its own purposes. The funding in 2022 was $31.7M. DoD has a lot of contingency plans and that's not a lot of money to spend to fund one of them even if the likelihood putting it into action is small.
31 million dollars is actually a lot of money to waste on an arguably immoral program. Multiply those tens of millions by the 40 years of the program and you are talking about a lot of money that should not have been spent.
It is overwhelmingly likely the US will never have a draft again.
The nature of warfare has changed. You can't give someone a few weeks of basic and throw them on the battlefield anymore. They need to be experts on a variety of technical topics as well as how to do combined arms maneuver in large formations. You need trained professionals.
If the US is ever placed in a position so desperate that a draft is done again, rebuilding a new selective service administration overnight will be a trivial problem compared to everything else going on.
You don't need to throw everybody onto the battlefield.
The standing armed forces and reserve will need a lot of logistical support that can be done with little additional training. Plenty of people are forklift drivers and cooks in their day jobs.
That said, it's not like the SSA is really needed. If a war got bad enough to need a draft I'm sure congress would let the IRS fork over a list of 18+ males. Or even say 18+ males with certain occupations on their tax returns (i.e. Doctors).
Like most systems, on the surface it appears extremely simple. You start to look at the issue deeper and it becomes extremely complex. Start drafting all the doctors? Sure, what happens when you draft an ophthalmologist? Are they even useful for more than TikTok videos? What if they have asthma? How many Doctors can we take without crippling the home front?
Furthermore, we start up a draft. We draft the guy who does calibrations for Maverick missiles in factory. Come to find out, it takes 3 months to train that guy and there are very few of them. It's also really important weapon system. Now what?
SSA constantly holds mock drafts to try and answer all these questions.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine implies otherwise.
It's unlikely the US will find itself in such a conflict soon due to their technological advantage. However, multiple simultaneous engagements can stretch the available manpower to such an extent that a draft is needed.
The war in Ukraine reflects exactly what I said. They've run into a stalemate because both sides are heavily using conscripts and are incapable of doing maneuver warfare on a scale beyond a platoon.
If the US military stepped into the Ukraine war, and there was somehow no possibility of nuclear escalation, the Russian military would be decimated within a matter of a week or two, and that's not overly optimistic thinking on my part. The incompetence of the VKS as well as Russia's mechanized formations has been gallingly clear.
> It is overwhelmingly likely the US will never have a draft again.
It's more likely that it will, the longer it exists. Saying "it will never", implies a pessimistic view of US durability. I think this is a fair interpretation, I can agree with. I understand this is not exactly what you meant.
I don't know why anyone would believe that, as I implied. The future is unknowable, but history has shown it takes less than a generation to militarize any nation. Assuming it will be different this time around, is not "overwhelmingly" likely.
I don't know - there were several effective land armies in WW2 - Germany, US, UK (though small), Russia from 1942 or so. They didn't have it much easier then. There was technology then, which was simpler but also more raw. What they did have was good officers, NCOs and training. I don't see reason to believe that a side in the Ukraine war has these.
The war in Ukraine is a war of attrition. The need for human material is so large, that the Ulranians are considering forcing citizens that are in other countries to return and submit to the draft.
Any war that will be fought between powers that can easily destroy each other will be fought in the Clausewitz way:
Throw bodies at each other until one side is not willing to suffer the losses anymore.
Should the US be China ever go to war, that will be the war that we will see. And since China would pick a battle ground south of the topic of cancer ( NATOs southern border) , that bodycount would mostly be US.
The war in Ukraine reflects exactly what I said. They've run into a stalemate because both sides are heavily using conscripts and are incapable of doing maneuver warfare on a scale beyond a platoon.
Please explain to me how the trench warfare in Ukraine is relevant to a potential war with China, which will be fought almost entirely by the Navy and Airforce. In fact, the Marines are so convinced of this they gave up all their tanks to reorganize as a more agile force that could island hop while deploying anti ship missiles.
The idea that a war with China will require an infantry draft is preposterous. It's no longer 1940. Attempting any form of amphibious landing without naval and air superiority is suicide. That means if China ever lands boots on Taiwan, the war is already over, and a draft would serve no purpose.
1. Conservative forces in the southern states continue to claim that the Federal Government is trying to change the voting dynamics by naturalising immigrants.
2. Some form of legal argument is made against the legality of the vote of naturalised citizens in state level.
3. Hawaiian nationalists, secretly backed by China adopt that.
4. Some form of secession movement in Hawaii is formed.
5. China recognises independent Hawaii.
6. The US cannot accept to loose its influence in that part of the Ocean.
7. War by proxy, on US soil.
This is all very unlikely, and would make a good plot for a Novel BUT:
Historically the US has a much weaker claim on Hawaii ( which was annexed agains the will of the population) than China on Taiwan and there is already friction with the native Hawaiian population e.g. by Zuckerberg circumventing traditional local inheritance laws to build his mansion.
I don't think there's any reason to talk about a civil war in that sense. It's pure fantasy. That's not to say I'm unconcerned about right wing extremists but that sort of scenario is just nonsense. If anything they'll try to capture control of US military leadership instead.
Ukraine is a war of attrition because its primarily being supplied by other countries which are dripfeeding supplies while Russia has to slowly unmothball a lot of kit.
If the USA actually went to total war it would likely be over long before the average Joe Blogs can be turned into a useful warfighter.
It will happen, and the American people will accept it, for the same reasons they accept tons of things today that are done against their best interests: Ideological divisions and loyalty, propaganda saturation, fear of an outside enemy, (possibly) religion, and the general desire to use the political system to punish "others" rather than help themselves.
I’ve done this arithmetic a few times now and I think you’re wrong: someone born the week after ww1 ended (November 1918) would have been 22 in November 1940, when the first draft registration was held for men who had reached 21. So there should be about 12 months of births in there.
all I'm saying is how mandatorily drafting people to go fight a war in another continent is extremely hard
whereas getting people to fight in a way that's happening near YOUR (meaning their particular case) state border is super easy, barely an inconvenience
Gall mentions the example of an organization founded to conquer polio. With that disease all but eradicated, the foundation almost collapsed, but instead changed the goal to conquer genetic defects. Very little changed about what the organization did, and the new goal is one that isn't likely to ever be completely achieved.
That doesn’t seem like an entirely bad thing, though. Once you have an organization built up to solve a problem, shifting those resources into solving another problem is a reasonable next step. This is not the same as TFA, which talks about organizations preventing the problem from being solved.
> That doesn’t seem like an entirely bad thing, though.
Not at all. It's an example of a good pivot. Probably Gall thought it rare enough to mention it in a book otherwise full of wisdom about how systems go wrong.
I disagree. When you've solved the problem the best thing to do is to celebrate, give resources back, and then organize to solve another problem if you want. Switching missions is a bait and switch for your supporters and should be avoided.
Organizations are expensive and hard to build. If you liquidate an organization, you might free up some modest amount of cash in a bank account (and maybe some furniture, office supplies, etc.) but the cost of rebuilding that same organization will be vastly higher than the money freed up. It’s like tearing the copper out of a working industrial air conditioner and selling it for scrap: a huge waste and a loss of value in absolute terms. Perfectly reasonable to give back money to recent donors who opt out and raise it over again, though.
This is a classic problem. The best example I have of it is probably Mozilla. They went out in the beginning to set up the open web. They won. Complete and total success. The web is uniformly open and standards based. The major browsers are open source and on open source engines.
Unmitigated and total victory.
So what's next? Well, that's what they're struggling with. What to do with a non profit that achieves its goals?
I'm sure you can find a better example, because Mozilla's goal needs continuous maintenance. If they don't continue providing a competitive browser, Chrome might start playing the role of the IE of old, free to disregard those standards you mention.
New printing might be coming up! His wife (and heir) suggested to a friend that he might be invited to write the forward to the next one. He has cases and cases of books in his basement, and has given them to all his students for years :)
IIRC I sent an email to a robotics team about cataloguing metadata for supported procedures as (JSON-LD) Linked Data; there also so that it's easy to add attributes and also to revise the schema of Classes and Properties.
Compared to Ctrl-F'ing a PDF copy of an ebook,
Client-side JS to fuzzy search (and auto complete) over just the names of the patterns/headings in the book would be cool; and then also search metadata attributes of each.
The facts in Mediawiki (Wikipedia,) infoboxes are regularly scraped by dbpedia. Wikidata is also a Wikipedia project, but with schema.
IIRC there used to be a longer list of {software, and project management} antipatterns on wikipedia? It may have been unfortunately and sort of tragically removed due to being original research without citations.
There are probably more useful systems patterns to be mined from:
the Fowler patterns books like "Patterns of Distributed Systems (2022)" [1] and "Patterns of Enterprise Architecture", Lamport's "Concurrency: The Works of Leslie Lamport", Leslie Valient's Distributed Systems work,
Perhaps there's also general systems theory insight to be gained from limits and failures in [classical and quantum] Universal Function Approximation; general AL/ML limits and Systemantics.
...doesn't that entire problem rest on the fact that the unstated goal is to pick up the trash at the lowest cost labor will bear? That yields service reduction, automation, and labor disputes. When you look at it that way, the organization is seeking the goal, not fighting it. I think there is truth in the general idea, but a correlary that no one sees value in continuing to solve a problem that has been solved once. They always imagine it will get cheaper, meanwhile those who create expertise in it see themselves as more valuable with time, and that creates tension.
I didn’t see a moral judgment against striking, just an observation that the elaborate systems set up to collect trash sometimes end up intentionally not collecting trash.
The union and its member's intentions sure, not the intention of the overall 'elaborate system'. Because the union and its member are only components of the larger system.
i.e. A system that doesn't take into account the free association of its components is incoherent.
I think you’re missing the original point. It was nothing about unions or free association. In fact, the point was that ALL systems become incoherent as they scale.
The existence of unions and free association is built-in to the argument that systems designed to pick up trash sometimes intentionally do not pick up trash.
It’s not a moral judgment that these systems are broken and therefore workers should be slaves. It is an acknowledgment that complex systems end up having to meet conflicting priorities and therefore become, as you say, incoherent.
>Failure to collect trash under certain conditions is not a failure of a trash collecting system.
Of course it is. If your phone fails to make calls under certain conditions, that is a failure of the system, and we try to fix it (for example by deploying more antennas, or by fixing software bugs in it).
If workers refuse to pick up trash, we can also fix that (ask Ronald Reagan).
There's no expectation of continuous (24/7) trash pickup, unlike your phone where (these days) you expect it to work all the time.
If the regular collection schedule is every 7 days, and it turns into 14 or even 21, for the most part your trash is still being collected within the bounds of "yeah, my trash gets collected".
Great book. I learned from its Wikipedia page that the author (John Gall) pitched 30 different publishers, got rejected by all of them, and then published it himself. It got discussed in academic papers and then the New York Times picked it up. And we're still talking about it 50 years later. Given that the central theme of the book is "systems barely work" I very much like to imagine Gall taking all of the rejections in stride because he was able to view the publishers as just another system that has its own goals and perhaps isn't really working as it should.
Not just institutions, individuals too. I’ve seen many individuals ‘dig their heels’ into protecting their own pet project/baby/solution/etc, mainly due to ego.
It takes maturity and humility to step back, assess objectively, trade off pros and cons, and ultimately let the best decisions, ideas and solutions win, even when it’s hard to give up your idea or a solution you’ve worked super hard on.
It also takes energy, focus, and intellectual capacity. All of which are being removed from the current effort at hand. There is a real cost to continually reevaluating the situation. Sometimes you just have to put your head down and plow ahead.
This is why having competition is so powerful. Someone will likely be working hard at the right problem using the right strategy.
There is no perfect strategy that will always result in using the fewest resources to generate the best solution. We have to accept inefficiencies and wasted efforts.
> Competition isn't a panacea that makes everything bad go away.
Nobody said it did.
I'm not making a moral claim, i'm saying that it is a matter of reality that nobody can predict the future perfectly and that effort from any individual is a limited resource. So it makes sense sometimes for an individual to just press on in the direction they've chosen, and not "waste" time reevaluating too often.
You can either have one central authority that dictates a single direction, and forces all effort down a single path. Or you can have a more diffuse strategy that explores the solution space in multiple directions simultaneously. Competition, in the context I was referring to it, is basically just the difference between breadth first, or depth first search. I wasn't making a claim about what motivated the search in the first place.
> individuals ‘dig their heels’ into protecting their own pet project/baby/solution/etc, mainly due to ego.
Guilty of this.
I worked for about a decade on a pet project to find a new family of computer languages designed for both humans and machines.
I did not think machines were close to mastering our languages, and new languages were needed.
I knew my approach was a long shot, but if I found a way to make it work the upside was huge.
Then LLMs happened. The possible upside of my approach dropped dramatically.
I have been trying to "rewire" my brain and re-purpose the neurons that evolved over a decade to keep turning my approach around from different perspectives. It is very hard.
It is easy to get a sapling to grow into a desired shape. It is much harder to reshape a fully grown tree. Just the physic of it.
To tie this back to the original article, if you model an individual's brain like Minsky's Society of Mind, you would have neural agents that create a circuit ("Institution") to solve a problem, and some of those agents focus on the task of preserving that circuit. Without those Institution preserving neurons, you would never keep the circuit going long enough to see through a contrarian idea. But the downside is that the organization will persist even when it is no longer a good bet.
Tbf, half the linguistics discipline thought that language's grammar was somehow hardcoded into our brain, which is clearly ridiculous if you look at how LLMs work, so you're not the only one who had misconceptions.
Perhaps you can turn your idea around slightly into finding a language that finds a balance between formality and universality, rather than computers and humans. Because even though computers now speak our language they do not use it in a logical way at all (arguably because we humans don't).
And while mathematics is very formal it has a lot of trouble expressing ideas from different branches that aren't as formal. Things like fuzzy logics have been created and many things like that but they are still very much on the formal side.
Perhaps you could even derive an academic language for a specific field, perhaps standardizing between synonymous constructions. You could even use LLMs to accelerate the process. Maybe LLMs are a good thing that makes your work easier!
> You could even use LLMs to accelerate the process. Maybe LLMs are a good thing that makes your work easier!
Oh I 100% agree. LLMs are amazing. Plenty of neural agents in my brain are on board. I use them everyday to work on problems in a way not possible before.
I think what I was trying to express is that a contrarian idea might require developing a large number of your own original solver brain circuits that are very dumb, always running, trying to brute force a path for your idea to work.
Later you can then develop new circuits that recognize there's now a better approach, but those solver circuits that you grew are still in your brain, occasionally still running (like sometimes when I wakeup in the morning), because that's what you trained them to do.
In other words, there's a risk to taking on a contrarian idea in that you have to build up lots of brain circuits that will stick around for life, even if your idea turns out to be wrong. I'm sure people have written about this more eloquently. I need to search more.
Ahh yeah I was trying to help you repurpose these circuits given the new information. But perhaps that's not possible.
It sounds very similar to what happens with love. In my experience, at least, when you love someone you build up these circuits that care about the other person and you cannot break them down, it seems. You can ignore them but then there's this part of your brain you're ignoring.
So perhaps you could say you were/are literally in love with the idea.
> ...clearly ridiculous if you look at how LLMs work
This is well off topic now, but this doesn't follow at all. LLMs aren't brains and don't even resemble them that closely. LLMs demonstrate that it's possible to learn grammar from scratch, not that humans actually do. I for one think it's pretty plausible that humans have a little bit of neural wetware-acceleration for syntax. In much the same way, it's possible to implement AES with just an ALU and memory operations, but your CPU probably has special hardware anyway.
Don't forget that people in any organisation also need opportunities to get some experience which, I guess, isn't ever an optimal course of action for the task at hand. Of you have an idea and and opportunity to do something that's good to actually fit in a bigger picture, paying for a solution that does the exact thing might be more efficient, but it does rob that ones specific person of an arguably invaluable opportunity.
Individuals and organisations can also be impostors.
The impostor as individual cannot usually scale the lies. An organisation can be a total imposture or have internal structures that are impostor structures.
I'm on a Committee
(Phong Ngo)
Oh, give me a pity, I'm on a committee
Which means that from morning to night
We attend and amend and contend and defend
Without a conclusion in sight.
We confer and concur, we defer and demur
And re-iterate all of our thoughts
We revise the agenda with frequent addenda
And consider a load of reports.
We compose and propose, we suppose and oppose
And the points of procedure are fun!
But though various notions are brought up as motion
There's terribly little gets done.
We resolve and absolve, but never dissolve
Since it's out of the question for us.
What a shattering pity to end our committee
Where else could we make such a fuss?
Copyright Phong Ngo
RG
APR99
I found two posts of this poem to Usenet, dated 1998, one of them claiming that the author is unknown. Thus it wasn't written in 1999, making the entire Phong Ngo copyright claim inauthentic.
It looks like it appears in the fortune program's database. Search for the word committee in the following file:
I also found an old file of quotes (evidently from the alt.quotations newsgroup) where it is also attributed to Lipson, and additionally a
"Michael J. Irvin <IRVINMJ@WSUVM1>" is credited as having submitted it. It could be because of Irvin that it ended up in the fortune program.
Fifteen years ago I made a documentary about homelessness (https://graceofgodmovie.com/) and one of the things that many of my subjects talked about was the "homeless industrial complex". These were organizations who ostensibly helped homeless people, while also advocating for policies that created more homelessness and more problems for homeless people, like restrictive zoning to prevent development, and laws against sleeping in public places. I never dug into the extent to which this was true, but it certainly seems plausible. The cost of actually fixing the problem would be putting yourself and everyone in your organization out of work.
It could be simple dissonance with their beliefs as city residents (NIMBY, keep cities clean etc.). Same way a priest can be against abortion and divorce while daily helping victims of abuse and runaway kids.
Police system wants criminals to persist.
Justice system wants litigations to persist.
Medical system wants diseases to prolong.
Religious leaders don't want to us to reach our own god.
Political and military leaders want the country to be threatened.
Education system don't want us to learn on our own. So, they create artificial pressure to get educated.
Even top technological companies pay legal bribes to users not to use competatiors product. so on.
Only solution to all this is: Think how would we live if such entities did not exist. Then develop necessary skills and use them in daily life.
It's not actually police most of the time, it's for-profit prisons. They are by far the biggest lobby for keeping minor drug offenses illegal. Police don't actually benefit a whole lot from there being lots of crime, at least where I live -- it makes them look bad.
Sorry, I generalized it too much.
I was expressing the general tendency, not the exception, forgot put a star mark!
Yes, you are correct. There are good people in every system.
Even I have seen top doctors in top hospitals who
wished patients who had surgeries to return home as soon as possible.
I have seen (some you tube videos) some police persons who wished less crime.
I have seen engineers fixing bugs once for all!
This adage can be seen in the Neitz-sche's statement - "exploitation is a basic function of life".
It's funny too because it applies to almost every industry, and to almost every individual in those industries.
I wrote and maintain the codebase for a government ETL pipeline that an entire analytics team relies on. It would in no way benefit me to have good documentation, or tests, or a readable codebase. I put those things in because I'm not a sociopath.
The difference is that corporations behave like sociopaths, not most individuals.
Tangential but hilarious: back in the day, the British were buying fragments of dinosaur fossils from China. Unfortunately, they paid per fragment, so it was much more profitable to break the specimens into bits before sending them.
There's also the case of a dolphin that was trained to collect plastic trash (they paid it in fish). The dolphin realized that it could get more fish by tearing the plastic into shreds.
This feels “truthy”, but I wonder how much of this is selection bias. Organizations that do solve their problems tend to cease to exist or be relevant. In that sense you would expect only the organizations that have not (yet?) solved their problems to persist. It may not exactly be an incentive in the sense that most organizations behave in this manner, depending on how you sample across organizations.
The article mentions this in the very end, but isn't the "Shirky principle" just a case of perverse incentives? Allocating a budget to solving a problem continuously does set the incentives to prolong the problem.
I wonder how much paying after the problem is solved would help vs. paying in advance as it is often done for agencies / institutions.
It might be. How can we say when all be get are "solutions" that deepen it, perpetuate it, normalize it, etc.?
So yeah, I'm glad we agree. Thanks for proving my point.
Hint: Start by reading Matt Desmond's "Evicted" and then go from there.
Also, watch the Rob Redford film "The Candidate". Make note of how many of "the issues" - and the associated narratives - persist today. Imagine selling a product that promises a solution but ultimately only keeps selling you promises.
Another book that covers the topic - Quigley's the Evolution of Civilizations. Taken from a summary:
"Quigley defines a civilization as “a producing society with an instrument of expansion.” A civilization’s decline is not inevitable but occurs when its instrument of expansion is transformed into an institution—that is, when social arrangements that meet real social needs are transformed into social institutions serving their own purposes regardless of real social needs."
He spends some time defining institutionalization, when groups transition from being a group that was formed to accomplish a goal, to being a group whos goal becomes to preserve the group, the various stages involved, and the points where there's opportunities to rectify the situation via reform.
Interesting links in the article and comments, but it seems like two different concepts are mixed here – the nature of bureaucracies and wrong incentives. I struggle to understand how cobra and rat cases are "institutions trying to preserve the problem".
Cobra effect, in particular, is an immensely interesting topic of how rewarding the metrics can distort the system, otherwise known as Goodhart's effect. I highly recommend reading these two papers on the subject for anyone interested:
- Categorizing Variants of Goodhart's Law [1]
- Building less-flawed metrics: Understanding and creating better measurement and incentive systems [2]
Adding the "Cognitive Surplus" book to the to-do shelf, but it seems like Shirky principle is mostly about institutions and the nature of bureaucracies. Now, a good question would be - when and why Shirky principle does not apply to the institutions. My first thought is the difference between bureaucracies that have "owner" and ones who lost it.
When a bureaucracy has an owner (person or group of people) who can change the bureaucracy in response to external events, then it's probably unlikely to have Shirky effect (WHO and smallpox example in comments). However, bureaucracies that have lost their owner will most likely have this effect.
The best thing I read on this subject (how bureaucracies work) is Samo Burja's "Great Founder Theory" [3]. If anyone can suggest something along these lines on the fundamental principles of bureaucracies, I would appreciate a lot.
I have to leave the example of police and police unions - which have very powerful lobbyists who try their darnedest to keep as many things illegal as possible.
Our firefighters, who also do ems, are currently battling a bike lane plan. I guess in places like Amsterdam with bike lanes huge swaths of city must burn down routinely if you believed the bull pedaled by our fire dept.
Id we are being charitable to firepeople, I assume, that bikelane will reduce width of auto part of the road, thus making difficult: for firetruck to drive on it or make turns, other cars can not allow through the firetruck.
(Maybe amsterdam bikelanes were not an afterthought and took all this into the design)
Legal barriers to entry and similar regulations are often the form entrenched players use to preserve their problem.
It's a hard balance to strike because the examples of harm from too little regulation make easy soundbites. But the costs of the certification are complex and difficult to quantify, albeit very real.
“To oppose something is to maintain it. To be sure, if you turn your back on [Rome] and walk away from it, you are still on the road [to Rome]. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.” - Ursula K. Le Guin
Yes, and I think I really see this with authoritarianism and authoritarian impulses, both in politics and in organizations. The people who oppose authoritarianism often end up recreating it in their own image & ideology.
There's a word for this, it's called "managing," which means, "to extract value from." Anything that manages a problem exists to extract value from it - not to kill the golden goose by solving it.
It's why there is an entire class of people who benefit from creating chaos and disorder, because it creates opportunities for them to manage, or extract value, from it. If you build something, they are the ones who arrive to "problematize" and wreck it.
In some cases sure, but some things require management due to the nature of reality, and there is nothing to be done about it other than manage the problem. Take something banal such as DLP tools. There is no way to “solve” people stealing data, so tools were created to manage the problem. Then comes the team of people to manage the tool. Then the management structure to oversee the team. And so on. It would be nice to believe that this seemingly small problem could be “solved” once and for all, but that remains to be seen.
> municipal authorities, who realized that their best efforts at dératisation [extermination of rats] had actually increased the rodent population
I live in a complex of town houses. We have lots of rats and mice. This is seemingly an unsolvable problem, and our pest control company keeps adding poison traps, but the problem does not go away. They blame government, because the poison they are allowed to put in their doesn't kill the mice, (as this could kill eagles or other animals eating the mice).
We ended up buying our own standard issue traps lately that either slap them to death, or drown them, and the problem is getting better. Makes you question why the pest control company didn't do that. Or not, we know why.
I've always had a gut feeling that if the best solution to a pest problem is to buy a $10 spray from Home Depot and spray it around your house in 10 minutes, a pest control company is never going to do it because it doesn't make them look like pros.
I wonder then which other processes are "held back" at a certain level of complexity only because if made simpler, the optics of the process would devalue the people who charge money to do it. Oil and filter changes?
I'm gonna have to play advocate here for The Institution over The Individual. The jobs you mentioned (pest control, basic car maintenance) exist because a lot of people can't be bothered to learn how to do it properly.
(Or, to put it more cynically: a lot of people are idiots. Like, a lot. Cue the quote about the average man and the thought that half of humanity is dumber than that...)
A lot of things can go wrong with the $10 spray you bought from Home Depot. You could end up spraying it where you're not supposed to and at best you end up poisoned in the ICU, at worst you contaminate your area's water supply. You could spray it on a lazy Saturday afternoon but you forgot about your dog who loves to lick the floor; at best you end up with a very expensive vet bill, at worst your dog then licks your kids in the face and you end up with a dead dog and a dead kid.
To be clear, I'm not saying your gut feeling is wrong; I'd probably do the same, honestly. But it most certainly doesn't apply to everyone.
Further, oil and filter changes might be super easy, barely an inconvenience but you could end up not resealing and tightening a valve or a nut enough and the worst time to find that out is when you're doing 100KPH on a highway. Don't even get me started about people who think they could save money by using olive oil where they are supposed to use a specific type of coating grease or lubricant; after all, they buy olive oil from the grocery once every month so, as a car maintenance item, it's "basically free".
These people are not only a danger to themselves. They are a danger to everyone they share a road (or a residential area) with.
Of course, having an industry around these tasks doesn't eliminate the possibility of these dumb outcomes but having "professionals" who are have read the fabulous manual and are regulated put them head and shoulders above J. Handyman Smith when doing said job. Emphasis on regulated, we give that far less credit than it deserves. You might have also read the fabulous manual but if you are not regulated, not beholden to a specific standard or process, how do I even check you didn't cut corners? If you mess up somewhere, how can you and everyone else even begin to assess the magnitude of your fuck-up and thereby respond appropriately?
This is true but kind of tangential. My point was even for the pest control company if it were a 10 minute job, they wouldn't do it that way because the "spectacle of professionalism" that justifies the prices they charge (and perhaps recurring revenue) is lost.
For oil changes it is completely conceivable for a user-serviceable system to be built in, making it not much more difficult than filling air in your tires at the gas station. But the manufacturers have a perverse incentive to not build it.
If that was the best solution then the pest control companies would do that, except they'd try to buy the spray in bulk straight from the supplier and use their own permanent spraying devices instead of buying a series of cheap disposable cans that force them to bend over all the time.
To some extent our notion of what's "professional" is dictated by past experience of professionals using what works best for professionals. If that changes, an unofficial pest control business has a pretty low barrier for entry considering there are literal DIY solutions at retail.
I like to state this in the inverse, as the engineer's paradox: "A good engineer believes their purpose is to solve their problem so effectively that their position is no longer relevant to the organization".
Which leads to the corollary that, over time, all good engineers are eliminated from an organization (or are re-homed to a new position where they aren't as effective, until they do become effective, in which case they are re-homed again).
An alternative resolution of the paradox is that if every engineer solved their problem such that there were less problems than when they started, there would eventually be no more need for engineers.
The IT at the company I work for recently launched their own version of ChatGPT. Basically a chat interface that only covers the text generation. (Not image generation, OCR, etc.)
When they saw nobody was using their version, they straight out blocked the domain of OpenAI altogether and the page now show a message directing users of their solution.
It's a 80k + employee organization, so imagine the impact of such decision.
The TSA is also miraculous in it's ability to suck up billions of dollars in hidden fees added to every plane ticket and annoy tens of millions of people while performing a "service" which has been proven (many times, including by the TSA's own studies) to be completely unnecessary since cockpit doors were hardened and pilot procedures updated in 2002. Even if it was needed, their "service" has also demonstrated itself to be completely ineffective based on the number loaded handguns accidentally included in carry-on luggage and missed by TSA screening every year.
If I remember right, there are multiple types of leaders. One type is leader by necessity - basically you don't want to lead but do if you feel you're the best option.
I can say from experience that the scenario of these types of people becoming the dominant leadership style isn't possible as it's self-defeating.
I filled the role of a tech lead and had great feedback from it. We had a more senior dev join the following year. I told them they should ask for the official title and we could share the responsibilities that I had been performing on my own. 10 years later and im not even a senior dev... sucks for me I guess.
This seems reductive. For everything TSA misses they've caught plenty of other weapons that have no place in the cabin of an aircraft. No security can be perfect, so tradeoffs are inevitable. We can disagree about the thresholds, but it's not just theater.
But it's not the TSA's job to prevent murders in the air. (We already had a service specifically for that — the Air Marshals!)
The TSA's only job is to prevent planes from being hijacked or destroyed in a way that results in massive collateral damage.
And as the GP says, if you can't get in the cockpit, there become relatively few ways of doing this. (And the ways that do remain — e.g. binary explosives — are addressed by the more-limited carry-on regulations and security checks that every country does, and which the US already did before the TSA.)
An air marshall on a flight has one gun. If a determined group could reliably bring multiple guns into the cabin they're much more likely to overpower the marshall. From there they could open exterior doors and throw debris into the engines. Or perhaps their weapons could breach even armored cockpit doors.
Also, throwing debris into the engines would just result in an emergency landing.
The TSA is ridiculous and there isn’t a need to try to contrive examples to justify what they could prevent outside of hijacking.
If their goal was to prevent killing just a plane load of people, they would have to setup perimeters far around the airport to prevent people with a 50 caliber rifle from shooting up the cockpit during takeoff roll.
They would also need to block private air access to the airport because someone could just drive a truck of explosives underneath a plane load of people taxiing.
Put differently, it their job was just mass casualty prevention in transit caused by other people, they would need to be near every bus station, controlling road access near buses, guarding all railroad tracks with passenger routes, etc.
TSA lines are an obvious soft target and if someone wanted to take a lot of people with them, they could just use a suicide vest in the security lines. It would have the same chilling effects on the air travel economy and spread terror.
Yep - and it has been done already [0]. Stadiums, malls, and water supplies are other extremely soft targets. I tend to consider TSA to be 'make work' at this point...
I would hypothesize that the goal isn't preventing mass casualties, but rather preventing mass casualties that shift popular sentiment toward making war with certain countries. (The government calls these acts "terrorism", but citizens being afraid isn't quite what they have a problem with!)
The US government doesn't want a repeat of Sept 11. By which I don't mean "planes crashing into buildings"; but rather "operatives of some other country doing something on US soil, that results in US citizens becoming enraged-enough toward a particular other country, that — sensible realpolitik or not — any president that didn't declare war with that country, would be immediately impeached and replaced with one that would."
The US government, despite being a nominal democracy, wants to "the head to control the heart" when it comes to deciding when to go to war — because the heart is very easy to manipulate, and because there are always tons of realpolitik things going on that the heart knows nothing about.
I would guess that the government thinks that US citizens won't get too angry if terrorists bomb a bus, or a plane taking off/landing, or a line full of people. All these things are bad, but they don't strike me as being offensive to the American spirit.
The TSA, meanwhile, is very concerned about the airspace above... football stadiums. Which tells you about their thinking re: what would "offend the American spirit."
Burt Berlin, my mentor at Boeing, got his start working on the B47 (first jet bomber). They discovered that the pilot could not bail out into the wind stream, the force would just push him back in. Hence the development of the ejection seat to force him out.
Obviously the solution is just to allow concealed carry on planes and let law abiding citizens defend themselves, and keep the cockpit locked. Yee-haw!
"For everything TSA misses they've caught plenty of other weapons that have no place in the cabin of an aircraft."
How do you know? They seem very tight-lipped about how effective they are at catching things vs things they miss and at least one test done by the TSA itself resulted in a 95% success rate - for the terrorists (https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/06/reassessing_a...). But hey now you at least have the "right" to pay a fee to be labeled not a terrorist and go through security as if it was pre 9/11.
This really doesn't say anything about the benefits though. Just because people had "weapons" (some of which are basically harmless, like fishing tackle, or drinks), doesn't mean they prevented a threat. Yes, maybe the theater of it has dissuaded some from even attempting. Many, including myself, feel that many of the rules and the penalties for them are extreme.
I would argue that the main function of the TSA is to ensure the public feels safe flying. As long as the public perceives that the TSA is making it “safe enough” to fly it has value, regardless of its actual effectiveness.
I wouldn't say "completely unnecessary" because I believe that preventing another "shoe bomber" [0] is important. But, the way the TSA goes about doing that, doesn't seem to be worth the cost.
There's no amount of informed argument that will sway the extremists, so when it comes to politics, people are even bigger idiots. For the rest, it's more that they feel one candidate or the other is a necessary evil to avoid letting the worse candidate be elected. I don't think that's an issue on their part, at least as pertains directly to who they should vote for.
In 1902, Hanoi, Vietnam was plagued by rats. The French colonial government, in an attempt to control the rat population, offered a bounty for each rat killed. However, this plan backfired spectacularly. People started breeding rats to collect the bounty! And the rat population exploded. This led to a surge in the bubonic plague, which killed thousands of people.
This event is a perfect example of the Shirky principle. Once a solution becomes institutionalized, it may perpetuate or even exacerbate the problem to secure its own existence.
They don't need to intentionally try. Institutions that do things to solve problems compete against ones that do things to survive. Even if everyone, in their mind, is trying to solve problems, over time the institutions that survive are the ones that "solve the problem" in a self-perpetuating, self-empowering way.
I used to believe that any organization who takes morality seriously must fund it's equal and opposite organization. It would serve as a foil, collecting unhappy customer stories and potentially turning them into lawsuits. The second organization's stated goal is to end the first organization. But after a moment's thought, the Shirky Principle clearly makes this unworkable - both orgs want to survive, so the second org will, in general, tend to shirk its duties (so to speak) and function merely as a private welfare scheme and a cloak of respectability for the first.
All the concrete examples in this post refer to companies trying to prolong the problem they benefit from, but the summary at the top says "For example, the Shirky principle means that a government agency that's meant to address a certain societal issue..." They took a bunch of examples about companies and used them to imagine a problem of government.
Kelly does the same in his blog post, where he opines, without citation, that unions "inadvertently perpetuate the continuation of the problem (management) they are the solution to because as long as unions exists, companies feel they need management to offset them". Which to me is very amusing, but it's written in a style that encourages you to take it completely seriously.
Even the use of "institutions", which at least to me implies government more than it does the private sector, is not technically wrong, but I would argue is subtly misleading.
One example I've seen in government/non-business settings is needing to spend all budgeted money in order to avoid budget cuts. It's an incentive to look for problems in order to keep their funding as the solution.
Yes but the challenge is that the article is rhetorically lax because it doesn't provide a domain specific case example of the Shirky principle playing out in government yet submits the hypothesis that the principle supports backwards government behavior. It’s a fair point and it’s why people are presenting (the somewhat obvious but missing) government examples.
That's because we as humans like predictability. And hence, stock market rewards predictability. So, a large company's finance department allocates, say, travel budget, to all divisions based on their past year's travel spend +/- some margin. So, now, if you are division head, you are going to make sure your travel spend for the current period is at least as high as last cycle to ensure your travel budget for next cycle doesn't shrink. This means you may encourage your employees to use that travel budget by traveling even if such travel wasn't absolutely necessary. This happens all the time with all sorts of budgets in all sorts of organizations.
In businesses that is kept in check via competition. Startups can beat old companies that gathered too much such bloat, the same is not true for governments since they don't get competed out. Even in democracies most of the government bureaucracy stays even when the opposite party gets elected, you need a total revolution to flush that out and those happens very rarely.
No, but we already do. Huge amounts of public money is spent by government on consulting firms, private contractors and industry grants/incentives.
Yet the public doesn't generally consider these firms to be publicly funded organizations, despite taxpayer money being the primary revenue source for many of them.
The government switches external firms as soon as another firm seems to be able to do it better, that isn't true for the governments own parts. That makes the two fundamentally different, one can accumulate bloat forever the other will get renewed from time to time. Private profit seeking adds overhead though so which one is better depends on the domain we are talking about, in some cases private are better in other government are better.
We certainly do have to, at least for certain values of “we”. An example in the US is the current legal obligation to procure private health insurance. (There are exceptions to this obligation, generally lack of means, and in turn may qualify one to procure private insurance with tax subsidies.)
I had to refresh my memory, so I looked it up. What I see now is that the mandate is technically still law, but the tax penalty was eliminated. Not that it’s a meaningful distinction, just an odd legal artifact.
In some cases it doesn't even require creating "problems", the budget just needs to be spent to justify keeping it for the next round. I believe the military excels at this practice.
Incentives drive behavior and it would be wonderful to find incentives to minimize budgets reasonably and to ensure they can be properly increased when justified.
This is one of those things that seems amazingly dumb to me in business and in government.
If I run a department in a company that is responsible for say, customer service, there are a million ways I could improve customer service by doing things like increasing efficiency in "back of house" areas and the reallocating those funds to customer facing areas.
Problem is... I can't do that, because if I drive efficiency in the BOH area I don't get to keep the surplus resources I just created, it gets gobbled back up by the organisation at the next budget cycle... So there's literally a NEGATIVE incentive for me to optimise.
Now, I understand why the organisation feels the need to capture that surplus, there might be other areas of the business that leadership thinks needs those resources more. But what they're failing to understand is they're actually hurting both the team making the efficiency AND the team who needs the extra resources because now everything is just going to remain exactly the way it was.
This seems like a ridiculously easy problem to solve though... Just allow teams that drive efficiency dividends to retain say half of the benefit they generate.
The company still gets a chunk of resources back to redistribute the way they see fit, AND the team generating the efficiency are able to implement the rebalancing of resources WITHIN the team that incentives them to make the changes in the first place.
I would bet serious money that the NET divided returned to the central pool would actually be HIGHER even though they only get half of each block of surplus, because you would be providing SO MUCH more incentive to individual teams to find and implement these efficiency gains now.
> Just allow teams that drive efficiency dividends to retain say half of the benefit they generate.
I think that's a good start but like in the article, could somehow create perverse incentives (for example, if they keep the savings where does it actually go)?
The whole issue of incentives is fascinating to me and I think it would be wonderful to have a "Department of Game Theory" that could model and verify these behavioral assumptions.
> I think that's a good start but like in the article, could somehow create perverse incentives (for example, if they keep the savings where does it actually go)?
Is that really a problem, though? The other half of the savings still gets returned to the rest of the business to allocate as they see fit. Even if the half retained by the money-saving team gets lit on fire, that's still a net positive, overall.
You are right. Not only do you lose the resources you saved but you are now less resilient against changeable circumstances as you approach a natural maximum efficiency based on resources and circumstances. A fat inefficient department can pluck low hanging fruit at need a lean efficient one may fail under pressure even if more resources are provided late in the game because it may not be able to efficiently turn money into productivity without a significant ramp up in terms of recruiting and training.
> now everything is just going to remain exactly the way it was.
Consider it’s not dumb. Then what is it? Perhaps management knows full well everything you say but they’re also subject to the same incentives.
My hypothesis is the status quo makes the system more predictable all the way to the top, which in turn enables them to confidently pull the levers they want to pull without surprises.
If that hypothesis holds, it seems entirely rational to let support be.
no such corrective structure can exist, since the organization will cease to exist if the problem is fixed for eternity.
For example, homelessness. There's hundreds of different programs, all trying to "fix" homelessness, using different methods. Ultimately though, they do not make progress - not deliberately, but as an aggregate.
At least some governments have put in controls to stop end of year spending at least. Only part of the issue though. Centralization of common services has aided in this too.
It's a predictable outcome though. Budgets, by implication, imply that resources are limited. Someone, somewhere is deciding winners and losers.
A good budgeter will ask for input to determine the next budget. They will treat savings will delight, and not penalise those who created them. They'll find out if the saving is permanently, or temporary. They might ask for suggestions with how the budget might be allocated.
As the org gets bigger and bigger though it becomes impossible to do this on a individual-level basis. So next years budget is formed with incomplete data from this year.
Some savings are because on lack-of-need, some are because not everything happens every year, some are because of incompetence. But the bigger the organisation the less likely this individual variance can be taken into account.
“I promise to feed you as long as you eat all of it.”
“Ok sure, I’ll eat all the food all the time.”
“If I don’t eat all the food they’re going to feed me less, that isn’t an option”
What exactly do you propose? All companies are micro-utopias? Maybe it drives you crazy because you haven’t tried to see the other point of view. I imagine if you do try, it will make sense, for loose definitions of “sense”.
I’d also like to note that I agree, it is wasteful.
Which is odd because every government program torn down in the last 50 years has almost immediately resulted in a resurrection of the bad behavior by private corporations it was meant to stop.
Doesn't imply the opposite isn't true either. Spending on "fixing" the homelessness crisis in SF has ballooned as expected and a lot of nonprofits and agencies well positioned to take advantage have benefited from the unhoused bull market
The fault here lies with the SF electorate, who collectively wants their housing investment to be protected and homelessness to be fixed.
Actually, I would argue that this isn't even a conflict, because SF homeowners probably do not want a durable solution to the homelessness crisis. That would require bulldozing the suburbs. They instead want SF to sweep the homeless under some proverbial rug so that their presence does not tarnish the value of their homes. House them, but house them somewhere else. This isn't even an instance of the Shirky principle, it's just people using words in confusing ways.
However public toilets have multiple objectives. The more accessible they are, the less likely you are to smell or step in excrement, which also makes being in a city a nicer experience.
That wasn’t my experience in Europe, where pay toilets are common. First, they’re not all attended. Second, the nastiest toilet I’ve ever seen was a pay toilet at a train station in Norway.
Although I prefer the floor-to-ceiling stalls of Europe, I find it much easier to find a usable bathroom in the US.
To be fair, there's something about the Scandinavian diet that makes any kind of toilet you encounter literally the most disgusting experience possible.
Yeah, considering it would be most coveted job and best of the best in town would be falling over each other to be a toilet attendant. It naturally would lead to some of the finest toilet experience one can have.
It is extremely common that in most of Mexico, the pay toilets have such bad plumbing that everyone knows to not flush any toilet paper at all, it all goes in the bin no matter how dirty it is.
I’ve been in Europe a lot recently, and the running joke has been how much worse the toilets in Europe are than in the US. Even worse, the pay toilets seem to be of consistently worse quality than the free toilets in Europe!
This is also the perfect example of survivorship bias: all the institutions which effectively solved a problem don't exist any more today, as they were shut down or repurposed and renamed.
Neither were an example of the shirky effect though. Both were examples of misaligned incentives, or if you like the law of unintended consequences.
The lesson though is clear and useful. Be careful what you -measure- because people will optimize to improve the measure. When the measurement is a proxy for what you actually want, you won't necessarily get the outcomes you were hoping for.
For example what makes a good driver? I'd suggest patience and consideration. How many driving incidents are fueled by impatience or inconsiderate? Yet those are impossible to test for, so despite passing the driving test (operate the machine, know the rules) we end up with roads full of terrible drivers.
But neither are examples of the theorem the article is about. They were simply misleading.
I don't actually doubt that the problem exists in government... But why not provide any actual examples of it? Just endlessly re-hashed stories from a hundred years ago?
There are most certainly some papers out there which look into the issue.
The OP though, opened with a point on the rhetorics of the piece. As is usual, such conversations are tricky, evidence by this sub threads where we are discussing govt.
These examples are based around the idea of profit motive and these examples show a profit motive is rarely able to achieve the desired effect—these examples in no way speak to government agencies.
It does bug me when I see less than precise language, though I’m sure somewhere in this comment I’ll be less than precise and someone will point it out.
If you look up the definition, the spirit of the word is definitely not to convey companies or businesses.
In fact, sometimes the word is used to denote an especially popular or longstanding restaurant with a strong, devout customer base, “this hot dog joint had become a New York institution”. Stuff like that is usually said in jest and/or as hyperbole.
It’s possible for some companies to actually become institutions I think, but I can’t think of one off the top of my head. I don’t think size or date of founding matter, as I certainly wouldn’t call companies like Apple, Google, Walmart, or US Steel institutions.
Funny enough, though, sometimes you can use it to describe something, such as institutional knowledge.
Anyway, the article didn’t give off a pretentious vibe that some do with pseudo rigorous language etc, so it didn’t cause me any indigestion, lol.
> Which to me is very amusing, but it's written in a style that encourages you to take it completely seriously.
Because you expect me to take you seriously but instead of making a valuable assessment you instead resort to saying you find it amusing, as if the reason you find it amusing is obvious and implied. It isn't.
Fair point. To be specific, I find the idea that management only exists to combat the influence of unions ridiculous. A claim so surprising really begs for at least a fig-leaf of justification.
huh, yeah it implies that without unions companies wouldn't need any of that pesky management, just like without traffic lights cars wouldn't need brakes.
Perhaps it’s easier to study isolated corporations and draw generalizations than it is to study a large interconnected bureaucratic blob? I don’t generally see why problems of human nature wouldn’t present similarly across the public and private sector. If anything, finding a problem in supposedly efficient environments would imply the problem exists in less efficient environments.
I'm sure it is. But surely there would be some examples that could have been cited?
I'd suggest that in government, it's not so much human nature that's different as incentive structures.
I don't mean to argue that government is all sunshine, roses and enlightened altruism. Just that even if Shirky's theorem is just as true of governments, this article doesn't support that conclusion, despite being written as if it does.
I get what you’re saying and it’s a fair point (ack that it’d be nice to have a gov’t example) but I am just saying that I don’t think lack of citing a domain-specific case study implies a problem is irrelevant in a given domain. It’s rather strong of a statement to say that this article does not support the conclusion that government institutions or systems or entities are susceptible to the Shirky principle when it presents supporting evidence that is reasonably applicable to all types of institutions, systems, and entities.
My original post wasn't so much to suggest that the problem is irrelevant to government. I was just pointing out the interesting ideological maneuver: show evidence of a problem in companies, then ask the reader to imagine a problem in government. Kelly's post struck me similarly.
> supporting evidence that is reasonably applicable to all types of institutions, systems, and entities
I don't agree, but this verges into my own opinion lacking any supporting evidence. It just seems clear to me that publically funded institutions must have very different incentives in some areas than privately funded market institutions.
Again, I'm not saying this effect doesn't exist in governments. But it does need demonstrating, if one wants to actually argue that.
> supposedly efficient environments would imply the problem exists in less efficient environments.
Efficient at what? At making money.
Private enterprise wants to sells you a product that causes you to need more of their product. They all want to be drug dealers - that's the perfect business model.
Goldman Sachs analysts have asked whether curing patients is a sustainable business model.
Tobacco companies, management consultants, Apple creating 'ecosystems' of products that only work with each other, walled gardens, planned obsolescence. It's all kind of the same thing.
how does this translate into work of an average government department? I am sure you could make some parallels with clandestine activities by CIA, but outside of that - for transport, or healthcare?
And what are government bureaucracies efficient at? Manipulating the political system to get sweetheart collective bargaining agreements that minimize the accountability their members face while maximizing their compensation?
I think consumerism is orthogonal (but a fair subtopic to explore nonetheless). Not all corporate institutions are producers of consumer goods. Not are all consumer products designed (insidiously or not) for a recurring revenue stream. Furthermore efficiency usually refers to the cost required to achieve a desired outcome. Corporations are notoriously good and finding local cost minima in providing goods and services in ways that bureaucratic system aren’t. This isn’t controversial.
a) agree
b) Reads like chatgpt wrote it. Something about needing some stilted conjunction every other sentence.
c) If the lab leak theory for covid is true, that'd be a good government example. The whole anthrax thing was weird as hell too.
edit - actually I guess it's fuzzy. Where's the line between prolonging a problem and inventing a problem
A lot of examples in the comments are NOT the Shirky Principle.
The Shirky Principle is about how an organization wants to self-perpetuate.
The comments are just blaming any government program that might be miss-managed, or under-performing, for any number of reasons, regardless of any relation to Shirky. Shirky != Government.
Any organization can underperform for many reasons.
There can just be multiple groups with conflicting incentives.
None of the examples in the article actually support the hypothesis described, that "institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution".
The very first one is about how tax-filing companies don't want the government to make filing taxes easier, but that's because tax-filing companies aren't non-profits dedicated to making taxes easier to file -- they're corporations dedicated to making a profit.
The same with the bus company wanting to eliminate competition. The story about the cobras is a tangent about unintended consequences that has nothing to do with the supposed Shirky principle (it's actually an example of perverse incentives [1]), and so forth.
If you peel the layers back, you realize that this is essentially just the age-old conservative ideology that government intervention is bad because it never solves the problem but just makes government bigger.
And then you realize that counterexamples abound. Did the history of vaccines in the 20th century just wind up sustaining the ravages of smallpox and polio? Of course not. Does investment in a military lead people to attack you? Of course not. Do incentives for solar power actually play a role in preserving fossil fuel usage that otherwise could have been eliminated? Don't be ridiculous.
And guess what? The IRS is currently piloting programs to make filing taxes simpler. Despite the lobbying efforts of tax-filing companies.
The "Shirky principle" is something that sounds really clever, and it's so cynical you almost think it must be true... but that doesn't mean it is true. The evidence that seems to support it doesn't, and the massive evidence against it seems to be ignored.
The unrwa is an example of this. An agency created to help Palestinians ends up perpetuating the conflict by generating ever increasing numbers of refugees who can't work in their country of birth (Lebanon, Syria, etc) because they are denied citizenship.
It's actually quite the opposite. There's a great recent analysis in the Economist that disagrees [1] -- it claims the problem isn't with the UNRWA at all (as Israel has been claiming), but rather with neighbor states actively blocking solutions that would therefore allow the UNRWA to disband. Key quotes:
> Some Israeli officials have wanted to shut down UNRWA for years, accusing the agency of helping to prolong the conflict. They have seized the moment to press their case. For its supporters, meanwhile, the agency is above reproach, a group of selfless humanitarians doing vital work. As ever, life is more complicated than a morality play. The continued existence of UNRWA is a problem—but not for the reasons its critics think...
> This is a problem—but not one of UNRWA's making. Blame instead the Arab states that have refused, for decades, to offer citizenship to the Palestinians in their midst. The 1.7m registered refugees in Gaza (or their ancestors) lived under Egyptian control for almost two decades until 1967. Instead of offering them rights, Egypt left them in squalor.
Similarly:
> In many ways, UNRWA was the government. Hamas officials have all but admitted this in interviews over the past few months. They said Hamas’s role was to build up its military capabilities, not to care for their people—they had do-gooders for that. Israel, too, relied on UNRWA to mitigate the consequences of the draconian blockade that it (along with Egypt) imposed on Gaza. Even today, as Israel tries to abolish UNRWA, it still relies on the agency to prevent mass starvation in Gaza.
It's not the UNRWA that is trying to perpetuate itself. It is the actions of several countries that force the continued status of refugee on the Palestinians, Hamas not taking over basic governmental services, and Israel not providing humanitarian services in Gaza. The UNRWA is doing its best to do necessary humanitarian work when others aren't stepping up.
The idea that UNRWA is the primary party responsible for perpetuating the situation, in order to therefore perpetuate its existence, couldn't be further from the truth.
> neighbor states actively blocking solutions that would therefore allow the UNRWA to disband
UNRWA though is what enables them to do so. If a state has 1m refugees on your soil that don't have any support mechanisms, it's this state's big problem and they'd be soon forced to find some solutions, as it routinely happened with other refugees. To be clear, not all of these solutions are very good, but at least there would be a pressure on the host country to find one. With UNRWA, it is taking care of the "refugees" - who aren't actual refugees for 2 generations already, btw - so no pressure on somebody else to do anything. In fact, it's an established policy - when one of the prominent Hamas leaders was asked, why don't you work to take care of Gaza population, he answered - it's not my business, my business is to fight Israel (he didn't use the word, of course), and UNRWA business is to take care and feed people. Without UNRWA, this wouldn't be possible - no people would tolerate a government that doesn't bother to provide even minimal care to them. But UNRWA provides this safety net that enables the perpetuation of that situation. Hamas can be 100% full time terrorists, because they know the population wouldn't revolt - they have UNRWA to supply their basic needs.
> It's not the UNRWA that is trying to perpetuate itself. It is the actions of several countries that force the continued status of refugee on the Palestinians
UNRWA certainly isn't doing anything to stop it or voice any objection at all to it, as far as I know. They never asked or acted in any way to make anybody except them to step up.
> Israel not providing humanitarian services in Gaza
Israel provided a ton of humanitarian services to Gaza. Of course that was before people from Gaza murdered over 1300 of people from Israel and kidnapped over another 200. Then the idea kinda lost its attraction for a bit. One of the most cruel parts here that many of those who were murdered were of the most active participants in providing those services, and in fact for many of them that was exactly the reason they went to live so close to Gaza - because they wanted to help.
Hey - let’s call out Hamas as opposed to the people of Gaza. I get the inclination to do so, but missing a chance to call out perpetrators and organizations in favor of a broad population benefits the perpetrators.
Actually - Hamas and Netanyahu are apparently an example of the Shirky effect aren’t they? I havent followed this that deeply, so maybe there is some nuance lost here - but Netanyahu’s and his party kept Hamas alive, so that their position would be strengthened.
Sounds suss, like a "Jews created the Holocaust, actually" narrative. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but whenever someone presents their "evidence" of things like this it's invariably something like a badly shot 4 hour lecture from a "Bible scholar".
It is somewhat rare when our intuition is found wrong, however this is one of those times. The fact that a known hawk supported their ostensible enemy, is a weird situation.
> A year later, Netanyahu was further embarrassed when photos of suitcases full of cash going to Hamas became public. Liberman finally resigned in protest over Netanyahu's Hamas policy which, he said, marked "the first time Israel is funding terrorism against itself."
By the looks of it, this was going on for years.
But I am more interested in understanding if this had any impact on you? Do you still think this is BS? Are you cautiously looking for more evidence? Is the evidence sufficient to have changed your position? If so how?
These articles are quoting one of Netanyahu's fiercest opponents - the guy that right now says they need to wage campaign destabilize the government to topple him - as if these were established facts. And, btw, one of the architects of the completely failed "peace process", who let's say has a bit of an agenda to push here.
Yes, Israel had to cooperate to some measure with Hamas as the de-facto government of Gaza, absent any other and absent any desire to re-occupy Gaza. That included, yes, sending them goods and money, or allowing the money to be sent by other parties (note that Israel still is charged with making Gaza "open-air prison" simultaneously, because nothing has to make sense anymore). Because if Israel didn't do that, the whole world would cry out "Israel is blockading and starving Gaza" - there would be no way to pay the salaries of any civil servants (and not like there's much thriving business, except for contraband and drug trade, that can sustain Gaza economy) and deliver any goods. So yes, Israel was allowing money and goods to come to Gaza, and sometimes supplying them, because the only alternative was either to remove all the population there, or let them starve, or re-occupy them - and neither of these options were attractive. This is very far cry from "Netanyahu kept Hamas alive" - that's bullshit framing, Hamas was very much alive by itself, there wasn't a choice of not keeping them alive short of starving the whole population of Gaza or killing all the Hamas members. The former wasn't acceptable, and the latter is what Hamas eventually forced to happen, but Israel was hoping not to go there. Now when it's forced to go there, everybody is crying "how dare you!". Truly, damned if you do, damned if you don't.
> Do you still think this is BS?
Absolutely, it's complete and utter BS, and it's not news for me either - I know about the history of it much more than you'd ever hope to learn from occasionally reading a terribly biased article or quickly googling for a hot take. I lived there, I witnessed all the history of it happen, and I have read tons of materials about it for decades. What for you is a deep and profound revelation, for me is something that I knew for years, and unlike you, I know the full picture, I also know the context of it, the reasons for it and the consequences of it. That's why I say the idea that Netanyahu dreamed of Hamas never going away is complete and utter bullshit. Netanyahu and his policies leave a lot open to criticism, but this thing is on "doctors cause disease because that's how they get paid" level of conspiracy bullshit.
> Is the evidence sufficient to have changed your position? If so how?
There's no realistic "evidence" possible to change my position in such a question, because it goes contrary to decades of knowledge and context that I learned and witnessed. That would have to be evidence on the level that the whole Middle East history for the last 50 years has been some kind of staged conspiracy aimed at deceiving me, Truman-show style. It's on the level of proving with evidence that the Moon is actually made of Swiss cheese and you can get to it by jumping really hard, and that's actually how Swiss cheese is made - by going to the Moon and mining it there. If you can provide such evidence, go ahead, but I'm pretty sure no such evidence exists or can exist, because I don't see how it's existence is possible given what I know about the world around us. Maybe I am just crazy and we all live in simulation and anything is possible, but that's not likely. Much more likely is that some folks have read some biased bullshit - produced in part by people with very clear agenda - and decided they now know everything about the question.
Fascinating! Thank you for responding. Please know that my interest isnt in perpetuating a cycle of anger or hate, but primarily to see if we can somehow find ways to discuss difficult topics online.
Do note, I am not condemning Israel here.
I do not want to change your worldview or anything like that, nor am I litigating your lived history. This would be silly and rude.
That said, you have stated that there is no chance your position could be changed. Unfortunately expected.
So given that your position cant be changed, and I have gotten what I needed, let me help a bit by addressing a few assumptions made -
1) The Haaertz article is inaccessible to me, so I do not have any input from that individual biased against Netanyahu.
2) The second article is from CBC.ca, so I assume is also free of the dismissal causing bias. The quotes are from there.
Now when it's forced to go there, everybody is crying "how dare you!". Truly, damned if you do, damned if you don't.
This is a gross (and bizarre) distortion of why people are taking issue with the current operation in Gaza, of course. In a nutshell: no, they are very obviously not simply taking issue with the IDF "being there" in some form in response to October 7.
They are taking issue with the actions necessary to eliminate Hamas. There's no way to eliminate Hamas by hugging it out and singing Kumbaya in a drum circle. It requires war. And not a war somewhere where there's no civilians and all targets nicely marked up, but a war in real Gaza. And even now, when Israel suffered unspeakable atrocities, there are constant calls for Israel to stop and let Hamas recover and regain their strength, and ultimately just stop and go back to what was before - Hamas is attacking, Israel is suffering, UNRWA is feeding Gaza and Hamas both.
Imagine what would happen if Netanyahu started an action like this on October 6. The whole world would be sure that he's the next Hitler hellbent on committing genocide. He'd probably be declared international war criminal and Israel would be under sanctions in mere days. And everybody knew that. So Netanyahu instead did what the world demanded him to do - worked with Hamas. His mistake was (not only his personally of course, it was a widely shared delusion) that he believed it's really working and Hamas is slowly moving towards accepting Israel and becoming the real government of Gaza, and not just a terrorist group relying on UNRWA to perform essential government functions while they rob, murder and shoot rockets. But even if he weren't deluded, he's likely still have to cooperate with Hamas to some measure, because there weren't many realistic options otherwise. And that means, yes, that there would still be pictures of the boxes of money sent to Hamas, available for anybody to build their conspiracy theories on.
They are taking issue with the actions necessary to eliminate Hamas.
It's not, as you seem to be insinuating, the very idea of there being some kind of military response to October 7 that they take issue with.
Rather - they don't buy your contention that the current operation, the way it is being conducted, is necessary for (or even helpful towards) that goal. Or even for the safe return of the hostages.
Meanwhile, by now they find themselves forced to acknowledge certain ulterior motives at play -- based on how the current operation has been conducted on the ground, all the rather abhorrent statements by government officials and public figures, all those batshit insane TikTok videos that the IDF's best and finest have proudly broadcast to the world, etc.
That's the way of the hypocrite. While I don't object to the military action in theory, as an abstract concept, but as long as any actual military action happens in reality, I would object to it and demand an immediate cessation of it. So what's the point of not objecting in theory, if you object to any instance in practice?
> they don't buy your contention that the current operation, the way it is being conducted, is necessary for (or even helpful towards) that goal.
Destroying Hamas is not helpful for the goal of destroying Hamas? That's certainly a novel take. I wonder how do you imagine a military operation with the goal of destroying Hamas looking like. Is it, in your mind, being conducted by sending them a sternly formulated emails, expressing your grave concern? Do you realize that Hamas has - or, rather, by now "had" - over 30k soldiers (that we know of), 18 years to dig in and stockpile weapons, explosives, build miles-long tunnel system, establish command points in every hospital, school and mosque that exists in Gaza, and they couldn't care less about any "international law" or war crime statutes? A war with such type of an enemy is not going to look very pretty on your screen. Fortunately, it's also not the goal of it.
> all those batshit insane TikTok videos that the IDF's best and finest have proudly broadcast to the world, etc.
I have no idea what you're talking about (I don't use Tiktok, for starters, neither I recommend it to anybody else, and I would agree that any IDF soldier that uses it at the site of military action probably should get a stern talking-to by the unit commander, but of course it's inevitable since the soldiers are people, sometimes - very young people, and would occasionally do things that aren't in the best judgement). But whatever "batshit" things you've seen on Tiktok, I don't see how it's relevant to anything.
> Meanwhile, by now they find themselves forced to acknowledge certain ulterior motives at play
Again, I have no idea what you mean - could you speak your point plainly?
Destroying Hamas is not helpful for the goal of destroying Hamas?
What's the point of not objecting in theory, if you object to any instance in practice?
Unfortunately it appears that you're either grossly misreading what I'm saying, or (intentionally or otherwise) going through a lot of weird mental gymnastics to make it look like I'm saying things that I'm plainly not. So I'll have to bow out, and let you sort this stuff out on your own.
It is interesting - though not surprising - that when asked to speak your point plainly, in case I misunderstood you - you complain I am "grossly misreading" it and refuse to do so. Of course if you refuse to speak plainly, it's easy to misunderstand - or, it's easy to say something and then when proven wrong, claim it's the opponent's fault for misreading it.
The basic point is that, while you seem to think that if people oppose Operation Iron Swords, it's because they take issue with "Israel taking necessary action to defend itself" -- when very obviously that's not what they take issue with at all.
What they object to, rather with extremely high (by all appearances intentionally so) number of civilian fatalities. Combined with numerous blatant statements by government officials and public figures in support of a complete removal of the entire population of Gaza.
What is normally called a genocide, in other words.
No, it's a well-known fact. Netanyahu has lobbied within Likud to support Hamas as a way to prevent the PA from making inroads in Gaza (which is seen by most in the West as the only way for a Palestinian state to occur, since Hamas is classified as a terrorist organization). Basically, keep the terrorists running Gaza, and no one will make a serious effort to pressure Israel into recognizing or allowing Palestinian statehood.
What this article describes is that Netanyahu treated Hamas as de-facto government of Gaza - and cooperated with them in certain things. This is, btw, exactly what Israel has been accused of not doing - e.g. not letting Gazans work, not letting them receive goods and money, etc. But in reality, Netanyahu has been doing all that - under the mistaken impression that Hamas can be, eventually, converted from purely military genocidal terrorist group to kind of hostile, but manageable government of Gaza. This wasn't done because he liked Hamas, but because there's no other option in Gaza, and the alternatives would be very costly and politically untenable - you can't blockade million-sized territory for long before "international community" cries out, and you can't re-occupy it. All that changed on Oct 7, of course, where this policy has proven to be a colossal failure - and that's what Netanyahu and others who pushed this policy will have to answer for, after the war has ended. But none of this makes the claim that Netanyahu actually preferred Hamas as a partner any of a fact - he had a choice, either cooperate with Hamas, ignore them or destroy them. All the world screamed at him "cooperate immediately!". He cooperated. This turned to be a catastrophically mistaken choice. But ironically, now everybody screams at him "how dared you to cooperate! It's all your fault now!". Not that he had much choice - if he chose anything else before Oct 7, what occurred would also probably be listed as his fault, because how dared he not to cooperate? If only he cooperated, nothing like that would happen!
> But in reality, Netanyahu has been doing all that - under the mistaken impression that Hamas can be, eventually, converted from purely military genocidal terrorist group to kind of hostile, but manageable government of Gaza.
That is literally the opposite of what Netanyahu himself said. He told Likud directly that propping up Hamas in Gaza was good for Israel because Hamas would never be accepted as a legitimate government, and that would prevent 2-state talks from ever seeing progress.
Stop making up b.s. just to excuse Israel's fault in this.
Israel's fault in what? I wonder what you mean by "Israel's fault" - i.e. what Israel should have done and didn't?
Netanyahu said a lot of things over the years - including, yes, that Hamas is not going to be accepted as legit government by the world (though I'm not sure it's true) - but in his actions, he was treating it as de-facto government, even if not legitimately accepted formally. Actual political reality is a bit more complex than one slogan. And part of this reality has been that Israeli government tolerated Hamas - and it's significant abuses - because they thought it's a manageable evil and the alternatives were worse. This is a far cry with "keeping Hamas alive" - it's "not destroying Hamas because it's too hard and politically untenable, so we should make the best of what we have". If you think that there was some way for Netanyahu to magically make Hamas go away and he didn't because he like it - that's what I'd talk "talking out your bum" - nothing of the sort was ever possible. You can see what it actually takes to do this right now - and this only became politically possible after October 7. And even now the final destruction of Hamas is not assured at all - Biden admin, for example, works very hard to somehow avoid it (without saying it publicly of course), and they may yet get their with and Hamas will be spared - to repeat the same again for another 20 years.
That's a creative way of explaining things, but if you were correct the unrwa would have long since disbanded and all the refugees handed over to the unhcr for integration into their country of birth.
That this has not happened is the clearest proof against what you wrote. Tell me: If what you said is correct, why does the unrwa even still exist as a separate entity?
The unrwa has a policy of always expanding the number of refugees, the unhcr has the opposite policy.
Yes, it's true the Arab states have not made things easy, but the unrwa is not even trying - it's simply not part of the mandate. It is however the mandate of the unhcr.
Do you think host countries want to admit refugees as citizens? They never do, but the unhcr manages to make things work. If the unrwa would try as hard they would cease to exist, which is a perfect example of this article.
"UNRWA re-opened its new inscription process in 1992. Palestine refugees who were not registered in the early fifties can now apply for registration, provided that they approach any UNRWA registration office in person and are able to produce valid documentation proving their 1948 refugee status. Since 2006, husbands and descendants of registered refugee women, known as ‘married to non-refugee’ (MNR) family members, have also become eligible to be registered to receive UNRWA services."
> There is actually no mechanism to take someone off of UNRWA membership roles! Once a member, always a member, and so are all their kids. Forever.
This is silly.
It's just registration to receive services. You don't need to "take someone off of UNRWA membership roles" -- just stop using the services.
You make it sound like an organization that's trying to sinisterly enroll everyone it can find for nefarious purposes, even their children, with no escape! It's a humanitarian aid organization for goodness sakes. If you don't want to use its services, then just don't.
I mean, if a humanitarian aid organization provided services to people but not to their children, that seems like it would be a pretty big problem, no? I'm baffled how you can think that providing services to children is a bad thing.
That's not true though, the UNRWA is the organization that holds the list of people that Palestinians demand to be allowed into Israel. Despite that those people have little connection to Israel, they were not born there, and have never been there. All they have is some ancestor who lived there a long time ago.
> I mean, if a humanitarian aid organization provided services to people but not to their children, that seems like it would be a pretty big problem, no? I'm baffled how you can think that providing services to children is a bad thing.
At the very minimum they should hold two lists: Actual refugees and poor people who might need help.
But worse, they are perpetuating permanent refugees - because it's against the UNRWA policy to pressure host countries to give citizenship to people who were born there, if those people are registered with the UNRWA. The country in turn is quite happy to let the UNRWA pay for services for them.
The easiest way to understand this is to compare to the policies of the UNHCR. There are no permanent refugees with the UNHCR.
It's so much more than that. It's a political affiliation; it's a status; it's a stigma in some circles.
We can all easily imagine wanting to distance ourselves from certain organizations. To find you cannot disentangle yourself, that anyone can look you up and draw conclusions from your affiliation, is an problem. Not 'silly'.
Can you provide a reputable source for those claims?
I can't find anything in the (extremely long) Wikipedia article that suggests anything like that, or anything from a quick Google search.
It's not a political party. It's an institution -- a UN agency -- that provides education, social services, and health care, that someone may or may not be eligible for.
If you attended a school run by them as a child, or received health care from them, I'm having an extremely difficult time trying to imagine how that becomes a "stigma" that you need to "disentangle" yourself from, or why anyone would ever describe that as an "affiliation". It's just where you went to school and got medical care. (Which, you know, is usually better than not going to school or not getting medical care.)
That has nothing to do with anything I wrote in my comment, as far as I can tell.
Unless you can explain further how the right of return is somehow a political party, or a "stigma" that people are trying to "disentangle" themselves from?
> Unless you can explain further how the right of return is somehow a political party, or a "stigma" that people are trying to "disentangle" themselves from?
I guess I assumed you had some basic knowledge of the situation there.
Explaining properly would take too long, but in short part of the reason there is no political solution to the conflict, is that the Palestinians insist on the right of return to decedents of former Palestinians into Israel proper. Israel would obviously never agree to that. (They could return to the newly created Palestine, but apparently that's not an option for them - they only want Israel.)
So that's your political party connection. And as for stigma anyone who is listed on that register is basically permanently excluded from citizenship in their country of birth.
Former Palestinians who were born in Lebanon would prefer to be Lebanese citizens and work there, but they can't, because of that registry. etc, etc, etc, for all the other Arab countries in the area (Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, etc). No one wants Palestinians, so I'm sure a ton of them would prefer to shed that label and live like other Arabs in those states, but they can't.
Thanks -- I understand what you were trying to say now.
And I do have some basic knowledge. But I still don't think what you're saying has anything to do with a "stigma" or "political party".
The whole "citizenship in their country of birth" thing is a red herring. Lots of countries don't provide citizenship to the children of immigrants who are themselves not citizens. There are jus soli countries that provide citizenship if you are born there, and jus sanguinis countries that determine citizenship based on the citizenship of your parents. Lebanon is a jus sanguinis country.
So I don't see how this has anything to do with whether someone received services from UNRWA. Lebanon isn't providing citizenship to Palestinians if their parents aren't Lebanese. They wouldn't provide citizenship to an American born in Lebanon either, if their parents weren't Lebanese.
You're using the UNRWA as some kind of stand-in for nationality, but past history with the UNRWA isn't the relevant part here.
Unless you can tell me that a Palestinian, born to Palestinian parents, on Lebanese soil, does somehow get Lebanese citizenship if their name doesn't show up on any UNRWA data? Which I don't believe is the case.
In other words, none of this has to do with some affiliation with UNRWA. It's just quite simply your citizenship period.
It's not that UNRWA creates the problem as in maintaining people in refugee status, but that in order to operate in Gaza they have effectively become part of Hamas.
Even that Economist opinion piece has this line: "That was the role of UNRWA: to preserve the status quo."
> The idea that UNRWA is the primary party responsible for perpetuating the situation, in order to therefore perpetuate its existence, couldn't be further from the truth.
The article elides much. The reason for neighboring Arab nations not really trusting Palestinians, for instance. The work of UN Watch in exposing UNWRA as being too cosy at best with Hamas, for another. "... couldn't be further from the truth" is quite a stretch.
The Shirky principle is: "institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution".
I see no evidence that UNRWA is the one trying to maintain the status quo.
Rather, other parties are trying to maintain the status quo, and UNRWA is providing humanitarian aid until things change, to alleviate misery.
I think it's quite obvious that if a peaceful solution were found in Israel and Palestine, the UNRWA would very quickly wind down its operations. With a lot of its staff possibly being hired by the local government.
The full situation over there is extremely, astonishingly complex. But the "Shirky principle" tries to posit some kind of simplistic answer. And it's just wrong.
> I see no evidence that UNRWA is the one trying to maintain the status quo.
You are one of the rare few. UNRWA is losing funding precisely because this evidence exists and is compelling.
UNRWA could not have been ignorant of the terror tunnels beneath its HQ. UNRWA school curriculum has taught anti-Israel rhetoric to children for decades. UNRWA telegram channel promoting and celebrating terror attacks. Not to mention Hamas employees working at UNWRA.
This is all beside the main point of the number of Palestian refugees ballooning from 500K in 1948 to 5.6 million today.
> I think it's quite obvious that if a peaceful solution were found in Israel and Palestine, the UNRWA would very quickly wind down its operations.
Indeed. That + Shirky's Principle goes far to explain UNWRA's behavior.
Please don't say I'm one of the "rare few" -- that presupposes that there's some kind of broad consensus here, which there absolutely is not.
And the things you're saying have nothing whatsoever to do with "Shirky's principle", whether they are true or false.
I'm not taking any kind of political position on UNRWA.
But what I am saying is that they don't hold any kind of power to change the situation here. They're not any kind of major player in the geopolitical situation. There's not a state actor that has the power to be negotiating over the status of the Palestinians with Netanhayu.
The idea that, if it weren't for UNRWA, there would be no more refugees because they'd all have gone back home or been peacefully resettled elsewhere, is absurd. To suggest that they are the ones creating the sitution -- rather than the actions of Israel, Hamas, and the PA, together with neighboring countries and the US -- is totally at odds with all historical fact.
It's like saying that the Red Cross foments war so that it can have wartime casualties to treat. It makes no sense.
It's pretty simple: The UNRWA should refuse to provide services that the local government is obligated to provide. For example in Gaza the UNRWA has the role of government, instead of Hamas. If UNRWA refused, then Hamas would have had to do that, and they probably would drop this idea of perpetual war with Israel, because they have obligations to their citizens.
In Lebanon Lebanon refuses to give even basic services to the people who were born there, because the UNRWA does it. If Lebanon was on the hook for schooling and other basic services they would probably grant work permits to the parents.
This would eventually lead to integration with the host country.
But instead the UNRWA does it, leading to perpetual refugee status.
That's a backwards way of assigning moral responsibility.
Would you say that the Red Cross should refuse to provide services that the local military and health services you think are "obligated to provide"? Because by treating wounded soldiers and civilians, they might extend the length of fighting? In other words, that the Red Cross shouldn't exist at all either?
Your argument suggests that any and all international humanitarian aid is illegitimate in any conflict, because without it one side might "drop the idea" of making war -- or, more sinisterly, "drop the idea" of defending themselves.
I'm not taking any sides in this particular conflict. But the idea that assigning responsibility for prolonging a conflict to a humanitarian aid agency trying to help civilians seems morally absurd.
> That's a backwards way of assigning moral responsibility.
"Moral responsibility" is a non-sequitur. The discussion is whether UNRWA perpetuates the problem it purports to solve. Several of us have demonstrated that they do this.
You seem each time to reject the evidence because you find the premise itself incredible. It is indeed a bitter pill to swallow, that one of the bulwarks of civilization such as the Union of Nations would be so corrupt, but the evidence is clear.
> ecause without it one side might "drop the idea" of making war -- or, more sinisterly, "drop the idea" of defending themselves.
Well, see, you are taking sides in this conflict. Historically, Israel only attacks when it is attacked. In other words, Israel would like to be left alone. No one argued against Palestinians defending themselves, but there is no legitimate reason to attack Israel, and particularly not Israeli citizens. As we've demonstrated repeatedly in this thread, UNWRA has enabled Palestinians to maintain a perpetual war against Israel for 75 years. If UNWRA had not been doing this, it's at least arguable that Palestinians would have devoted their energies to making a legitimate state that took care of its citizens rather than the situation as it is today: Gaza ruled by a well-funded terrorist organization that literally has "destroy Israel" and "never compromise with Israel" in its charter, while legitimate government operations are left to UNRWA. Even if you believe the Palestinians have some kind of right to "resist" the "occupation" of "their land" (which is taking a side) and so commit acts of terror, it should not be the UN that funds it.
> "Moral responsibility" is a non-sequitur. The discussion is whether UNRWA perpetuates the problem it purports to solve.
This is incorrect. To determine whether an organization is perpetuating the problem it is trying to solve, one has to assign blame for that problem being perpetuated. Also known as moral responsibility. Just because a problem is being perpetuated, and some organization is trying to solve it, doesn't mean the problem is being perpetuated by the organization trying to solve it.
This is the fundamental logical mistake people are making why they try to claim that UNRWA is the one perpetuating the situation.
> You seem each time to reject the evidence because you find the premise itself incredible. It is indeed a bitter pill to swallow, that one of the bulwarks of civilization such as the Union of Nations would be so corrupt, but the evidence is clear.
Please stop trying to make these assumptions about me. And this conversation has nothing to do with whether the UNRWA is corrupt or how much. It is solely about whether it is an example of "Shirky's law".
> Well, see, you are taking sides in this conflict.
Please stop reading things I didn't say into things I actually did say. You took a totally generic sentence of mine, that I intentionally made generic, and are then somehow accusing me of taking sides. I don't know how to be clearer that I am not.
I am saying that UNRWA is not an example of Shirky's law. You're bringing all sorts of claims about the UNRWA that may be interesting in other conversations, but are irrelevant here.
And it's funny how nobody seems to want to answer my question of why, if they think UNRWA is perpetuating the conflict, the Red Cross isn't similarly perpetuating every conflict it provides services in. Because of course it's not. And logical consistency would require one to admit that therefore UNRWA isn't either.
If you want to meet our arguments, refute the specific claims we make; either that the facts are false, or that the facts do not demonstrate Shirky's law. Otherwise we're just arguing in circles.
To recap, here is a list:
UNRWA collaborates with Hamas. UNRWA schools teach anti-Israel rhetoric to children. Hamas employees work at UNWRA. UNRWA expands the definition of refugee beyond that of UNHCR to include children of refugees and those who have citizenship in other countries. UNRWA replaces the normal operations of government leaving Hamas free to use vast resources to commit terror.
To demonstrate that Shirky's Law does not apply to UNRWA, you should refute each of those specific claims.
> you should refute each of those specific claims.
Sorry, that's just not how it works.
You're making a number of highly controversial, cherry-picked statements that are being heavily debated in the news. It doesn't really matter if a handful of Hamas employees may or may have worked at UNRWA, when it has a staff of 30,000. It's irrelevant if some educational materials take a locally-biased political viewpoint, when the history curriculum in every nation takes a locally-biased political viewpoint.
But I don't have to refute any of your arguments because none of them have any relevance whatsoever to Shirky's law applying. Whereas you continue to refuse to engage with the analogy to the Red Cross, even after I've pointed that out that you aren't responding to that. So I just can't take this discussion seriously anymore, when you keep trying to divert the discussion into irrelevant tangents, and won't engage with the simple, direct comparison that reveals the foundational inconsistency in your logic.
> The idea that, if it weren't for UNRWA, there would be no more refugees because they'd all have gone back home or been peacefully resettled elsewhere, is absurd
And yet this is exactly what the UNHCR does. A refugee settles, and they are no longer a refugee.
> To suggest that they are the ones creating the sitution
You're arguing against a strawman. The Arab war on Israel in 1948 created the refugee crisis. No one argued any different.
There is evidence that UNWRA is perpetuating the situatiyon, your personal incredulity notwithstanding. This is but a single example, but it is enough to demonstrate that they intentionally exacerbated it.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/unrwa-textbooks-still-include-...
"The Nakba" was a result of the war begun by Arabs. Without that war, there would have been no "Nakba". Israel invited the local Arabs to participate in the new nation. Some Arabs took them up on the offer, and they and their descendents live as full Israeli citizens today. Some chose to flee because they listened to their leaders who did not have their best interests at heart. Some of those who fled returned and some became refugees. Those who chose to fight or were historically responsible for pograms were expelled. That is the Nakba in a nutshell. Blaming Israel for the "Nakba" is self-pitying ahistorical revanchism full stop. The Nakba was FAFO in action, a lesson that is apparently difficult for Palestinians to understand.
Overly reductive take. And whitewashes the massacres that Israel perpetrated in the civil war prior and during the war in 48. Many fled for fear of being killed by Israeli forces or were actively removed from their land.
From the conclusion of that article, emphasis mine:
> The Palestinian refugees have been forced into abject poverty by the Lebanese government's denial of their rights to remunerated employment, social security, public health care, public education and property ownership. The argument that Palestinian integration into Lebanese society would either cause them to lose their right of return or would upset Lebanon's sectarian balance is just a pretext the Lebanese government uses to discriminate against the Palestinians, whom many Lebanese blame for causing the Lebanese civil war.
Nowhere could I see how the UNRWA is "generating ever increasing numbers of refugees"? Do you have any other sources?
I replied to you in a different part of the thread.
What you are missing in that conclusion is that the UNRWA has no mandate to even try to get their members full citizenship in Lebanon. It's easy to blame Lebanon, and you should, but UNRWA is utterly complicit be encouraging this status.
The issues around the UNRWA are a lot more complex than what's presented in the article. I appreciate you bringing documentation to back up your posts when I've asked for it.
I've realised from reading most of what you've brought so far that I'm not going to be able to develop a sensible opinion on the matter. It requires a lot more background and understanding of the region than I have. With that said I'm going to let this thread go. You may be right- I'm not convinced yet, but I think I've gone as far as I care to for the sake of an HN thread.
The article isn’t as hyperbolic as you’re suggesting it is. It admits that there are cases where the benefits of solving the problem outweigh sustaining it. The existence of a generalizable pattern does not imply the wold reduces solely to the pattern. It is not conservative to say institutions try to preserve themselves nor to suggest that government institutions, systems, and entities are equally susceptible to the plight of preservation, even inadvertently. Traditional conservatives are allergic to change and the conservative mindset may be at fault for institutions behaving conservatively… but we won’t have that discussion if you write off a rather wise observation as politicized anti-government propaganda.
Or, you’re preserving the HN community by finding some absurd hyper reductionist way to turn an interesting subject into a problem. We could go on…
There are numerous and quite normal unproblematic examples of how self-preservation is unwanted and destructive. I for one am interested in learning how and why these incentives evolve and how to structurally combat them so that we never have to talk about harmful examples of the Shirky principle ever again. Concretely apropos and not one whiff of meta.
I don't think the examples were exhaustive. As I read it, the writer tries to extrapolate and generalize his principal to everything and everywhere as some sort of natural law; so it'll affect governments, unions, companies, etc...
I think that's a fair and charitable reading, that maybe they've just overgeneralised a bit, or maybe just haven't chosen the exact mix of examples they "should" have.
The ideological lean, though it may have been completely innocent or accidental, stood out to me.
I think he’s pointing out what your question is a victim of - rhetorical devices that ensure a certain point of view is reinforced.
The opening line is about institutions, while the examples are about firms. The point being that this will focus people on government behavior, while the examples are anything but.
As we can see in the comments, it is somehow effective even when we are discussing the structure of the argument.
The conversation naturally generates poles, which end up reinforcing the govt wastefulness argument - without the underlying article itself supporting those comments.
This is pointed out by people who see the device, but this counts as an indicator that they are “pro-government”.
Discussion ensues in the comments, entrenching the rhetoric, without having to resort to valid examples.
I love such constructions, like stingers that dig deeper if you try to pull them out.
I'm implying that both the author of this article, and Kevin Kelly, have an anti government bias that they're supporting using examples from the private sector.
(Unions aren't the government, but I'm lumping them together in comparison to the private sector.)
Government institutions may well do that (and I personally expect they do), but the (private sector) examples presented don't actually support that conclusion.
don't know if he is but the point stands regardless. the space around this question private v public is more than active enough for the writer to know better than skip past it and assume they are identical.
personally i think they are basically identical but it is a little dirty.
I think the broadest definition of the role of government is to regulate. With that in mind, it would mean that the government (and its agencies) would be intentionally failing to regulate well so that there is a perceived continued need to regulate?
As asinine as that sentence sounds, it actually seems to be exactly the state we're in right now. We have tons of government and tons of regulation, and yet we still see corruption and criminality everywhere, and people begging for more regulation to undermine it.
I guess the principal "Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution" can apply to almost anything though, as really it is talking about "incentives"?
Reminds me of a recent post about getting a message in Slack with a link to another app about a meeting in Zoom, ... and a number of steps involving a bunch of other apps each costing $15/month/user.
In the end nobody does anything but move small amounts of data through those apps.
I don't understand why saying institutions and focusing on government, the current example I have in mind for this is Google relationship with search and Ads in the AI era.
That's what I thought was weird. It starts and concludes with "For example, the Shirky principle means that a government agency [...]", but all the actual examples in-between are of private companies causing problems, not government agencies.
The cobra and rat examples are examples of perverse incentives and the charitable interpretation of the tendency for institutions to preserve the problems to which they are solutions is that the "obvious" answer, such as "pay people to bring us cobras," may involve perverse incentives which didn't occur to the person who was like "I want this gone. I have a simple and direct solution: I will pay people to make it go away."
I am usually speaking of homelessness when I talk about the Shirky Principle. Programs to "help the homeless" are often well meaning but require there to continue to be homeless people to keep doing their work. So tying help to their current status can actively help keep people stuck.
It can be quite hard to decide you want to "help the homeless" or "decide to do something about homelessness" and find some way to mentally get yourself out of that box. It took me a long time to get to where I wanted to be mentally on that issue.
Actually doing something effective about a problem sometimes means not doing anything that sounds like solving that specific problem is your real goal. And that's kind of a tough place to go mentally and emotionally for most people.
> Actually doing something effective about a problem sometimes means not doing anything that sounds like solving that specific problem is your real goal. And that's kind of a tough place to go mentally and emotionally for most people.
Can you give an example? I feel like there is a really key insight here but I'm having trouble parsing it.
Sorry, I'm looking for something and just happened to trip across this and am seeing it for the first time.
I am an environmental studies major who wanted a career in urban planning and I spent years homeless and most stuff aimed at "helping the homeless" does little or nothing to solve the problem. A lot of it is just crisis management -- helping them eat one more day.
I have done a lot of analysis of the problem space and the single strongest factor in increasing rates of homelessness is rising rents (presumably relative to wages) and lack of adequate amounts of "affordable" (small space) housing appropriate to the actual needs of our current demographic and it's really, really, really hard to even try to talk about that in a nutshell because people have trouble readily understanding what I'm saying at all. Phrases like "affordable housing" seem to just trigger a lot of people and not convey at all what I am trying to describe.
So I increasingly just blog about housing solutions and feel like it's mostly pointless to try to talk about "helping the homeless." I want our housing issues solved and that means largely disengaging from discussions about homeless people.
I want to see fewer people on the street and that means we need to solve our housing crisis and most people don't see it that way at all.
I feel like I already said that above but maybe not or maybe that helps clarify something for you.
Of course institutions preserve the problem - that is the reason for their existence - so they are in a fight for survival to keep a systemic problem going. It is even better for them if the institution has managed to enshrine its position in law, creating huge barriers to entry for any upstart that tries to come up with better solutions. Taxis, medicine, banking - there are so many examples.
If you ask me, a freer market is the answer - less intervention, allow simple economic forces to play out. But the inclination is to have more government meddling etc to fix the mess, which has the opposite effect that it was intended to have. This is such a common pattern however, one ought to be asking whether the "unintended effect" (of entrenching the problem) is in reality an "intended effect", with only lip service being paid to 'doing the right thing' to facilitate legal changes.
It's a good article for those who are unfamiliar with these cautionary tales of second order effects and fraud. As someone who believes government is a solution to many problems, these lessons are critical.
I disagree with the universality of the statement "any institution made to solve a problem will preserve it". They back off this in the caveats section.
Two important things to prevent this is to consider the influence of money on a solution/organization, and what kind of oversight is needed for an organization. Also, when spinning up a program, asking "is the problem this org solves a permanent one?" Or can the problem be eradicated?
A group created to clean up trash in a city park system might need to be large one year, but practically non-existent 5 years later if goals are met. The planned decommissioning of such organizations should be considered.
I think it's when there's no (need for an) exit strategy for the people working for institutions set up for solvable problems (i.e. reducing the inflated housing prices, restructuring other institutions) you get the self preservation effect.
That's why for-profit, non-government/community anything is so terrible at solving problems. Charities spending 80% of the money you give them on marketing efforts. For-profit prisons in general. Self-regulation of most industries. The whole plastic recycling farce. Unless your institution is built with a real intent to solve a problem, and the people put in charge actually care, you get a self-serving institute. That doesn't just happen in private institutions either, corrupt governments accepting bribes and operating on nepotism also tend to set up useless institutions that just serve as job mills for friends or government officials.
A group created to clean up trash in a city park will exist forever if the mayor hires their nephew to run it because he was too incompetent to find a job himself.
If the mandarins salaries and livelihood depend on it they will move mountains to sustain the institution. This is human nature. The problem with public institutions is that they fase few external pressures. A company will eventually die and history is littered by the corpses of former industry titans. Public institutions on the other hand.
Yeah like all those external pressures that have kept private mega corps from polluting, monopolizing, pervasively surveiling, brutally exploiting labor, and generating false "science" that maintains their dominance even in the face of huge global negative effects... Oh, wait...
In comparison to what? The pristine environmental record of the soviet union, north korea, cuba, venezuela, communist east europe, cambodia, vietnam, china etc...
Ah yes someone always rolls out the false dilemma of "the only options are completely unregulated capitalism or completely top down command economy communism".
It'd be shorter with the same meaning if you'd just scream "traitorous commie!!!!1111"
Yes, sadly this is an easy way for people to dishonestly claim to themselves and others that any attempt to solve problems (other than the "problem" of how to generate ever greater wealth disparity which somehow never gets included in this) is completely worthless
African liberation movements. The successfully fought colonialism, got into power and instead of dispanding and letting technocrats run the countries to improve things like roads, healthcare, access to water. They continue to "fight" imperialism and other ills that are literally impossible to define.
This explains a lot about the effectiveness of San Francisco's $600M in spending on drug addiction/homelessness, the spend and problem seem to increase together
They produce wealth for their executives. The Colorado Coalition For The Homeless received 122M in 2023. In 2021, the CEO made $313K. The top 6 people make over $200K a year. All of this from a non-profit.
I don't know that high executive salaries are evidence of anything other than theres an executive class which exists, even in the non-profit world. You'll need to come up with better arguments that there's a homeless-industrial complex, which there very much is, but complaining that the leader of a 700-person organized doesn't deserve more than a low end FAANG shows a very naive understanding of how the world works. $313k is cheap for that kind of work. A CEO for a 700-person strong tech company makes well into a million dollars a year, counting equity. Complaining that executives make a lot of money at a non-profit is like complaining that things cost money in the first place. there is a need for someone to do job X. people who do job X cost $xxx/hr. it doesn't matter the context of that job, whether it's running a business, managing armed forces, saving the homeless, or writing a web browser, that's what that job pays.
A better argument for there being a homeless-industrial complex would to say there are incentives for organizations to expand operations rather than fix problems, and then give examples where organizations didn't fix problems because it would result in their lowered funding.
>The Colorado Coalition For The Homeless received 122M in 2023. In 2021, the CEO made $313K. The top 6 people make over $200K a year. All of this from a non-profit.
What's the typical salary for a CEO of a for-profit company that has 122M in revenues? While I can understand why people are outraged at the prospect of people getting money from a non-profit, it's unrealistic to expect everyone to be volunteers. Besides the question of how they'd financially support themselves, you have the problem of "pay peanuts, get monkeys".
You're losing the point. It's not outrage at the amount they are paid. It's outrage at the Shirky Principle-- they are incentivized to keep the homelessness problem going and growing.
Shelter beds for half a million dollars a pop and lucrative service contracts surrounding that pile of money. LA county did an audit and some units they paid north of 830k.
It goes something like this. Well meaning people join government to solve the problem (homelessness). They can't do it on their own so they allocate money to local charities that run services for homeless, like soup kitchens and shelters. Two things happen
1. if homeless didn't exist anymore, these kitchens and shelters would have to shut down. The volunteers are fine with it, they'll volunteer elsewhere. But the permanent employees would be laid off. Understandably, they want to remain employed. So they're incentivised to not search for a durable solution to the homelessness problem.
2. The people in government realise the problem isn't getting solved, so they leave government and form their own think tanks/charities or institutions to solve the problem. They have connections in government (their former co-workers) which they use to get funding. Now there's another company in the homeless industrial complex.
Accountants, tax consultants, (many types of) lawyers, real estate agents and other useless middlemen, all examples of professions that shouldn't exist, given that there are cheap, easy and efficient technical solutions for the problems they solve.
Why are they still in business? Because the law prevents more efficient solutions. Why are laws made in such a fashion? Because said industries offer lucrative deals to lawmakers if they give in to their lobbying.
The corruption in the western world is deep and pervasive. It's just one level removed from the public perception s.t. the price we all pay for it is hidden.
The problem is money and the way it is allocated. Institutions can't ossify if the funding dries up first.
In a market system, an institution that fails to serve a purpose goes out of business.
In a command system, too, bad management gets the axe.
In the hybrid system we have had since the early-mid 20th century, institutions can be both 1) insulated from market discipline; and 2) influence their own funding through lobbying and legislation. The former does not occur in a market system, and the latter does not occur in a command system.
What is missing is negative feedback. Systems without negative feedback are typically unstable.
I’ve been struggling with a clients SaaS third-party integrations so much lately everything I read describing counterproductive outcome gets compared in my imagination.
Marketing says they support your integration, but in practice there are gaps—somebody made a business decision about what was “good enough” and the company’s investment in development stoped there. Anything that is not served by this limit becomes a “product improvement” request.
Maybe this is a related principle I’m discovering now—-same fracked up family of underperformance and unexpected outcomes.
There is a trap here of saying "thus we shouldn't do anything about problems" rather than the more reasonable "we should be prepared to iterate on our efforts".
This forum seems to be filled with (comments by) people who love the "there's no perfect solution so we shouldn't try because trying might infringe on my libertarian liberties". I need to stop reading the comments.
But note how all the examples were private companies or enterprising individuals who weren't controlled somehow, but simply wanted to protect their profits.
The political right uses multiple deca-billion-dollar megaphones to talk nonstop about this problem as it relates to the government while dramatically underrepresenting the extent to which it happens in the private sector so that they can lobby for privatization as a silver-bullet. I think it's fair for the article to shore up the complementary point of view. No less fair than what the right is doing, at any rate.
Private ownership of land and capital is also enforced at the barrel of a gun, lol.
When monopolies are common, every business school student openly aspires to rent-seeking moats, and regulators snore more loudly every day, the claims that the private market is checked by competition frequently ring hollow. The big difference between public and private sector is that the private sector has literally entitled themselves to this rent seeking behavior, while it's only a metaphor in the public sector.
Don't get me wrong, I think competition is a brilliant principle and I think markets are the place to make it happen, I just think that strong anticompetitive forces are common natural occurrences in free markets and I think that the government should play a stronger role in checking them.
The war on drugs is a great example of this. It's led to high incarceration rates in the US, particularly for minor drug offenses, without significantly reducing drug abuse rates. There's plenty of evidence that treatment and decriminalization strategies are more effective than incarceration, and yet localities in the US continue to prioritize punitive measures over reform. And so: a high demand for law enforcement and prison systems which continues to recycle the problem.
> A well-known example of the Shirky effect in this context is the cobra effect. It describes a case where British colonial officials in Delhi (India), set a bounty on dead cobras, in order to reduce the cobra population. However, this led citizens to breed the cobras for profit, and eventually to release them when the bounty was canceled.
Human nature FTW!
That's like the Dilbert cartoon, where engineers wrote bugs, and fed them to the QA people for the bounty.
I understand that was actually based on a real event.
A solution only exists if you have a problem. A problem is every opportunity for a solution. Uber existed to address the limited amount of taxis in a city and address the pricing problem they produce. How they themselves became more expensive, they also became more of a problem. Then more solutions were added like regulation...
The issues are compounding. The phrase is, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions.".
A good example is also how some open-source business models moved away and started charing their services. The unintentional consequences of society and businesses making descissions hastedly would out throughly reviewing and executing their strategy.
Often businesses that make these underhanded tactics receive massive negative publicity and loss. A good example is how Unity announced that it will start charging per installation of a users game. This became problematic because in turn it was taking an already fairly licensed product and tacting on additional fees which caused it to become unfairly priced. Their initial goal as a platform for game development was to be the better competition to major studios eventually becoming the problem they swore not to be after becoming established.
Many here will see connections to The Innovator's Dilemma. So I want to ask, are you aware of any business that recognized it had become an impediment to further innovation and "consciously" applied the suggestions from TID? Has anyone done a review of their own business trying to see if they had become part of the problem rather than the best solution to the problem?
Related to this principle, and other ones mentioned in this thread, while they're entertaining and gratifying to read about, they're also largely un-testable hypotheses. This is not to dismiss them, as there are many ways of thinking that might be useful or comforting in certain situations.
-> Meanwhile, most of the problems in this thread are not nefarious at all, and can be explained by plain old fashioned bad middle management and the "Peter Principle".
“The planet had once been beset by burning winds, which—the scientists said—threatened to turn it into one enormous desert. Therefore a great irrigational plan was adopted. To implement which, appropriate institutions and top-priority bureaus were set up; but then, after the network of canals and reservoirs had been completed, the bureaus refused to disband themselves and continued to operate, irrigating Pinta more and more.”
By the time Tichy arrives, people are being encouraged to breathe underwater.
— The Star Diaries: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy
I’m surprised the Soviets didn’t suppress this story
French sociologist Jean Baudrillard wrote of the supposedly "anti-racist" French NGO "SOS Racisme":
> Every society must designate an enemy, but it must not seek to exterminate it. This was the fatal error of Fascism and the Terror, but it is also the error of the soft, democratic Terror, which is in the process of eliminating the Other even more surely than the Holocaust. The operation that consisted in hypostasizing a race and perpetuating it through internal reproduction, which we stigmatize as a racist abjection, is now being carried out at the level of individuals, in the very name of man's right to control his own process genetically and in all its forms. SOS-Racism. SOS-whales. Ambiguity: in one case, it's to denounce racism, in the other, it's to save whales. What if, in the first case, it's also a subliminal call to save racism, and thus the anti-racist struggle as the last vestige of political passions, and thus a virtually doomed species?
It does seem that the incentives are pretty aligned with keeping the organization in place and thus not solving the problem. The incentive structure would have to change to fundamentally fix the issue.
Luncheon vouchers systems are run by private entities that take a fee on it. I believe the fee is pretty high (a shop owner told me 8%, but I am not too confident).
I definitely believe this system is outdated, that the tax-cut is eaten by said companies plus the extra burden and that the world would be a slightly simpler place without meal vouchers (at least as I know them in France).
Any source that companies are actually paying a premium on this? Given that gift cards are sold at par or even at a discount, I'm skeptical that companies will pay a premium for what essentially are gift cards.
It also happens at a larger scale where an entire industry maintains the status quo. I think of this every time I read "the $x B ____ industry"
> In addition to mentioning the key quote that is now known as the Shirky principle, Kelly also says the following in his blog post:
> “The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions (like a company, or an industry) can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem.”
This is a classic example of "show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome".
I could also see how this same incentive might apply to nonprofit groups as well. i.e. nonprofit groups might actually have an incentive to perpetuate the existence of problems they purport to attempt to solve, because the folks who work there would be out of a job and might lose their prestigious titles as authorities on whatever their chosen problem is.
I can think of no better example of than the US Postal Service.
They’re literally is zero reason in 2024 why are we cutting down trees using diesel fuel to ship paper to a mill using coal to make it into paper using more diesel fuel to ship it to my home to be trashed picked up by a dump truck, using more diesel fuel to be thrown in a giant pile on what it would’ve been otherwise pristine piece of land.
I don't think the US Postal Service is responsible for the quantity of paper people are shipping to your doorstep, neither for the disposal of that pile of paper in a giant pile etc.
To be clear, you believe that everyone in the US is sufficuently digitally savvy and well equipped with digital technology that paper is no-longer needed? Have you tried volunteering with your local town's digital champion/digital mentoring programme, if they exist? Yoiu may find it it interesting
The existence of Amazon's shipping department, UPS, FedEx, DHL, among others, says that people still want to ship physical items around, despite is living in a digital age.
I received 6 letters in the last 6 months I want to keep. Three of them were cards from nieces/nephews. 3 of them were bills, but could have been sent via email. This is generously maybe 120 grams.
Compare that to the _enormous_ amount of unsolicited bulk trash that I have to clean out regularly. I would say the yearly minimum is 5kg with the upper bound probably around 25kg. I cannot fathom the huge diesel cost to deliver this crap straight to the landfill.
I'm always thinking about that when I see various homeless shelters in my city.
Yes I dont doubt that people there work from their goodwill... but... if homelessness disappear, they will be out of business? From some point of view, homelessness is GOOD for them?
Same thing with all those African charities I guess, but I dont have any direct experience with poverty in Africa while I see homeless daily
Nah. Correction: Institutions try to preserve themselves. That's the goal. That's the root problem. Once you understand the power of that belief, the behaviour, the rhetoric, etc. all becomes much clearer. The bullshit much easier to cut through. The fact the problems don't get solved is a "side effect" to self preservation.
Exactly. You should shape an environment where institutions _cannot_ exist if they don't solve the problem. E.g., 'no cure, no pay', set and fixed subsidies, under-performance penalties, competition.
Institutions are composed of people who expect to continue to get paid and therefore their incentives are aligned. If changing jobs was less costly it might alleviate the problem somewhat.
This behavior is pretty much the state of the American two party political system. For example, Democrats had countless attempts to make abortion a constitutional right, but if they did, they could no longer count on using that subject for fundraising against the "enemy". Using Democrats as an example, both parties are guilty.
My wife, every ready with a bucket of cold water, said "We don't need a new name for that. In economics, that's called 'a conflict of interest.'" But, I said... yet the conversation merely devolved into a rant about eliminating lobbying while somehow magically preserving freedom of speech.
A while back when I noticed that many upscale gyms were offering high-calorie workout smoothies, shakes and bars. When I did the math, it happened that most of them would completely obliterate whatever workout you had just done (assuming your goal was calorie deficit)...thus prolonging the need for the gym.
I see your reasoning but disagree with it being an example of the shirky principle.
Even once you get "really fit" you don't stop needing the gym, so I don't think "prolonging the need for the gym" is something a gym can actually do, or would want to do. If anything, it's the most fit people that have the most consistent gym habits.
On the contrary, to go off on your example, it might actually be _against_ the gym's interest to serve high calorie smoothies, the reason being that those pursuing a calorie deficit are likely to become discouraged by the lack of results over time, and would be more likely to abandon the gym altogether.
Gyms are usually optimized for weightlifting and equipment-based exercises, which typically lean more towards performance and hypertrophy/strength training, in which case you need high-calorie nutrient-dense foods to be able to actually see results.
However, yes, if you go there for a Zumba session to try to lose weight and then you have three smoothies, you are still gonna be gaining weight. (I'd argue this is still _not_ in the gym's best interest)
Eh plenty of people are trying to bulk and those things are for them. I doubt that's a conspiracy, gyms want people who either pay and don't go, or if they do go they're probably more likely to stay if they get results than if they don't.
Most times they don’t need to preserve the problem as the problem always slowly evolves and so does the institution. Another reason they cannot easily preserve problem is because there is competition. I do think this could be happening for medicine, and most likely place for it to happen
I tend to think that this isn't inherent to institutions (or individuals), but rather that institutions that have this behavior tend to grow and last, whereas institutions that do not stay small and eventually disappear. A kind of survivorship bias.
what's awful is that often, people argue that closing loopholes and improving things are not good, they will use a fallacy of nature or say it's idealistic and impossible to fix because of human nature.
How does this relate to entrepreneurship? I’ve considered that wielding this problem to your advantage is a predicate of success. But I’ve never seen it spelled out in that context.
Something I have noticed along the same line is that the importance of actions within a company is mapped from the work roles people have, not from the work to be done.
Sounds like a lack of competition. Multiple entities should compete for providing the best solution, and the entities should be rewarded or penalized accordingly.
I'll give the Canadian telecom market as a counterexample: Multiple large providers (Rogers, Bell, Telus, Videotron to name the top four) instead of competing for customers and driving prices down, they have effectively colluded into an oligopoly - to the point of matching prices and plan details.
In this case we have multiple entities working together to maintain the existing problem, so they can collectively maximize profits.
This is very interesting when applied to thoughts and interiorized beliefs, as well as belief systems that purport to free you from those thoughts and beliefs.
Pharma is the prime example. A 'good' drug does not cure, it temporary mitigates and 'idealy' makes you even more susceptible, requiring recurrent future consumption.
This requires no great conspiracy or planning. Time and the market will disappear companies that eradicate the disease they solved, while persisting and elevating those that stumbled upon the dependency route, and inside those companies teams pursuing platforms resulting in success of the latter kind will rise to prominence and at that stage the company will protect the goose that lays the golden eggs even if that means mothballing internal research that finds a real cure or aquiring outsiders to do the same.
None of the pharma products raking in billions upon billions actually solve a condition. All require perpetual consumption to at best stay in the mitigated state.
By that definition if I crumple a ball of paper and throw it and it goes 7 feet, I’ve engineered a physical marvel of an object that goes exactly that distance.
While absurd this is accurate. Incidentally, in the 5th grade I won (and was disqualified from) a school-wide paper airplane contest. The rules as presented prior to the contest:
- No design constraints specified, your paper airplane could be any style that suited you.
- paper airplanes must be constructed from a single sheet of paper (no size limit specified)
- weighting was allowed (no weight limit specified)
The day of the contest I walked out into the middle of the school gym with a single large sheet of construction paper and a dollar and fifty cents in quarters in my pocket. I placed the quarters in the middle of the paper then carefully crumpled it into a ball in such a way to ensure the coins were trapped. I then threw it the full length of the gym and out the gym doors, tripling the closest best distance. I was immediately pulled aside by several teachers and informed I was disqualified, with no reasons for the disqualification given. Moral: none that I can discern.
Independent thinking like that could never be encouraged or rewarded in a place designed to produce just smart enough replacement labor. Hell, equivalent stunts in places like university or the workplace wouldn't necessarily end up in your favor (similar arbitration resulting in the organizations desired outcome likely being the case).
The rules, as you gave them to us, didn't define an "airplane". So you have to go to a dictionary for that. Which means ball of paper isn't an airplane because an airplane has to have wings.
I understand why it felt unjust to you at the time. But even if you go 100% rules lawyer, the disqualification was correct.
Nope. Airplane was undefined as specific questions regarding design requirements and defining features where asked, the response was: there are no limitations other than it must be a shape made out of paper.
I have heard things about this, but I wish there could be a better documentary with proper accounting done to point out those numbers and why they are so high.
In a nutshell, San Francisco’s ultra-liberal policies fight for the right of doing drugs and potentially dying on the streets, because they believe that actually helping these people would be akin to penalizing them because they are poor or jobless, or would be an infringement to their freedom. Helping them really means detaining them and/or forcing rehab for their benefit and the benefit of the community. Many of them suffer from mental illness, often induced by drug consumption, or that leads to drug consumption, but apparently detaining or forcing treatment is considered to be more cruel than letting them die, and so nobody does nothing with huge negative externalities in the community (besides the actual people involved and their families).
In San Francisco there are open-air drug markets that nobody shuts down, where illegals are selling “death” 24/7. Of course San Francisco is a “Sanctuary City” so they don’t collaborate with immigration services to deport the drug dealers, let alone shut down the drug trade.
Of course keeping to feed their addictions with public money doesn’t actually help them and they eventually die on the sidewalk by over dosing or other drug-related complications. Hundreds of them die every year, it’s really despicable.
San Francisco has a large network of no-profits that exists with the sole purpose of trying to “help” the homeless population by encouraging “clean” use of drugs (they distribute needles and other drug accessories), and they are the recipients of 1B+ of funds every year from city hall [1].
Many of these no-profits are plagued with corruption [2], the Mayor itself and people in her circle have been investigated/arrested [3], but nobody does nothing because they are afraid to lose the ultra-liberal vote. Now that the tide is starting (very slowly) to shift, we are seeing politician’s big talk to clean up the city, so far with poor results and no action.
Of course with more than a billion dollars on the line every year, some people started to wonder if these no-profits really want to solve the problem (they don’t) to keep the money flowing, and the pockets of corruption ongoing.
An interesting book to read is San Fran-Sicko [4] which analyzes this phenomenal in ultra liberal cities. It’s so bad that kids are accidentally ingesting Fentanyl at the park [5].
Even being a moderate democrat acting rationally will earn you the label of “fascist” by the ultra progressives.
Ultimately, this will be remembered as a very dark era in the history of San Francisco and everyone involved has blood on their hands, including the voters and supporters of these ultraliberal policies that lead to death and desperation.
Really interesting read. I’ve had this exact thought but not in a well defined sentence before. Especially regarding entities like turboTax or DoT (Departments of Transportation) where they will expand highways even though it’s a well known empirical fact that this typically causes induced demand or more traffic.
It’s really nice to have such a well defined principle to this idea.
Ya honestly that’s a great question. I think more public awareness would be helpful and pressure on state representatives. But honestly you see where it can go badly wrong in Austin TX. A majority (as far as I’m aware) are against the DoT highway expansion and have proposed alternative plans for light rail… but the DoT has over ridden this majority and gone ahead with the highway expansion anyway.
Maybe if the engineers that work on these projects are skilled in planning rail projects too… there’d be less myopic focus on roads. Just a thought.
I don't understand how people perpetuate that induced demand stuff. It absolutely falls apart if you think about it at all. So we shouldn't expand highways because it "induces demand/traffic"? So all of our cities and states should have kept their original one lane dirt roads and never improved on them, because expanding the dirt lanes would have induced demand and caused more traffic? Our transportation system would have been better / more effective with a couple of dirt roads and never expanding? It doesn't even remotely make sense.
I think the argument of induced demand is not so much we should never build or expand road infrastructure, that’s obviously asinine, but rather we should consider alternative transportation investments. Rail, dedicated bus lanes etc all increase rider density dramatically over cars. Induced demand will happen regardless of the mode of transport, but cars allow for an extremely low ridership density per lane. That’s really the point being made.
And if you look at the economics of road infrastructure it’s far inferior to other modes when you look at raw cost per person who can and will use it.
Lastly from an environmental, and safety perspective there are several other modes of transport that are far superior
One of the reasons defense spending in the US is so high and why programs like the F-35 have gone $183 billion over original cost estimates, is because of the Shirky Principle.
I’m convinced that earned value management (EV), which is a requirement of contractors to follow under the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR), is a very subtle form of regulatory capture that serves the needs of the managerial professional class over that of the warfighter, workers, and tax payers.
EV, at its surface, appears to be a tool for the government to ensure contractors provide honest work and control costs. Because it’s essentially waterfall, it incentives raw task execution and disincentives managing risk, fixing bugs, and satisfying non-functional requirements.
We have acquisition programs that follow the systems engineering process, with discrete execution steps of design, development, integration, etc. with people’s careers focused on fulfilling those stages of development. The later in this process an issue is discovered, the more expensive it is to fix [1].
The kicker is that a good manager, under EV, will work to exceed performance, get a task done ahead of schedule, and under budget. This manger has every reason to not solve bugs and to pass them on later in the process.
There is no reason for anyone in this process to change it, because careers depend on it continuing to exist, and contractors, as institutions, really benefit from it.
In the bad old days of defense contracting, contractors would seriously underbid contracts. As soon as they got the award, because they underbid everyone, the contractor would immediately send a series of change requests to increase the budget. The government has ways to eliminate this risk, such as hiring two contractors to do the same job, then drop a competitor who attempts the change request ramp. Though this is expensive.
With EV, contractors get a ramp up and further contracts, without having to directly engage in shenanigans. EV incentivizes the development of brittle and incomplete solutions, like aircraft that give their pilots hypoxia and melt holes in the decks of carriers. The genius of EV is that contractors effectively get change requests and follow-on contracts, and everyone in the system can act honest and honestly say they are acting honest.
What I would do instead is change these perverse incentives by amending the FAR by adding alternative oversight mechanisms, such as a knowledge point framework to develop risk modeling or use economic modeling such as cost-of-delay. The problem is that everyone benefits from the current system and you would need strong leadership by many in congress on an obscure issue.
NATO and its system of related organizations is another great example. Built to defend against the USSR, when the USSR fell it made sure to repeatedly provoke Russia so that the threat from the east would be preserved.
No he hasn't, he thinks the Soviet Union was a disaster! Putin has always been very clear about his motivations, which he has expounded upon in countless lengthy interviews and speeches. For example, his July 2021 ramblings: https://www.prlib.ru/en/article-vladimir-putin-historical-un...
The first main example used here is dumb. The point wasn't that carpooling needed to go back to being inconvenient again, the problem is obviously that if you expand the definition of "carpooling" too much you get unlicensed and unregulated common carrier transportation companies that are effectively taxi or bus services with no oversight at all, and people could get killed.
Of course there's ways around that, and maybe the trade-offs are worth it. That's what the legislation concluded it seems. But the argument here is a strawman.
I think this a lot as the root cause of where "bullshit jobs" come from. This pattern happens all the time:
1. Government passes a law to try to improve some problem. All laws in a democracy are the result of a lot of horse trading, so the law itself generally includes a lot of tradeoffs.
2. The new regulations bring up a need for a whole host of people to understand and implement these regulations, who sell their services to other companies and the public at large. Of course, these jobs exist to make it easier for others to follow the regulations, which means that people in these jobs have no incentive to make the regulations simpler in the first place.
For example, a lot of people in the US are familiar with flexible spending accounts, FSAs, which let you spend money on health-related items without paying the income tax on the money for those payments. But the rules for FSAs can be notoriously complex. As one example, many products/services are "dual purpose", so you can spend FSA money on a massage if a doctor prescribes it, but not if you just want a massage to feel better. So a whole host of "wellness services" have popped up that will essentially write you a dubious "letter of medical necessity" (literally nobody is ever turned down) so you can buy these items with an FSA.
But the real kicker is FSA is "use it or lose it" - you set aside money from your paycheck at the beginning of the year, but if you don't spend it on medically-approved items, it reverts back to your employer at the end of the year. And 25% of all FSA funds are forfeited every year! So the end state is that all of this complexity was set up to create and manage FSAs, but, on average, it's essentially a wash for participants as a whole due to the forfeited money.
The most general form of this is Upton Sinclair’s: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.
Though often the causes are not cynical or nefarious.
not wrong but - notice that this states a principle from the point of view of a single individual only. Certainly other "lenses", frameworks or mission statements are relevant?
It seems many of these - e.g. turbotax - are more specifically regulatory capture.
The capitalistic business that makes a profit on tax preparation surely opposses the government giving it away for free.
People trying to protect their cushy feeder? No shit Sherlock. It starts with a single individual and goes up to highest level of Government / Corporations
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
Almost all the examples discussed are government or social institutions, but it really applies more widely. Large corporations should be included, and even whole economies. A more general word instead might be "systems".
If you look at the historic prime growth and productivity eras of national economies of the US and China, some of the most productive eras were early on when large scale systems (corporations, institutions, etc) simply didn't exist. In the primary build phase, growth was huge even though the investments and actual tasks required were huge. But as the 50s/60s US Economy, and the 90s/00s China economy filled in with existing systems there is a phase transition. Productivity slows. Even when you have more resources, and more solved problems, more skills available, productivity slows. And IMHO, it directly relates to this inversion of administration vs actual work.
> If you look at the historic prime growth and productivity eras of national economies of the US and China, some of the most productive eras were early on when large scale systems (corporations, institutions, etc) simply didn't exist.
I really don't think that's correct. In fact GDP per capita was historically flat in most of the world, even through the early parts of the industrial revolution. It took off like a rocket only after WW2 in the pax americana era. I think that's an interesting argument to have, but I'm not going to believe that statement for an instant without numbers.
I agree with you that this law applies to any large organization.
But I disagree with the idea that the 50s/60s represent the end of an "early on" era of the US economy. Many large US corporations were already decades old the time WW2 started - John Deere was founded in 1843, GE in 1892, Castrol in 1899, Texaco in 1902, Ford in 1903, Chevrolet and IBM (under a different name) in 1911, Boeing in 1916. The biggest boom in the US economy happened during and just after the war, when much of the giants of today (except big tech, of course) were 30+ years old companies (and there were many .
I don't think bureaucracy was the problem with any slowdown, or if it was, it wasn't as inevitable as the law suggests.
Addl note on the phase change: administration might also be thought of as capital ownership in a economic or capitalist context where an inefficiency is protection or "administration" of large pools of existing wealth and profits becoming more important than the continued building of the creation of value and identification and solving of social problems through economic activity.
In particular, this would be capital ownership by independent investors who are only interested in abstractly making money and not being personally involved in business operations, and then hire managers afflicted with the principal-agent problem to handle the details.
Individual investors are actually pretty disenfranchised compared to concentration of financial parties like institutional investors and private equity. This those more collected interests which are happy to install a Professional Managerial Class that are only interested in the abstract financials and ignore principal agent mismanagement of long term interests. But concentrated fictionalization agents and PMC they appoint preserve their control above their ability to manage healthy growth. And our system is unable to check them.
Private companies, I think, have some limits. Governments can always raise taxes or print more money to sustain their otherwise insolvent organization.
In other words they can be wasteful and top heavy without having to periodically pare things down through layoffs.
And definitely organizations that teach their initial goals will reinvent themselves to milk more money.
Monopolies and regulatory capture sustains insolvent organizations.. see Boeing.
This really isn't a private enterprise vs govt split. It's the system in place of how decisions get made, how resources are allocated. Our current system of the world has elements split in both private enterprise and gov't that as a system, exhibit Pournelles law.
This theory of division between private enterprise and gov't doesn't in practice limit the negative effects - in fact in think we live in a modern world where we should recognize that there are many many examples of this split failing to administer a solution to meet the needs of society & humans.
Boeing can still go bankrupt or become so financially strapped it needs to sell itself off, merge, split, etc. Governments rarely try to become more efficient. By and large they keep adding to their bureaucracies.
The ex Gov of Texas was made fun of for saying he’d eliminate parts of the executive and when asked couldn’t even remember which ones, never the less, there is a kernel of a good idea to retrench bureaucracies on a periodic basis -something when younger I’d dismiss out of hand because I though more govt always equals better.
Private enterprise in our current system stands in the way of government being more efficient. It's a prime example of administrators (in the form of capitol holders) standing in the way of better functioning.
Intuit / Turbo Tax standing in the way of better tax admin.
Pharma companies standing in the way of negotiated drug prices for medicare.
Power utilities standing in the way of rules allowing distributed power production.
I know that private medicare advantage plans are coming to be worse than gov't medicare plans and the private healthcare fights many improvements in medicare administration. Including wierd lobbied divisions between what the private plans are allowed to cover in areas that the public plans are not.
And on a system wide scale, US private healthcare is broken in both cost and performance when compared to comparably advanced nations.
I'll rephrase what I said in a different comment, and that the public/private division and arguing about which is "better" on an exclusionary basis is a big distraction on the failing of systems which include elements of both. "Free market or not" is mostly an immaterial distinction imho.
> "Free market or not" is mostly an immaterial distinction imho.
I don't think this is the right conclusion.
What you need is a competitive market. An uncompetitive market doesn't work. But a government is going to be a monopoly, which is the thing that doesn't work, whereas a market has the possibility of being competitive even if it is possible to screw that up.
US healthcare is a case in point. The healthcare system is highly regulated and the regulators are captured by the incumbents, so the regulations are designed to inhibit price competition between providers and keep costs high because those costs are the incumbents' profits.
In order to achieve the benefits of competition you would need rules that actually facilitate it. For example, if providers were required to publish pricing and then insurance would deposit into your HSA 90% of the median cost of a procedure among every provider within 100 miles of your address (equivalent to a 10% copay), and then you can choose where to go. Now there is no such thing as "in network" anymore and the patient has the direct incentive to be price sensitive, which in turn requires providers to publish competitive prices. But we don't do that, because it might work.
To be a bit glib there is no competitive market to give me an emergency surgery if my appendix has burst.
But in a sense I think we have some agreement that it’s much more interesting to discuss a set of characteristics than can make markets work to deliver value. I just think “free” isn’t a useful distinction because it’s approached usually a shorthand for free of regulation. I think that all markets are artificial and require rules to form a functional marketplace of exchange.
> To be a bit glib there is no competitive market to give me an emergency surgery if my appendix has burst.
This is what everybody resorts to when trying to claim that this can't work, but it's really more an excuse to not even try.
The large majority of medical spending isn't emergency care. You can't shop around for an appendectomy doesn't mean you can't shop around for a joint replacement.
> I just think “free” isn’t a useful distinction because it’s approached usually a shorthand for free of regulation. I think that all markets are artificial and require rules to form a functional marketplace of exchange.
There are a couple of different dimensions along which you can measure this. One is the type of regulation that exists.
Markets need externalities to be priced, otherwise companies will dump industrial waste in the river. That's one type of regulation.
Another is paternalism. You can't buy a huge soda because it will make you fat. That's not an externality. You're the one choosing to buy and drink the soda and you're the one who gets fat. You're the one who buys the poorly insulated house and you're the one who pays the heating bill. This isn't Alice doing something that hurts Bob, it's Alice doing something that hurts Alice. It's a different type of thing, and we could do without it entirely and still prohibit companies from polluting the rivers.
Likewise, some regulations are, shall we say, petty. Some might say illiberal. You can't put an addition on your house or finish your basement because then more people might live in it. You can hypothetically frame this as an externality, because then there might be more traffic or something, but the underlying premise would have to be that this is something other people have a legitimate right to prevent and that interest should override another person's interest in having somewhere to live. We could do entirely without this type of regulation too.
The other dimension is that regulations of actual externalities can be unnecessarily burdensome. You can pass a law against dumping mercury in the river and then fine anyone caught dumping mercury in the river. Or you can pass a law against manufacturing products without testing each and every one of them for the presence of mercury, even if you don't use any mercury in your manufacturing process, and then fine anyone who doesn't pay for testing, coincidentally by a testing company owned by a legislator's brother which employs a lot of people whose unions made some generous campaign contributions. Or just establish administrative agencies with too many bureaucrats who run out of anything legitimate to do and start to micromanage everything.
Regulating externalities efficiently is a hard problem and claiming that you can't have a free market unless you can remove externalities without any inefficiency is basically claiming that you can't have a free market. We could certainly do better than we do right now, and there is value in the attempt, but it's never going to be perfect.
Whereas the rules that are purely paternalism and politics? If the claim is that a market with those kinds of rules isn't a free market, that's a fairly legitimate claim.
I'll add a separate comment, because I don't feel I specifically addressed your observation that Boeing can go bankrupt, split, etc.
Boeing is today, the conglomeration of previous companies that did become distressed enough to be consumed or split and acquired. That actually exacerbated the systemic problems of the current Boeing. So this idea that private enterprise can't accumulate systemic issues seems like an optimistic concept that is invalidated by Boeing's current circumstances.
The current issues with Boeing are largely blamed on a merger with
McDonnell Douglas that was forced upon Boeing by the US government. Now the US government gives many favorable conditions to Boing with regards to lucrative defence contracts as well as the US govt goes after Boeing would be competitors on their behalf (see Embraer). At this point it may make more sense to consider Boeing a for profit arm of the US government than any kind of normal business.
Companies can be very efficient at keeping themselves in the market rather than providing real value. Rent seekers, mono/oligopolies, etc. examples are abundant.
Doesn't this depend on how you define productive? If GDP is your metric, I think it probably correlates well - despite the fact that the 50s and 60s weren't particularly free market (wage restrictions, high taxes, etc.) when compared to say 1930 after the free market collapsed.
But my larger point is that I think "free market" eras also correspond with worse quality of life for the majority of citizens. I'm thinking things like pre-safety-regulations industrialization in the US; the environmental catastrophe that was the 60s (so bad that it led Nixon to create the EPA); the affordable housing catastrophe that has been the past 15 years.
We can obviously produce more if we don't have to worry about externalities like "worker safety", "being able to afford rent", or "habitable environments". Free markets create conditions where externalities aren't as important.
What collapsed were the banks, due to mismanagement by the Fed (the government). In particular, it was trying to maintain a fixed (government specified) exchange rate between gold and money while inflating the money 2:1.
Like all such pegging schemes, the result was a run on the banks, leading to their collapse. This (finally) stopped when FDR made it illegal to exchange gold for money.
> We can obviously produce more if we don't have to worry about externalities like "worker safety", "being able to afford rent", or "habitable environments". Free markets create conditions where externalities aren't as important.
You're conflating two different things here.
Pricing externalities is part of a functioning market, but most of those things aren't externalities. Pollution is, but free markets where emitting pollution is priced can still be competitive, they just take into account the cost of internalizing the externalized cost into the market price of the end products. Environmental regulations can be inefficient if they're poorly conceived or impose excessive administrative burdens, and that's a problem, but you can have simple rules like "no leaded gasoline" and "no dumping mercury in the river" without destroying the free market.
Whereas the reason housing is expensive isn't any market externalities, it's regulations that restrict where and how much of it can be built, and the supply of trade labor with which to build it.
Whenever I hear people talk about free market it is usually not in the sense of economic freedom or free software. So you are correct. It generally refers to free as in free beer aka the government is supposed to subsidize the private sector and average citizens are supposed to pay for it. I'm not talking about socialists here, I'm talking about neoclassical economists and neoliberals in business and politics.
Almost nobody wants to pay for the pollution they cause via CO2 taxes. Meanwhile income taxes are considered efficient despite their dead weight loss. Everything is upside down on this planet when it comes to economics.
There has to be unrealized economical potential for growth. And there has to be shifts either in that potential, or in the machinery that uses it for change.
Think of it like a potential gradient, or a gravity well, or a food source in biology.
Open markets where markets have been open for awhile (and no new game changing things like new technology, new ideology, etc. have happened) will maintain homeostasis at that level.
If new technology gets introduced, unless there is strong closed market forces to keep it from spreading, then you’ll have change (in this case growth) faster with open markets. It will equalize the potential faster.
Which, depending on who you are, may be desirable or not.
> Open markets where markets have been open for awhile (and no new game changing things like new technology, new ideology, etc. have happened) will maintain homeostasis at that level.
I think "homeostasis" is overselling it, even if I agree in the short to medium term.
Any growth potential leads to pressure to take advantage of it, which leads to runaway growth until some sort of scarcity sets in, where one entity's ability to exploit the potential is decreased by other entities'. This leads to competition, which results in pressure for each entity to take advantage of more of it than other entities, which leads to entities evolving ways to restrict others' consumption even at the expense of their own. Free markets expand consumption of potential to the point of scarcity, at which time they produce evolutionary pressure towards non-free markets (via monopolies, regulatory capture, or whatever else is available).
It's like a nutrient-rich drainpipe getting so clogged up with algae that the water stops flowing. Or fishing, where it's all good until you start making a serious dent in next year's breeding stock.
Free markets in times of plenty can produce massive benefits. They raise people out of poverty, dramatically improve healthcare and education and opportunities, etc. AFAICT, they're the most powerful mechanism for doing so. And then eventually, they consume themselves.
I take back the complaint about using "homeostasis". After all, it applies to systems that will eventually die.
The problem isn't scarcity actually. If you have scarcity, "it just works".
It is in fact the opposite. Capitalism fails due to inevitable relative abundance. At some point you reach market saturation. Present abundant resources should be allocated to the future. This doesn't happen. When abundance happens, you no longer need full employment to produce all present consumption needs. However, the principle of hiring the most productive employees and letting them work full time results in the redundancy and unemployment of less productive people, because hiring a single employee has less fixed costs than hiring two employees assuming they both perform the same amount of work. The paradox is that the more productive person is producing the consumer goods of the person that was let go. That unemployed person can't afford to buy his own consumer goods since he doesn't get paid to produce them, because it saves the employer fixed costs. You could think of this as a greedy knapsack algorithm. This algorithm works while there is scarcity, since you can just hire all workers. It doesn't work when there is abundance, since workers have to earn enough income to buy their own products. Note how this relates purely to the structure of the economy. Now the classical objection to this is that the workers who produce but don't consume will save instead, which lowers the interest rate. This is supposed to happen even if the interest rate is already at zero or even negative. The capital market signals that present resources are supposed to be allocated to serve the future. This allows employers to hire the unemployed workers and let them work to satisfy future demand, such as interplanetary travel and colonization of the moon or building pyramids that last more than four thousand years.
When a creatures homeostasis gets too out of whack, yes - it dies. Notably, I have yet to see any system that won’t die eventually. The giant Communism experiment died in the 90’s, for one.
Luckily, most have mechanisms to adjust - if they’re willing and able to do so.
Cancer, notably, is one such situation that hijacks that mechanism. I’d argue that culturally, we have such a cancer forming right now. And it’s not capitalism, or communism, or politics, or guns or anti guns, or whatever.
It’s our inability to focus on and care about what we, as individuals, actually need and want, and push for it.
An inability actively being grown and reinforced by a number of entities - and allowed because we refuse to acknowledge our weaknesses too.
Technological development - decent ships, actually good and reliable navigation, and knowledge of exploitable opportunities (sugar markets, and later cotton).
Energy gradient - cheap labor (in the form of slaves) in Africa, cheap arable land (Caribbean, US, South America), hungry markets with excess wealth in Europe.
First, the Caribbean got exploited (with open markets!) rather brutally, until the slave rebellions starting in 1790, and further escalating.
Haiti in particular, won their rebellion - and then were completely economically isolated (by closing the market!) by the European powers. They still have not recovered economically, same for most of the Caribbean.
Around this time is when the US markets (less ideal to exploitation, but larger and more controllable) in both sugar cane and cotton started to take off using the same sources.
Which fueled significant tension between the northern states (no crops easily amenable to slavery, rather being capital manufacturing, livestock, and secondary goods like weaving/textiles) and the southern states (many labor intensive crops, amenable to slavery).
Attempts at controlling the open markets in these crops by dissimilar interests (by either banning slavery or by blockade) is what led to the civil war.
The south couldn’t ban slavery without bankrupting their economy. The north couldn’t allow free trade/slavery continue without making themselves less competitive, as Europe has more developed textile mills and heavy manufacturing. So them getting the goods directly was undercutting northern US competitiveness.
Notably, the British, being the first into the Industrial Revolution and the furthest along, were also the first major European power to not just ban slavery in their country - but all their colonies, and everywhere else they could reach.
To cut off the ‘energy gradient’ of cheap labor, and make their products (more capital intensive manufacturing) more competitive.
The Caribbean is poor because they rebelled against exploitation, but couldn’t capture the economic engine that was exploiting them - they got bypassed by a competitor.
And by the time their competitor (US Deep South) also got broken, the underlying energy gradient that led to them being exploited at all was cut off.
So all they had left was ruins, debt, and disease.
Sucks to be them.
So, depending on how you measure ‘good’, they’d have probably been a whole lot better off with a closed market that would never have let the initial energy gradient be formed to begin with, eh? Or at least not allowed the extremely rapid and rapacious exploitation.
Think of open markets as a full open floodgate, and closed ones as having a valve at various degrees of closed off.
Flooding is very ‘profitable’ if you can somehow harness it (very difficult to do), but can be very unpleasant and destructive for those caught in its path. It’s nearly impossible to die of thirst in a flood.
Restrictive flow doesn’t product as much ‘profit’ but has the potential to produce more desirable outcomes if used effectively. As long as the dam doesn’t burst of course. If the valve is misused or turned off, it’s easy for some (or even all) to die of thirst.
And yet the free Northern economy buried the slave Southern economy. How does that fit into your theory? And how the entire country boomed after slavery was abolished?
Free economies always outperform slave labor, by a large margin.
> Technological development
Oddly enough, happens first in free market countries. Turns out, you can't build a technological economy using slaves.
The Caribbean countries would be prosperous if they'd try free markets instead of socialism and communism.
The northern economy was MORE CLOSED than the South. For one, they banned slavery first. They had more import/export controls.
The south was as free and open* as you could imagine - anyone with the Capital could buy a slave, or sell goods, etc.
Trade was minimally restricted.
(* Notably, if you were a "free man". Slaves, Women, Children, and sometimes Indentured Servants all had significant restrictions on rights across the board in both locations that were very similar - both de jure and de facto).
The North were the ones blockading the South, not the other way around.
The current Caribbean countries are also currently free markets? At least from what I can see.
Plenty of 'international banking' in many of them too.
Haiti finally paid off the restitution the French have been making them pay since the slave revolt back in 1947 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_Independence_Debt], and seem to be slowly gaining ground again.
The Dominican Republic (on the same island, other side of the fence, different government due to a revolt in the ~1850's) has been doing quite well for a long time, I think partially because they don't have to pay that debt back, being a "different country" and all. And they generally don't have the various travel blacklists that Haiti has had.
I suspect the argument you're trying to make is that mechanization/automation (and it's helpful companion, Capitalism) beats slavery.
Which I definitely agree with. One beneficial advantage being that it frees up people to do more thinking (and less, well, slaving away) and benefits significantly from economies of scale - both for the Capitalists, and everyone else. Which is why inventing is so useful (when it won't get stomped on by monopolies, anyway).
So it's mostly a beneficial cycle, as long as monopolist tendencies get reined in and someone is watching things to ensure it doesn't get too abusive. Unlike Slavery.
Slavery is also despicable in general, so I personally am glad to see it gone.
Free/Open/Closed/Restricted markets are not necessarily good or bad, independent of the circumstances - same as guns, IMO. They do have predictable outcomes, if used in predictable ways though.
The more closed, the more problematic IMO, but I have yet to see a truly open market (aka a black market, perhaps?) without some really nasty abuses of it's own. So YMMV.
You keep trying to equate slavery with freedom and prosperity. It doesn't work. Forced labor is not free labor, and slaves are significantly less productive than free labor, for obvious reasons.
The Southerners used slaves for cotton and tobacco farming. It was the only industry that could eke out a profit with them, and even that was failing by the 1850s.
The Northern economy BURIED the Southern one. That's why the South wanted to secede. It wanted to protect itself from the North. The North also won the war because they enormously outproduced the South in arms, uniforms, railroads, food, everything needed to fight.
The reason for the Gettysburg battle was Lee was headed for Harrisburg to loot the shoe factory there, because the Confederate army was barefoot.
Plus a dozen other examples from antiquity and recent history - including the Confederate states before the blockades and sanctions due to their use of slavery.
"An estimate of the slave population in the middle of the second century, when the Republic was at its peak, was over fifteen percent"
The Romans couldn't have produced enough food with only 15% of the population. Not even close.
As for the Spartans and the Helots, isn't it interesting you have to go back 2000 years to a society of which very little is known? Spartans left behind very little writing, what we know of it comes from their enemies.
The Confederacy used slaves for cotton and tobacco, not produce.
"Slaves increased the economy, fed the entire republic through agriculture, and they also upheld important roles and was the glue that held Ancient Rome together. Slaves played a huge roll in Ancient Rome and was the reason for the great economy and without the slaves Rome would not have been as powerful as it was. "
Total US employment in the food industry (not just farms) is 10% of US employment, and only 5.5% of GDP.
Slavery is terrible. But pretending humans haven't used it (successfully) to run civilizations at scale is just being willfully obtuse.
It's true for the last thousand years at least. A thriving middle class appeared in northwestern Europe a thousand years ago, a middle class of merchants and other businessmen.
The funny thing about all those guilds, as those were necessary to create something of a non-peasant class in the cities, is that zhey were absolutely not free market. They fixed prices, limited output, set salaries, limuted the number of workshops. In a sense, they were as much labor union as they were oligopols.
What we consider free market came with the industrial revolution and colonialism and the national companies created to exploit those colonies. The first signs of that can be traced to the early renessaince era, with Italian merchant princes, the Fugger and the Hanse. Those were still subserviant to nobility and aristocratic rule so, while the industrial revolution capitalists and colonial companies were much less so.
Fun fact: The workers building cathedrals were fully unionized, with all the benefits that's with that: limited work hours and days, health care, social security.
The places were the guilds had power were the prosperous places up until the early modern age and the rise of manufacturing in the run up to the industrial revolution: medieval towns and cities, added benefits if those towns had noble rulers that allowed, for various reasons, a high degree of independence.
Examples include the Hanseatic League (run by the various merchant guilds as a de-facto state) ans every single city in what now is Germany or Austria. Up to the point the rural nobles constabtly feuded with those cities.
You saidb t yourself, the textile manufacturer guolds of the low countries contributed a lot to the prosperity of those places, same for England. And for a long time, the trade between those cities was run by the Hanseatic League (which were arguable a lot closer to modern day capitalism than a local crafts guild).
Linking all of Europes success during history, up to WW1 arguably as far as sucess goes, to Christianity is at best a fringe view.
What does the book have to say about which kind of christianity is the source of all of that? Cathlocism, protestantism (which one?), the orthodox church (again, which one?)?
And how does Enlighment fit into all of that?
Edit: Focusing on the West is also extremely reductive. Up until colonialism really got started, the Mongols dominated the far east, China was a major economic and scientific power. None of which were even remotely Christian. It is true so, that the Western form of guilds is directly linked to European christianity. As the mongols and China show us so, there are more ways to prosperity than the "Christian" one.
Why not take a look at the book? It's an easy read, and there's far too much of interest to quote here.
The religious angle is not relevant to this discussion. It's about the emergence of free markets in the Netherlands, and the results.
As for China, China invented a number of things, but failed to apply them like the West did. For one take on why, see the book "The Triumph of the West" by Roberts
I don't know those specific books. I do know the pop-history trend of late that paints European dominance, starting in the 1500s and ending somewhere around WW1, in a certain way. Meaning Western capitalism, bonus points for including a religious angle, as the absolute superior. And that ignores a number of things:
It fails to look at the medival period as different, distinct periods. It also fails to brake those down by region. That can be called cherry picking.
It fails to look at all of that im context, especially by ommitting the history of the other side of Western dominance. That history is directly linked, after all Western dominance required a counter part to be dominated. So whatever happened at the other end is crucial to understand the shared history. This can be called ignorant.
And last but not least, this view on history is used to drive political narratives. As is the opposite political bias that shows in other books and papers. I do not like neither, historians shoupd at least try (one cannot be fully neutral ever) to be impartial and provide an objective study of history. Late pop-history doesn't do that.
Define “free”. Most modern Asian capitalist economies have never been very “free” in the American sense of “free market”. They’ve always been heavily guided by government policy.
I think the most productive eras are really when everyone is picking low-hanging fruit. And the low-hanging fruit only seems so low because there’s been a burst of newly available mechanical technology. Then everything is picked clean, productivity drops, and the economy shifts to prioritizing useless consumption.
"The free market is an economic system based on supply and demand with little or no government control. One of the central principles of a free market is the concept of voluntary exchange, which is defined as any transaction in which two parties freely trade goods or services."
Voluntary is carrying a lot of weight there. Do we voluntarily trade money for bread or freely choose starving as an alternative? What is to prevent those who control the bread from coercively taking every penny you have?
A free market without government control is an adolescent fever dream. Nothing like it has ever existed or ever will. The question is not whether there will be government control, it is how much?
Also when currency was backed by commodity that made limits by sources. With fiat money, there are no limits and companies / governments crippling free market. (or natural resources like environment etc.)
In 2015, Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club) talked about the same concept in an interview he gave about the graphic novel he was making as a sequel to Fight Club[1]
> my dream, or idea was that Project Mayhem and the whole organization would work to create empowered individuals who would go off to create their own visions. And that the organization itself would disappear. People weren’t meant to stay in it; the organization wasn’t meant to sustain its own power. Which was my experience with doing [Werner H. Erhard’s self-improvement training] EST. A lot of people who had a vision, who were empowered by EST — including myself — then went off to become the person they dreamed of being. That’s how I started writing. But a lot of people who didn’t really have a vision became part of EST. They really couldn’t bridge out of it. They just kind of perpetuated the power of the organization, because they didn’t have their own personal vision. And so what we’re seeing in Fight Club 2 is that Project Mayhem has crossed the line where it’s no longer about empowering people. It’s about maintaining its own power in the world.
To be clear, the Fight Club 2 limited comic series was indeed published in 2015 and concluded in 2016 after 10 issues, which have been collected into a graphic novel:
I think the “Mars” books (red mars, blue mars, green mars) proposed an interesting economic idea.
In a world where automation and AI allowed physical stuff to be organized and built almost as easy as software, you didn’t really _need_ huge organizations (employee wise) to accomplish goals, so Mars came up with an economic setup that did not allow you to join an organization, unless you got hard equity in it, and the amount of equity you could have had a minimum of 1%.
So everyone worked for their own organizations and were incentivized for their success, and organizations couldn’t grow too big (100 people at most).
So you had lots of small organizations with well developed interfaces between them, because there were so many of them. And you could still acquire huge wealth, just couldn’t be a monopoly.
I mean its just sci-fi thought experiment, but it got me thinking maybe there are better economic systems out there, both equitable and free market based …
> came up with an economic setup that did not allow you to join an organization, unless you got hard equity in it, and the amount of equity you could have had a minimum of 1%.
Wow… we’re so deep into capitalism that worker cooperatives is a sci-fi concept now.
I think what the author was trying to explore is a society where _all_ the workers are forced to be in cooperatives, I guess kinda like Sweden with its mandated unions, but even more sharply defined. And what the downstream effects of it would be.
Another great related insight from Systemantics (see other thread below)
> For Every Human System, There Is A Type Of Person Adapted To Thrive On It. There are some attributes that are probably necessary for survival in any system, but each system has some uniqueness in the sense that it attracts different traits. It’s hard to tell what traits any given system attracts. The traits do not necessarily align with successful operation of the system itself e.g. the qualities for being elected president don’t necessarily align with the ability to run the country effectively. Systems not only attract people who will succeed within the system but also people with parasitic traits that thrive at the expense of the system. “Efforts to remove parasitic Systems-people by means of screening committees, review boards, and competency examinations merely generate new job categories for such people to occupy.”
My favorite way of thinking about this is that every undertaking needs people to carry it out and logistical demands. The people who do the work ('technicians') are focused on accomplishing the specific goal, they are often poorly suited to secure resources for the entire group. On the flip side, those who focus on logistics ('administrators') are isolated from the underlying goal. They invest their time into work that, by necessity, relies on an abstracted notion about the details of the work.
This creates conditions where the administrators are always at risk of self-dealing and of mis-understanding self-dealing as supporting the underlying work. The technicians can self-deal as well, but because they are not in charge of coordinating resources across the org, the impact is smaller. It's easy to accuse any particular technician who disagrees that it's the technician who lacks a sufficiently wide view (and in fact this is always a danger). Selfish people who want to secure resources for themselves thrive in this area - but the situation does not require selfishness to become degenerate.
I was a NASA federal employee in 2017 at Johnson Space Center and I saw this exactly. There were people like me who joined to be a part of a particular project and who maybe would follow that project when it got separated and sold off to some contractor, and there were the die-hard NASA fanboys (and girls) who just wanted to "be a part of NASA" and who maybe spent years singularly focused on getting hired and displayed little concern about which role they inhabited. Project-level managers up through department heads appeared to be people who started in the first group and slowly transitioned to the second group.
> there will be those dedicated to the organization itself
The Iron Law holds. The article’s title does not. The way bureaucracies survive is by mutating their goals.
The examples are numerous: the March of Dimes [1], every successful referendum movement, every country with clean drinking water. The author’s mistake is in interpreting opposition as preservation.
I've heard this stated in a simpler form: that every institution eventually evolves to serve and protect its own interests first and foremost. My dad always used the term "petty fiefdoms".
I like to think it was the awful "Type II" people who insisted that "wasn't a thing", but it was probably the innocence and naiveté of the Type I's.
Does the second group also end up skewing remuneration in their favour? For example, a tech company where managers are paid over the odds, while the passionate engineers who do a lot of the technical heavy lifting are paid less.
Naturally. I’m being hyperbolic but barely. It’s middle management’s entire job to squeeze as much productivity out of their reports for as little money as possible. Anything they do in their free time (1:1s, career discussions, etc) is just there to give the reportees the illusion of control in the system. And it’s not my belief - I fight it where I can but it’s literally how companies structure incentives. Nobody gets a bonus for how many of their underlings got promoted last year. Your importance is a measure of headcount (why have a principal engineer when you can have 3 associates?) and products shipped (more hands on keyboards mean more stuff flung to prod, quality need not apply).
Sounds like you work at a pretty toxic org if this is the case. Even at Amazon a big component of management promotions is how many people did you get promoted this year and what are the highest levels of people reporting to you.
The fastest way to go from Senior Manager to Director is to get as many people as possible promoted to Principal Engineer, or hire more PEs. Or better yet get your Principal Engineer promoted so that they have to become your peer.
And you can guess what shenanigans result from such a strong incentive. People should be promoted when they are ready, not when their manager’s empire-building aspirations will benefit.
People were promoted after they were ready, because they had to convince a promo committee that they were ready. The manager was your advocate but did not have a say in if you were promoted beyond being your advocate.
So the incentives were aligned. The manager was incentivized to put you up for promotion as soon as they thought you might be ready, not the other way around. The toxic part was actually that your manager didn't have final say.
Even when they thought you were ready they had to convince others in an overburdensome process.
I don't think what you wrote and I wrote are at all in conflict. I said managers are incentivized to promo people and that it's super hard for them to do so, which means people don't get their promos when they should. But it still contradicts what OP wrote about managers being incentivized to not promo.
I am a big proponent of what you imply: the best leaders are massive next exporters of top talent. Once you explicitly compensate for that, the optimizers will destroy your organization by promoting mediocre people.
I’ve worked for several companies of various sizes and industries in my career and I can’t say any of them have been remarkably different than what I described. Being a manager now explained the confusing behavior and outcomes I experienced earlier in my career, in fact.
Imagine a union which forms in secret, strikes once, hard enough that the misbehaving institution cannot continue, then disbands.
Now imagine a culture which habitually does this. You don't need continuity of leadership if the only reason your organization exists is to rid the world of a problem. Once the problem goes away, so does the organization that solves it. (And if you fail, well, disband anyway and try it again next time as a differently composed group).
It would be like agriculture, but instead of selecting plants for drought resistance we're selecting institutions for human-friendliness.
Perhaps there's a holiday, and a crypto thingy that handles voting. If there's not sufficient consensus, nothing happens, but if it turns out that a sufficient majority voted to disband the same institution, then on the next such holiday you meet in person with some algorithmically chosen subset of people who voted similarly to you (to verify that they're real people and not sybil accounts).
If validation succeeds, then we generate proofs that indicate that yes, there are enough of us--this isn't radicalism--this is the will of the people. Then you spend the next such holiday orchestrating the demise of your target. Then you disband, problem presumably solved. If not, you'll have to try it again with a new union on the next cycle.
It would create incentives for the bureaucrats to not let their organization be chosen. It's more or less what labor day should have been. Let's do it quarterly.
As for "have to", you don't "have to" breathe, but you "have to" breathe in order to stay alive. It's a conditional, not an imperative.
So I mean that if we want our institutions to be continually useful to us, then we have to practice some kind of hygiene of this sort. Evolution does not act on organisms or organizations which don't occasionally die.
Perhaps this too would ossify and eventually have to take itself out of the meme pool, but I think it could do us some good along the way.
This seems like a great argument that bureaucracy is a just another kind of biological organization. It follows from Maturana's theory of autopoeisis, any version of homeostasis, or more recent ideas from Friston on self-evidencing.
• The first group sees something in the world as wrong / broken / requiring change, or just "could be better"; they see themselves as a force for that change; and they see any organization they're a part of, as infrastructure to enable/multiply their force. To these people, the organization is only relevant/valuable as long as it is providing leverage for individuals like them "on the front lines" to accomplish change. To these people, "everything staying the way it is" is an awful concept — if they were willing to accept things as they were, they wouldn't have bothered to become $profession! They will consider their life wasted if things don't end up changing for the better!
• The second group sees nothing wrong with the world, because (in part) they see those frontline people working toward positive change, to be an inherent part of the equilibrium-state of the world. They do think the problem is a problem worth solving! (That's probably why they gravitated to this industry.) But they think that "things are going great" in addressing the problem, insofar as there are these other people who are willing to "fight the good fight." They don't think it matters much whether any particular individual is involved in that fight, as long as in aggregate "people who are motivated to solve the problem" are minted faster than they burn out. People in this group don't feel motivated to be directly involved in solving the problem; and they also aren't much concerned with "losing" people who are directly involved — since they believe that there will always be new "new blood" coming in with a fresh reserve of morale.
The first group ("vocationals") will focus on the work to the exclusion of maintaining the organization. In a crisis, they will let the organization fall apart so that the work can continue happening.
The second group ("professionals") knows this, and thinks this is silly — to them, the work will always get done soon enough (because, if vocational A can't do it, vocationals B/C/D will feel compelled to pick up their slack, at their own expense.) But the organization itself might become paralyzed or fall apart — which these people believe would prevent the work from happening for a much longer time. So they dedicate themselves to keeping the organization functioning — which often involves cutting costs (i.e. making the first group's lives harder), imposing regulations (i.e. punishing the first group for the times they go above-and-beyond to get the work done at the organization's expense), etc.
These groups are rarely aligned, because their world-views are rarely aligned.
It can happen, though. If it becomes clear that the number of people in the first group is declining over time, such that the organization cannot simply rely on "new blood" — then the second group's behavior toward the first group changes dramatically.
That's a charitable take on the "professionals" (and arguably also on the "vocationals"). Both your model and the more pessimistic one can happen, but I think the pessimistic model is what happens more often as an organisation fails.
I'd say that often the "professionals" are "vocationals" who failed upwards. They're the teacher who can't teach, but got transferred to the department. It's the engineer who "failed upward". It's the people who liked the idea of being a teacher or nurse or doctor or rocket scientist, but couldn't hack it in the front lines. Sometimes it's cheaper or easier to transfer a hack into management (or some non-core admin role) rather than firing them. Sometimes it's the least essential person who ends up nominally in charge (the "Dilbert Principle"). Sometimes people go hard for promotions because they are sick of their job (because it's hard for them, because they're incompetent or lazy). An org might want a super-hero for a leadership role, but there's no super heros so they only get bullshitters ticking all the boxes.
There's a few "professionals" who genuinely think that being in charge is more important than working at the front. Maybe they see a good boss resign, and want to fill their shoes. Or they have a bad boss resign, and think they'll try to make a difference. Or they've seen stupid but well-meaning "vocationalists" tear things apart because they have a dumb idea that they're pushing, and think "a good boss wouldn't let these well-meaning idiots do harm rather than good".
But true professionals (either professionals at heart, or vocationalists who see the need to be professionals) are often not going to be as numerous as burnt-out, lazy, failed vocationalists falling upwards. And once there's too many burnt-out, lazy, failed vocationalists in management, the organisation is going to suffer.
> The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization.
It depends a lot on whether you own the organization in entirety or not.
I could have a business that operates for 5 years, own 100% of it, then shut it down because of loss of market interest and not wanting to pivot it to a direction that I personally disagree with just for the sake of keeping the business alive.
I could consider it a 5-year success and just be happy with that.
If investors are involved it's a totally different story.
Yeah totally. Just saying that TFA's thesis doesn't necessarily apply if the founder is mission-driven and 100% owns the organization. They might actually value the mission over the organization and be content when the mission is fulfilled.
As a founder mindset person if I could bootstrap a business that gets me $50 million by curing cancer I'd be MORE THAN HAPPY to just retire on that $50 million, and open source all the IP so that anyone can make the drugs. I don't have a desire to be a billionaire over curing cancer.
However, if you give up ownership during the process, things change. You have fiduciary duty to investors that would be violated if you just gave up all future revenue and open sourced everything. It would have to be a bootstrapped business in order to do the above.
I don't know if this is really true, but it does feel true. And I worry there are no easy paths for the first kind of person. One option is to persist devoted to the cause, and try to put up with the pain of being in that organization, potentially changing the organization's path after much effort. Another option is to quit and go it alone / start a new organization, but that's quite hard too.
The second group is just impossible to beat: people interested in playing office politics, unburdened by objectives like “achieving anything great as an institution,” and motivated by a need to find a niche to survive. Always seemed like an argument for Basic Income to me; at least rob them of some of their motivation, and remove some of the incentive for others to ally up with them.
It's a glaring omission that the word "capitalism" doesn't appear once in this because is at the heart of what the real problem is.
To borrowo another commenter's example: waste management. The town starts picking up the trash daily. It may cut back services and standardize waste bins to streamline the process and cut costs. But here's where it really goes awry: the waste management gets privatized, usually in some kind of "public private partnership". Or it and other municipal functions may be delegated to private insitutions, namely HOAs, which historically have been quasi-government actors that were created primarily to exclude people (ie systemic racism, segregation [1]).
Now HOAs are menat to be resident bodies but the actual management gets privatized to management companies. A government is accountable to its people. HOAs typically aren't accountable to their residents. They are filled with tinpot dictators, self-interested NIMBYs and corruption. Contracts go out to a company controlled by the HOA president's family, etc.
Some of this happens through innocent delusion like the myth of small government being good but usually it's because of corruption and/or lobbying by the beneficiaries of said policies. For public-private partnerships, it's even worse because, to make the prospect attractive, the government assumes all the risk and the private "partner" captures all the profit. This is one way that train companies are run into the ground: in the search for ever-inreasing profits, prices are jacked up and services are cut.
As soon as the stakeholders are separated from who the solution is for, you see exactly what's mentioned. This has been known for centuries and can be analyzed as the workers' relationship to the means of production.
The best internet is municipal internet. Why? Because it's by and for the residents. There are no shareholders who need to be constantly appeased with higher and higher profits.
Capitalism just promotes and rewards rent-seeking. That's all this is.
As soon as I read this, I thought of TurboTax and its mission to preserve the crappy system of filing US taxes so that its software can continue to profit.
The insurers have somehow created which ensures their survival at a real cost. Attempts to rationalize the system have failed because of the focus on getting everyone health insurance rather than health care (admittedly among other reasons).
It doesn’t help that politicians continue to propose dead-in-the-water alternatives. The last round of “Medicare for All” included a lot of provisions that were very unpopular when you asked people about them directly, such as taking away people’s existing private insurance.
This a common theme in politics: Actually solving the problem might remove enthusiasm for your candidate or party, so instead they propose things with no realistic chance of passing. Their business is being front and center in public discourse, not quietly fixing things.
EDIT: I’m getting downvoted because a comment below is denying this part of the bill, so I’m adding the exact text here:
> SEC. 107. PROHIBITION AGAINST DUPLICATING COVERAGE. (a) IN GENERAL.—Beginning on the effective date described in section 106(a), it shall be unlawful for— (1) a private health insurer to sell health insurance coverage that duplicates the benefits provided under this Act; or (2) an employer to provide benefits for an employee, former employee, or the dependents of an employee or former employee that duplicate the benefits provided under this Act.
The comment below is incorrect. The bill would have made people’s existing insurance plans illegal to offer.
I recall an interview where the interviewers were asking the politician if their plan for health coverage would raise everyone's taxes, to which they responded yes - of course they would. The interviewers tried to move forward with that, but the politician then notes that this would also mean that everyone stops paying for their current health insurance - and thus quite a lot cheaper.
> the politician then notes that this would also mean that everyone stops paying for their current health insurance - and thus quite a lot cheaper.
Unfortunately, not so simple:
1) Health insurance is already required to pay out at least 90% of your contributions, so even a hypothetically perfectly efficient replacement could only eliminate 10% of costs, all things equal.
2) The government run system would realistically be expensive to run, like any program covering all Americans. Many of those private insurance costs would just be transferred to a government-run operation. In theory it should be more efficient to have single payer, but it would also be extremely expensive in the short term to build and overhaul the system.
3) The actual cost savings wouldn’t come from operational efficiency (not the government’s strongest ability) but from forcing prices down because nobody would have any choice but to accept the government insurance. They were going to drive costs down by forcing doctors and hospitals to take lower payments and, as unpopular as it is to say, by limiting the types and amounts of treatments available to people.
> 1) Health insurance is already required to pay out at least 90% of your contributions, so even a hypothetically perfectly efficient replacement could only eliminate 10% of costs, all things equal.
All things remaining same, yes. But all things won't remain same because the incentives would be completely different. The 10% rule has incentivized the entire industry to raise their prices so that 10% will be worth more each quarter. Private insurance would rather have insulin at $1000/mo instead of $10/mo so that they can take $100 instead of $1 and they would rather collect $2000/mo in premiums than $200/mo. Medicare, on the other hand, can and should negotiate prices down: https://www.cms.gov/inflation-reduction-act-and-medicare/med...
These points assume that costs would stay the same and there's no overhead in the existing insurance system.
Single-payer could be cheaper and more efficient simply by returning the massive profits of health insurers directly to taxpayers. Part of high cost for healthcare in the USA is the huge number of middlemen.
> The government run system would realistically be expensive to run, like any program covering all Americans. Many of those private insurance costs would just be transferred to a government-run operation. In theory it should be more efficient to have single payer, but it would also be extremely expensive in the short term to build and overhaul the system.
The government is already the largest health insurer in the country, and providers can't turn them down. There's no system to overhaul.
The idea of "Medicare for all" is actually very simple - if you do not have private market health insurance, you can opt in to the health insurance the government already provides for about 65 million people.
> The government is already the largest health insurer in the country, and providers can't turn them down.
This is completely false. Many providers don’t accept Medicare or Medicare.
I don't know where you’re getting the idea that Medicare/Medicaid can’t be turned down by private practices.
> The idea of "Medicare for all" is actually very simple - if you do not have private market health insurance, you can opt in to the health insurance the government already provides for about 65 million people.
Again, that’s not what the “Medicare for All” bill actually said.
People just assumed it was an optional thing, but the bill said something else entirely.
Your post is a great example of how people had their own ideas about how things work or would work under new bills, but when you actually read the details it’s a different situation altogether.
I’m also amazed at the confidence with which people will deny the basic facts of “Medicare for All”, as evidenced by many comments in this thread. I posted an actual excerpt from the bill above, yet people are still trying to argue that it said something else.
You are misinterpreting the text of the bill you keep quoting. As well as equating the notion of Medicare For All as a policy with one attempt to pass it that failed.
While sure, providers could choose to not accept Medicare, practically all do because the people that need the most healthcare are all on it. That would be akin to not treating anyone over the age of 65.
> You are misinterpreting the text of the bill you keep quoting.
I don't think I am. You haven't provided any specifics and your claims above were easily disproven, so I'm not sure what you think I'm doing wrong.
> As well as equating the notion of Medicare For All as a policy with one attempt to pass it that failed.
See above: My parent comment was specifically talking about the Medicare for All bill. You are the one trying to substitute a different concept into the discussion.
> While sure, providers could choose to not accept Medicare
This is the exact opposite of what you claimed two comments up.
This discussion is a perfect example of what I'm talking about: When it comes to these discussions, people like to substitute their own facts and pretend like we can just ignore the reality of of what goes into bills. Once you start looking at actual legislation these things aren't as popular as people think because it doesn't match their imaginary ideal.
Hence my original point: Politicians have an incentive to keep these concepts as far from reality as possible, because it allows people to cling to their own idealized versions of what it would look like. The closer you get to reality, the more people realize that tradeoffs and compromise are necessary in the real world.
No one is going to get elected for solving a problem everyone today is going to be dead to see the results of.
Although we all might agree that this is necessary, people usually tend to vote for people who promise "real" solutions. As in, short term solutions to problems we've been carrying for decades (which obviously requires policies that also take decades to cement).
This is not correct. There was no prohibition on private insurance. Rather, all would have been required to participate in the public plan to spread the risk. That's the only way it could work. If someone wanted to also pay for a private plan, that was allowed.
They had to prohibit overlapping coverage in order to make sure that all private practice physicians accepted the medicare system, which has lower reimbursement rates than private insurance. You can pay for more coverage, because that doesn't compete with the public system, but you cannot pay for private insurance that may lead to lower access for publicly insured persons.
Yes, I did not read closely enough. You referred to new medicare for all plans, while I responded recalling similar false accusations against Obamacare. Some of these new proposals do not allow duplicate plans. Nevertheless, I don't think this particular objection makes them DOA. I believe this is an objection that could be overcome with discussion.
No, this is incorrect. Here is the actual section from the bill:
> SEC. 107. PROHIBITION AGAINST DUPLICATING COVERAGE. (a) IN GENERAL.—Beginning on the effective date described in section 106(a), it shall be unlawful for— (1) a private health insurer to sell health insurance coverage that duplicates the benefits provided under this Act; or (2) an employer to provide benefits for an employee, former employee, or the dependents of an employee or former employee that duplicate the benefits provided under this Act.
You could technically also buy extra insurance for… something extra, but your existing insurance plan would have become illegal.
This was a huge sticking point, despite how many people try to deny it or downplay it.
I'm honestly curious what the real meat of the objections to this were (I never heard much about this sticking point). Why would you want duplicating coverage anyway? Is it not strictly better for any consumer to only be paying for the extra coverage you want on top of the public coverage?
I didn't say I had objections to it. I said it was unpopular with the general public when you told them the details.
This is an example of a situation where people dislike the system but when you ask them about it they like their part of the system.
For example, people generally have an extremely low opinion of Congress, but on average they like their own Congress person.
You get similar results when you poll people about healthcare and health insurance: People generally hate the health insurance system, but if you start talking about taking away their health insurance or their doctor and replacing it with an unknown system, they get upset.
> Why would you want duplicating coverage anyway? Is it not strictly better for any consumer to only be paying for the extra coverage you want on top of the public coverage?
Duplicating coverage is superfluous if you assume the new plan would be better in every way and you give up nothing in the process, obviously.
However, the fear is that upending the entire system would require people to give things up and replace it with unknowns. There's a good chance that some people would be forced to be reassigned to different doctors under a centrally-planned system, or that access to things would be reset and need to be re-determined under new guidelines.
If this doesn't make sense, consider a situation where someone got special approval for off-label coverage of a drug (happens all the time) but the new government insurance had stricter guidelines about which conditions could be treated with which drugs (to keep cost down). Those people could lose access to medications or treatments that were covered privately.
We tend to think of "Medicare for All" type plans as being without downsides, but when you get into the details of changing the entire health care system out and banning the old ways, it's inevitable that some people would start losing things they liked. And that's where people get upset.
To be fair, there was a log of disingenuous fear mongering around the notion of "the government is getting rid of your insurance".
It would be extremely difficult to get an accurate idea of what the general public thinks about a measure before certain interests get involved with publicizing FUD.
Because it's being disingenuous. The insurance isn't getting removed, just like "the HVAC tech is removing heating" is not a coherent statement if the tech is just replacing your furnace. You might have opinions about the performance of the new furnace, but saying that the heating is going to be removed is simply untrue beyond discussing the logistics of that change.
I don't think you understand what people disliked about the idea.
They understood that it was being replaced. Nobody ever pretended like health care was going away and being banned. People weren't assuming that. That would be nonsensical.
People thought the bill was going to be about a Medicare option for all, but then it came out as forced Medicare for all. People didn't like that.
It wasn't fear mongering, people just didn't like that. It's demonstrably unpopular, and this isn't news to anyone who has been paying attention.
What I have works. It doesn’t for everyone. But it does for me.
If I’m too busy to read a thousand-page bill, it’s rational to default to the status quo. (Also, Americans like competition. Banning duplicate coverage sounds like ruling out the competition.)
My first thought was of the 2 major US political parties and their mission of promising things they have no intention of ever doing to get votes so they can win elections, take away more of our freedoms and redistribute more wealth from the many to the few. TurboTax is also a great example though.
This is quite independent of the US. The state functions purely to protect the interests of the dominant class. In the US, the dominant class happens to be capital owners, but that's true in most of the world these days.
Multiparty systems can become completely deadlocked as well. Belgium has had complete deadlocks because nobody can form a coalition, Israel had five elections in three years for similar reasons, Britain was effectively deadlocked under Theresa May, and Canada has had outright minority governments.
I also wouldn’t describe US politics as “rigid” just because we have the same two parties, because each party has different factions and some of the most powerful factions were either marginal or completely nonexistent a couple decades ago.
The biggest problem with the U.S. system isn’t that there are only two parties (that’s a problem, just not the biggest one). It’s that both parties need to agree in order to pass anything (due to the senate filibuster), which as far as I know is unique among democracies.
The filibuster is just a product of the Senate rules and could be changed at any time. There's no incentive to do so now because the Democrats currently control the Senate but they couldn't pass anything even without the filibuster because the Republicans control the House. I suspect it's going to happen with the next trifecta.
I'm not saying that to say that the us is any better, but simply for context for what happens when you don't need all the parties to approve:
France effectively has that by way of the infamous 49.3. the majority party coalition can effectively force all others to accept a law, without ever presenting it for a vote.
The caveat is that the other parties can start a vote of no confidence and dissolve the government with a simple majority, but in reality this never happens because dissolving the government over [pension reform, the budget, insert issue here] is disproportionate.
The current government's lack of caring about their voter base because of the Overton windows shifting to the right has obviously aggravated this.
any sentence that starts this way is just walking straight into its own falsity.
No human system as complex as "the state" ever functions "purely" to do anything. Instead, it's a venue in which different interests and power levels sometimes compete and sometimes cooperate, sometimes achieving goals and often not.
I tend to agree, but then I look at Europe and I say, who is the ruling class here? In the US it's obvious that corporations run everything, but that doesn't seem to be the case in western Europe.
I won't say this is a good representation of every european country, but in France, basically two bilionary own all mainstream private press media, the rich class basically built Macron to push their agenda, and most important laws anyway come from Europe transpositions where only those that can build a perpetual lobby service can push a topic into a directive.
So yes obviously Europe is a paradise of direct democracy where every citizen bloom thanks to a social structure made to help each of them thrive and reach the best version of themselves acting everyday for an harmonious society free of any anxiety about future that promise only bright shiny days for the masses and their children.
Is it possible that they pass USB-C charging and data privacy laws in Europe because the companies affected are primarily American companies not European companies?
Likewise, I imagine they pass anti-fossil fuel laws because there aren't really any major fossil fuel producing countries in Europe besides Russia which is both a pariah and the continent's gas station.
Means & motive are still largely governed by whether you own things for a living or work for a living. The pay to exist vs get paid to exist dynamic is alive and well over there and the debates are all quite familiar. After all they invented the rules and we just copy-pasted them with a few small modifications. The ownership class just isn't as dominant as it is in the US at the moment, for better and for worse.
Biden passed the most comprehensive climate law in US history. The most unbelievable part is that the law was nearly unchanged from what was written by climate experts. Usually bills start out looking good, then get frankensteined by the hundreds of stakeholders that want to cram their shit into it. For once, we got a pretty clean bill that will actually do good (based on the climate experts I've read).
Form your own opinions, but I had to mention real action that happened.
Yes yes and the other is the saviour of the democracy and humanity, while preserving equity.
Either you're new on this planet or just lying to yourself - all parties are marching against same goal, they just keep the distraction going so people are interally conflicted instead of paying attention.
Not really a helpful comment in either content or tone. Biden and Trump are marketedly different in both major policies and governing competence, and it doesn't help the discourse to say that they're just "marching against the same goal."
Indeed, however at least TurboTax has competition so that the experience, while unnecessarily complicated, is not as unpleasant as it could be. I have recently been thinking about this as I have just filed my taxes, which, in the country I am living in, can be done only using the government's website. This website is dreadful. It hasn't changed since the early 2000s at the latest, provides no help or guidance, contains typos, and even requires that you manually copy a number from one page to the next. I also don't think the tax system is noticeably easier than the one in the USA (where I used to live) even though there is no direct analogue of TurboTax lobbying for complexity (although there probably are still accountant lobby groups).
There’s a lot of businesses like this that rely on “complexity” or “fragmentation” of existing systems, particularly in the US where laws and standards differ across all states. Another example is a business like Segment—-they profit off of the complexity and incompatibility of other companies’ products, and would likely oppose or delay an open standard.
I think the more archetypal example is that _treating_ a disease is a lot more profitable than _curing_ a disease -- would the Epipen manufacturer ever develop and market a allergy _vaccine_ that cured an allergy with a one time shot?
One of the most successful drugs in recent times was one that actually cured a previously chronic and not curable disease. It was also a controversial one because it was very expensive. But Solvadi, which cured Hepatitis C was certainly a huge commercial success and shows that the whole idea that pharma companies are never incentivized to cure diseases instead of treating them is just wrong.
Free enterprise is not a necessary precondition for research. You'll note how much of the last 50 years of technological advancements were direct or indirect results of government funded research programs.
If it's too free, nobody will do the research because they'll get scooped by copycats while everyone will claim to have a cure because they'll already have the customer's money by the time their fraud is discovered. Freedom is a good default and a good guiding principle, but it's a terrible absolute principle.
Or a system that removes profit from the equation. From the article, I don't think any one bureaucratic system is immune from the effect.
In the tech sector, we see many examples of the disruptor opening a temporary wedge to either get acquired by the dominant player or becoming the new hegemonist.
This is just taking the rational consumer model, forgetting it's just a model and treating it as a fact of life, and then inventing corollaries from it. Plenty of people find intrinsic value in solving problems without there needing to be a profit. See, e.g. Open Source Software, The Apollo Program, Academia, the BBC.
The Apollo Program, Academia, and the BBC all pay their workers, which makes it profitable for them to do the work.
I get your point: These are not for profit enterprises and they still get important work done.
I'm making a different point: People don't work for the benefit of others without being rewarded.
Open Source Software is not a bad counter example. I think there are rewards in the joy of programming, making a name for yourself, and a few other things, but I'll concede that there is some nuance there.
You are replying to a post that references exceptionally expensive efforts. The inflation adjusted cost of the Apollo Program was hundreds of billions of dollars[1]. By what measure is that cheap? Maybe I'm missing intended sarcasm?
> What comes to my mind are labor unions, the NAACP,as well as feminists and other identity groups.
> They seem to follow a pattern of being really important for their time and place, but after winning the important, landmark victories, they stick around.
They stick around because union busting corporations, racists, and sexists don't just magically disappear or give up after they lose a battle.
If these groups were doing their job, those bad guys you mentioned should be gone by now, right? They used to make the history books with their accomplishments. What have they done for you lately?
> If these groups were doing their job, those bad guys you mentioned should be gone by now, right?
Wrong. By what magic do you think their opponents suddenly disappear or give up?
Martin Luther King said, "the arc of the moral universe is long". Progess is slow and subject to setbacks.
> They used to make the history books with their accomplishments.
Some areas of the country now want to ban the teaching of that history.
Forget racism and sexism for a moment: do you seriously think that the temporary existence of labor unions makes profit-maximizing corporations give up and give in to all of labor's demand for eternity, even after labor unions dissolved?
Do you feel the wars on drugs and terror will ever be won? I don't. I look at your wars the same way.
They'll drag on and on. Some people will get rich and powerful, but the people on whose behalf you're supposedly fighting don't really care about any of it.
They'd much rather have affordable healthcare and housing.
> They'd much rather have affordable healthcare and housing.
The "wars" for affordable healthcare and housing will also drag on and on. Because guess what, there are opposing sides fighting against each other on those issues too, and neither side will magically disappear or give up when one side wins a temporary victory.
It's truly bizarre that you think longstanding social issues can just be "solved" once and for all (if you truly believe that and aren't just trolling).
"If Christian evangelists did their job, then the whole world should be Christian." Doesn't that sound silly? It turns out that there are a whole lot of non-Christians in the world who don't want to be Christians, and they're going to do their "job" too.
So you've now compared feminist movements to Christian evangelists. Do you think christian evangelists are important and deserve our attention even if the majority of christians don't care about them? How about feminists if women don't care about them?
> So you've now compared feminist movements to Christian evangelists. Do you think christian evangelists are important and deserve our attention even if the majority of christians don't care about them?
You seem to have completely missed the point of why I mentioned them. We've now compared many different organizations and social issues. What they all have in common is that there are longstanding competiting interests on both sides, and thus an advocacy group doing its "job" doesn't entail that the opposition magically disappears. An advocacy group hasn't failed to do its job if it doesn't wipe the opposition off the face of the earth, thereby rendering itself irrelevant.
"An advocacy group should disband after one significant victory" is really an incredibly inane suggestion that could probably only be made by someone who doesn't like the advocacy group in question and wishes they would disband regardless of successes or failures.
I'm just writing to call out your abrupt change of subject and avoidance to actually answer the person you replied to. Please be a better poster, if you have no answer, just don't reply.
Get out of here with the "my team" / "your team" nonsense and the trolling in general. It's perfectly possible to make your point with reason and civility instead of cheap, shallow jabs, and if it isn't, well - probably not a point worth making.
I'm not supportive of all opinions from the left-wing about race and whatnot, but it's clear that there is real pushback. Some people want to downplay the crime of enslaving Africans and highlight "American exceptionalism", complete with evangelical Protestantism and some degree of white supremacy.
>those bad guys you mentioned should be gone by now, right
I dont follow your logic. Isnt this a bit like saying if doctors were doing their job, cancer should be gone by now? If police does their job all crime is gone?
Scientists research cancer and are producing visible, measurable results. If they hadn't had any for the past 50 years, I'd say maybe they should change course.
Are you saying that the civil rights and feminist movements in the US have not had visible measurable results in the last 50 years? If so, you are wrong.
I don't think they're too powerful. Like I said, the major victories were won long ago and are in the history books.
The institutions that claim to fight those things are the ones who are the bad guys now. All the while, ignoring the real problems that everyone wants solved.
Wage slavery and misogyny *are* real problems that sane people want solved.
Yes they are still problems.
No, there hasn’t been newsheavy significant wins recently. There has, however, been newsworthy significant losses.
The idea that institutions should disappear because they’ve managed certain successes is utterly, bafflingly stupid. That’s especially the case as we are still current fraught with issues that these institutions exist to help with.
Given you mention NAACP I'm assuming your comment refers to US-based organizations.
In that respect "feminists" won a landmark victory in 1973 that was just recently overturned in Roe v Wade. That's one example of the importance of "sticking around".
As all your examples are of groups leaning one particular way politically I'll proffer another example from other side.
Consider the NRA, presumably they don't need to exist as the 2nd amendment enshrines the right in our constitution.
As you may point out that right is under constant threat. Apply that same logic to the groups you're disparaging and you may better understand their purpose.
The "culture war" just resulted in the reversal of Roe v Wade denying millions of women with healthcare access. The current and previous presidents both called for depriving people of their constitutional 2nd amendment rights. Even if you specifically dislike the NRA their stated purpose is objectively needed.
To reorient the discussion back on topic, the Sharky Principle is often weaponized by those who don't understand the ongoing endangerment of our basic rights. Even with immediate relevant examples like Dobbs v Jackson. Though it may be broadly applicable across organizations it's important to pick good examples.
> The "culture war" just resulted in the reversal of Roe v Wade denying millions of women with healthcare access.
I don't really think it's accurate to describe abortion as "healthcare access". Whatever your views on the topic may be, the situation is more complex than that.
It really is that simple. Women are at severe risk now if they develop certain normal conditions which are mathematically certain to happen to a number of people every year, but now they have to leave to free states (if they can) or plead with a court system to get life/fertility-saving healthcare because the medical treatment is an abortion. Anyone doing IVF especially has to worry about that because there are more situations which can go wrong with elevated risk of death or loss of fertility. It’s not even directly reproductive care: some things like chemotherapy have the risk of complications due to pregnancy during treatment, which has numerous documented cases where treatment was delayed waiting for proof that someone isn’t pregnant because state law prohibits an abortion if that happens.
There’s another aspect which again really is that simple: the liability risk of having some theocrat second-guess their medical expertise means that hospitals are closing obstetric departments and doctors are leaving repressive states. Reduced access guarantees that people who would have had medical care a few years ago do not today.
Douglas Murray's book "The Madness of Crowds" explains this very succinctly. On the other side of the political aisle you could reference the pro-life-only voting block who now finds themselves trying to raise money on an issue that has been resolved (in their minds). "Dog Catches Car" is the headline for all of these issues.
You're correct on a theoretical level. But in reality these are still very real issues. You don't even have to squint - just look at the Supreme Court and Dobbs v Jackson.
Yup: Looks like there is an industry
with a standard operating pattern:
Form a public interest group. Find an
issue, e.g., a claim of a big threat, some
version of the old the sky is falling.
To put over the issue: For evidence for
the threat, scientific is not necessary;
anecdotal is sufficient. Celebrity
endorsement can help.
Get the media hungry for content on-board:
Have them gang up, pile on, form a mob,
publish shocking content, get credibility
for the group and the issue via one for
all, all for one, write click-bait
headlines. Then the media gets eyeballs
and ad revenue.
The group gets publicity, credibility,
donations, goes for legislation and
appropriations which help the group,
result in campaign contributions, maybe
cushy jobs.
Make use of a fact of life in politics:
One percent of the voters making a big
noise can scare politicians more than the
other 99% not much concerned.
I.e., there is "extortion" -- objecting to
the issue can result in getting hurt.
But eventually too many of that 99% find
reasons not to like the issue, and it
dies.
From the perspective of most people belonging to those groups, the major battles are all won and they have much bigger cocerns in their day to day lives. These groups know that, so they have to keep manufacturing outrage in order to stay relevant.
You don't stop fighting after the major battles are won. You fight until the the war is over.
As long as there are groups that continue to fight to reverse the gains that were hard won, one must continue to fight hard. Complacency risks society regressing. See: abortion rights.
I am a gay man and I see increasing homophobic speech that stems from transphobia which most definitely isn't a "solved issue". This worries me.
Yes there was a battle in culture and politics that lasted decades for gay men, but as soon as you let go. You will see conservative groups pushing back. Because they're not gone, there is a long way for them to go as a lot of these ideas come from religious and conservative groups that will probably never go away.
Sorry, but the fight is not over. You don't see it because you're not a part of it it's as simple as that.
If you haven't taken the time to understand why people are still struggling then you can't come and say "well this is a done deal".
Societies move forward but they so with a constant push back. That's just how it is. Even today there is so much homophobia, transphobia, misoginy and racism being touted by people in our most powerful sitting positions that it's silly to think this is "made up" struggle for these groups to "stay relevant". I mean, homosexuals, transpeople, women and racial minorities are never going to go away so they're always going to be relevant.
> Even today there is so much homophobia, transphobia, misoginy and racism being touted by people in our most powerful sitting positions t
Is that really the case though? It seems like in many (most? nearly all?) cases we've gone from people saying things that are overtly and objectively racist / sexist / etc. to things that aren't but could be construed that way if you squint hard enough, and it's largely in the eye of the beholder to decide, and along with that we've seen the rise in assuming people's intent. Once you've crossed the bridge of assuming intent, then pretty much everything can be further "evidence" of the foregone conclusion.
I invite you to take the statements of the "people in our most powerful sitting positions" for any recent period of time (the past month, the past 6 months, whatever) and make a note of all the ones that you are sure are homophobic, transphobic, racist, or whatever and try to take a look at them with fresh eyes. Set aside for a moment what you are so "sure" about their intent and background and see how many you can find are actually and objectively bad, or if they are just "bad" in the sense because (a) they have a different view than you and/or (b) it's only bad because in your mind that person is already <whatever>-ist and so everything they say is just going to be viewed through that lens.
We're never going to say that e.g. racism is a completely solved problem, but the headway we've made over the past century or two is so incredible that from the 30,000 ft view we're relatively close, and the organizations that exist to combat it have largely outlived their purpose and, unfortunately, in many cases seem to exist mostly to fan the flames.
Actually, I think this is a fantastic example of my point. He did not, in fact, call LGBTQ+ people filth, at least according to the quote in the article - the headline and the article clearly misconstrue what he said.
But let's pretend for a moment that he did say that. Is a state senator from Oklahoma one of the "people in our most powerful sitting positions"? With a sufficiently large population, we will be able to find people saying hateful things until the end of time - I don't dispute that at all. There will always be morons. But as you cast a wider and wider net to find people saying stupid things, you have to also take into account their proportion of the population. Even if he had really said that, he'd be part of a vanishingly small minority. Heck, the very fact that an article was written about what he not-quite said also shows how far we've come.
"We are a religious state and we are going to fight it to keep that filth out of the state of Oklahoma because we are a Christian state – we are a moral state"
Seems to me that he did, in fact, call LGBTQ+ people filth.
When later questioned about calling LGBTQ+ people filth, he answered: "I support my constituency, and like I said, we’re a Christian state, and we are tired of having that shoved down our throat at every turn. I’ll let my words [spoken here] speak for theirselves, but that is my statement, and I stand behind it, and I stand behind the Republican Party values, and that is my statement"
I get that you want there to be a bright line rule and that the only way for you to see that he said this was if he said it in a way that cannot possibly be construed as anything else, but that's not the reality of the english language. Since his statement was clarified further, I think we can all take it to mean what the headline says and agree that the bit of grace we might grant someone being misunderstood is run through.
> Is a state senator from Oklahoma one of the "people in our most powerful sitting positions"?
Actually, yes. If anything, recent legislation has shown that you underestimate the power of state government at your peril.
As to the "vanishingly small minority" - I'd say if 0.01% of people felt that way, it would be vanishingly small. The reality is, given Republican party platforms in multiple states, that closer to 21% of people feel this way. 21% is a minority, it's true, but it is not vanishingly small.
> Seems to me that he did, in fact, call LGBTQ+ people filth.
I see that you are choosing to read it that way, but that is quite literally not what he said, and I don't agree with the assumptive leap that you took to get there. Is it possible he meant it the way you're choosing to interpret it? Of course it is. But it seems at least as plausible that he didn't (the fact that he said 'that' and not 'them' means he's probably referring to some sort of dogma or indoctrination or messaging, and not people), but you - and the author of that article apparently - are choosing to go with that particular interpretation anyway. If you can't see the rather large assumption you're making, to me that's a far bigger problem, because it all but guarantees a state of perpetual aggrievance.
Regarding the other stats, that is actually committing the common follow on mistake of lumping everyone together as the same. Again, let's pretend this rando really meant things the way you're choosing to interpret it. To go from there to implying that he is equivalent to everyone who is not on board with gay marriage is again a huge (and false) assumption that only serves to ratchet up your frustration / anger / whatever towards people who don't see the world the same way.
(And as an aside, if you are truly interested in making further progress on some of these issues instead of just being angry about them, you need those people as your allies and could probably win many if not most of them closer to your POV, but demonizing them by lumping them in with the tiny minority representing the worst of them all but guarantees that won't happen.)
>But it seems at least as plausible that he didn't
I do not believe that is true. Possible, perhaps. Plausible, much less at least as plausible? No. You're kinda making an unjustified leap to support your position here. The alternative meaning of his statement is that LGBTQ+ behavior is filth and that their advocacy for equal rights and safety was advocacy for filth. That is essentially the same as calling the behavior that makes them members of a subgroup filth, and so the subgroup is made up of filth as a requirement for membership. The fact is, though, that he was asked about his statement in the context of calling LGBTQ+ people filth and reiterated that his words stood as a Christian and Republican.
>Regarding the other stats, that is actually committing the common follow on mistake of lumping everyone together as the same. Again, let's pretend this rando really meant things the way you're choosing to interpret it. To go from there to implying that he is equivalent to everyone who is not on board with gay marriage is again a huge (and false) assumption that only serves to ratchet up your frustration / anger / whatever towards people who don't see the world the same way.
That's not really it - I implied that he was similar to about 20% of the population, which is about 2/3 of the population against gay marriage or who believe gay and lesbian people are sinning/immoral. These people advocate for their position. They do not want gay people to exist; they would prefer that sin be eradicated. It is not a stretch to say that people who openly state that their core beliefs are antagonistic to the existence of a group of people are similar to one another in terms of their general unwillingness to allow those people to exist peacefully and freely.
>And as an aside, if you are truly interested in making further progress on some of these issues instead of just being angry about them, you need those people as your allies and could probably win many if not most of them closer to your POV, but demonizing them by lumping them in with the tiny minority representing the worst of them all but guarantees that won't happen.
I don't think that's actually true. If you look at the history of the civil rights movement, at least in the US, it has not required the willing participation of out-and-out bigots to make forward progress. It has required the population that is not flatly bigoted to either take action or get out of the way, but nobody required the KKK to become the ally of the civil rights movement. Fortunately, as their behavior is less respected or allowed, they get less out of being members of their groups and most withdraw or change their behavior.
The groups organizing against trans people are amplifying the problem 10000000000x.
A recent example is [1]. Many anti-trans activists, including some that represent themselves as more polite, are actively engaged in a conspiracy to eliminate the notion of transgender experiences being a real part of humanity. This is obviously going to elicit a response from trans people like me, and our reaction is not just understandable but wholly legitimate. Why are you not focusing your attention on those people?
If the "transgender experience" is males insisting that they have the right to impose themselves on any female-only space simply because they imagine themselves to be women, disregarding the boundaries and consent of actual women, then this experience should indeed be eliminated. If you are behaving in this way, please stop it.
And yet, you continue to use software and hardware that trans people have made significant contributions to, including quite likely (at least indirectly) some written by myself.
This is the great tragedy of open source software, isn't it? We keep laboring on things that make people's lives better, including the lives of the people who hate us. Sometimes I ask myself if focusing my career on FOSS always was a mistake.
> The fact that you think racial equality or feminism are "done" illustrates clearly that the problem isn't solved.
Where are you going with this?
I mean, do any of those institutions formed solely for feminism (for example) actually have a metric for when they will be done?
Did they actually draw a line in the sand, saying "When we reach this point, we will dismantle the institution because at this point we will, happily, no longer be necessary?"
Because to all of us watching, they don't have a "done" metric. They don't have a goal, which when reached, will cause their existence to be unnecessary.
Their primary goal isn't "fighting for $whatever", it's to ensure the continued existence of the institution.
Sane people don't work that way - they have a goal in their mind, and once that is achieved they move on to a new goal.
The way it applies to companies, we can state that <whatever>-ism is solved because we reached some metric. So I'm not sure we can close up shop on an <ism> issue after winning some policy or reaching some type of measurable threshold.
That said, what I'm really hearing in this conversation isn't actually that the -ism institutions need to go away. What I'm really hearing is that some folks are very fatigued and tired of being inundated with the -ism dialogue and the demand to spend any energy on it at all. This seems to be significantly true for the people not affected by a particular ism.
And on the side of the -isms, folks are saying, "We absolutely do not feel heard, you're not hearing us about my particular -ism! You can't ignore the badness of the -ism. listen to me! I will step up my activism!"
The reality of the matter is that the -isms aren't going to go away and change is going to be a generational process. For example, every significant founding woman of woman's suffrage died of natural causes (old age), and none of them got to see womens' voting rights pass in their lifetime. Now that women voting isn't even a question of debate and very obvious, no one is really debating in earnest whether women should be allowed to vote or not. That's just a ridiculous thing to consider.
If you want a metric for a measurable threshold of when the ism-issue should go away, it's when we reach a point where the ism-issue has reached a point of saturation where it's plain and obvious and has enough societal inertia not to be challenged. And if people decide to revive something like whether women should be allowed to vote, trust that there will be an opposing force that rises up to fight that.
The pandora's box of the internet and social media is that much of the learned-helplessness to accept that an -ism-issue is here to stay can actually be rallied against, and that change can come about from it. So I would expect that this is the new reality we live with. One can either fight for or against the ism, or ignore it and focus on their interest of choice.
I'm not sure what you think the goal should be. Do you imagine a world where racist policies end and never resume? We're a long, long, long ways from that so it seems premature to ask for organizations opposed to racism in government and business to close up shop, eh?
Tbh this comes across as related to the typical conservative argument that racism is over because we elected a black man president. That's not really what you're talking about, is it?
> Do you imagine a world where racist policies end
Yes. I don't, right now, see racist policies.
> and never resume?
Why does that matter? Can't a new institution form to fix the problem if it comes up again?
If society goes through (for example) 100 years of a totally racist-policy-free existence, why on earth would you argue that the institutions founded to oppose racist policies continue existing for that 100 years?
War is another thing, that's artificially created for that reason I think.
New jobs are created, creating battle equipment, cause stuff always gets destroyed in war.
Governments buy guns, choppers tanks, so those who produce them, are swimming in money now.
Why would those institutions be interested in a time, where there is no major war ?
I also feel like there's some kind of dynamic between US and Russia, like good cop and bad cop.
Russia is an aggressive lunatic, and US sells guns, offers protection services for rest of the world from this crazy guy.
But what would happen if Russia would be gone, or not aggressive anymore, who would buy the guns then ?
World order would be totally different and US would lose customers.
We had that brief period after the end of of the cold war and the US just found other places to blow up in the middle east. The gun lobby will never stop. And, unfortunately, you might become a "peaceful nation" but if your neighbor decides to wage war against you, you either bow or buy more guns to fight as well.
It's unfortunate but I don't think human beings will be able to coexist without wars for the foreseable future. There's just too much you can win by violence if the other side doesn't have the same firepower.
Defense contractors like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin have large incentives to promote conflict and intervention, but how much business do American gun manufacturers even do with militaries?
I can’t find numbers, but my intuition is that individuals consume over 90% of their output. There’s too few militaries rich enough to equip soldiers with US-made guns, and too many US gun buyers.
ChatGPT tells me there are about 20 million soldiers worldwide. That includes roughly two million Chinese, 1.4 million Indians, a million Russians, 1.2 million North Koreans. Of those only India has a small deployment of American small arms from Sig. For the sake of argument, let’s say each is issued a rifle and a sidearm, 40 million guns.
It’s difficult to estimate gun sales, but in 2020 there were 40 million background checks run for gun purchases in the United States. Each check could represent multiple sales.
And arms purchased by the military can remain in service for decades.
Don’t forget somebody has to pay for all the reconstruction that follows.
For the US at least, over the last 110 years or so, every war we’ve been in was initially strongly opposed by the populace. Most (modern) wars are the result of relatively small groups of elites working to create the conditions in which a peaceful populace will be ok with war.
If Russia was gone, the US has a host of “enemies” to replace them with. Additionally, when you have such control over the world economy, it’s very easy to create conditions that create new enemies.
It's not artificial. It's always been a trait of this animal species to get weapons, go kill the men in the other tribe, ra*e the women.
Read about massacres by (some not all!) Russian soldiers, or about what Hamas did. Artificial? No, it's how things have always been.
Combined with Machiavellian dictators, always hungry for more power (including m2 land) and you should see that what Putin and his soldiers do is (unfortunately) pretty natural and common across the ages.
Seems to me you've bought a bunch of conspiracy theories and possibly Putin's manipulation when you apparently think the reasons lite elsewhere.
Companies make money from war, but don't confuse that for that being the underlying reasons for wars.
What does this mean: "militaries in every country, probably won't throw away blood money"?
You're believing that none of the countries in Europe actually care about the people in Ukraine, and it's all about the weapon industry wants to sell weapons? (Or I don't understand what you're writing)
> Not taking my side with Russia or Hamas on this, by saying that US is actually "aggressor here".
Seems you're overlooking that Putin is attacking Ukraine, and that Ukraine defends itself.
You're saying that helping a country _defend_ itself is aggression.
That's like saying [a company that provides weapons to police who stops an active shooter], is an aggressor. -- It's not the right time to say that, when it's about _defending oneself_.
Had the US been exporting weapons to _Putin_, what you wrote would make sense.
In some cases, the US does such things (and many other countries, incl Russia and China). But this time you got it backwards, when you call the defenders for "aggressors".
The UNRWA, the UN Agency for helping Palestinian refugees has been accused of perpetuating their misery - (The real problem with the UN’s agency for Palestinians, The Economist https://archive.is/c7Pop).
This phenomenon (institutions helping to preserve their nominal enemy) has been omnipresent on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict. For example:
> Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas.
- Benjamin Netanyahu, 2015
> The PA is a liability and Hamas is an asset. On the international playing field in this game of delegitimization, think about for a second, the PA is a liability and Hamas is an asset. It’s a terrorist organization. Nobody will recognize it, nobody will give it status at the ICC [International Criminal Court] and nobody will let them push resolutions at the UN [causing us to] need an American veto. … I’m not sure at all that given the current situation, given the current fact that the central playing field we’re playing in is international, Abu Mazen (Abbas) is costing us serious [PR or political] casualties and Hamas in such a situation would be an asset. I don’t think we need to be afraid of [Hamas].
Unfortunately that is a deep and complex problem. There are a lot of forces that are using the Palestinians as a stick with which to harass Israel, in part to deflect from their own human rights abuses.
The result is a set of permanent mutual grievance. An intractable problem may now be utterly insoluble.
UNRWA was created in 1949 to help displaced Palestinians from the 1948 Palestine war. That was 76 years ago. Today the Palestinian life expectancy is 74. (In 1948, it was under 50.) Almost everyone they're supposed to be helping is dead.
One solution is to keep these organizations so lean and understaffed that they would love to eliminate tasks and reduce the scope of their responsibilities.
I don't think anyone is arguing that government is perfect, and you've shown some examples of it being imperfect for sure. In particular the restriction of housing by local governments is near and dear to my heart.
But to call these things "the pricipal source of harm in our society"? If the sorts of things you listed are the greatest harms you've seen, I envy you. You've never seen a company dump pollution in a river near you, never been unable to breathe the air in your own home from local emissions, and must be too young to have been negatively affected by the housing crisis in 2008.
By amount of harm caused, the two things that have caused the most damage to societies are individual persons seeking power for themselves (Putin etc), and organizations seeking to enrich themselves (companies behaving in ways that should've regulated). Those are orders of magnitude beyond everything you listed.
The government not fulfilling its core responsibilities, of preventing pollution, assault, fraud and other private acts that victimize people, would allow for all sorts of private harms, it's true.
But that is generally not a problem in the advanced economies. In those societies, the major problem is the government going beyond its core responsibilities and consequently causing most of the major problems facing society.
This includes the 2008 financial crisis, which was entirely created by the government. The two largest actors in the residential mortgage market in the US are both government sponsored enterprises and collectively guarantee 50% of the market. In 1999 they moved into the subprime market in a big way:
>By amount of harm caused, the two things that have caused the most damage to societies are individual persons seeking power for themselves (Putin etc),
The harm caused by government is primarily due to individuals seeking power for themselves. The harm caused by the Russian state is due to Putin and company's personal ambitions. The same applies to the harm caused by public sector unions. It is due to self-serving people working in government. Bad actors are every bit as capable of exploiting society through government as they are through the private sector. And the damage from the former has very few limits due to the state's monopoly on violence.
"widespread failures in financial regulation and supervision", including the Federal Reserve's failure to stem the tide of toxic assets
"dramatic failures of corporate governance and risk management at many systemically important financial institutions" including too many financial firms acting recklessly and taking on too much risk.
"a combination of excessive borrowing, risky investments, and lack of transparency" by financial institutions and by households that put the financial system on a collision course with crisis.
ill preparation and inconsistent action by government and key policy makers lacking a full understanding of the financial system they oversaw that "added to the uncertainty and panic".
a "systemic breakdown in accountability and ethics" at all levels
Note how government is only named in failing to prevent and fix the issue, hence the root cause lying absolutely with corporate/private greed.
Blaming government for not better regulating and preventing corporate/private greed is a weird criticism for government. It's like saying the government causes domestic violence by not putting a camera in everyone's house.
You're providing those explanations without context. These are all explanations provided by a government committee composed of the very same politicians responsible for creating the government programs that caused the financial crisis:
In its January 2011 report, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC, a committee of U.S. congressmen)
The political elite is thoroughly captured by the public sector institutions responsible for the financial crisis:
They spent a combined $170 million to cultivate allies during that period, a bit less than the American Medical Association and a bit more than General Electric (GE is the parent company of CNBC).
At the same time, their executives have consistently led the mortgage-banking sector in campaign giving to members of Congress, contributing a combined $16.2 million since 1997.
People who have lobbied on their behalf have played or are playing roles in the presidential campaigns of both Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama.
Defenders, including President Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, say the nation's two major mortgage companies -- which own or guarantee roughly half of the nation's $12 trillion in outstanding mortgage debt -- are more vital than ever to the smooth functioning of the nation's jittery financial markets.
For 20 years before the crisis, the American government promoted numerous policies to lower mortgage lending standards. The 2008 crisis is a natural price for such policies. "Corporate/private greed" - is an explanation aimed at children, I don’t understand how a mentally capable person can seriously listen to this BS.
> the American government promoted numerous policies to lower mortgage lending standards
Again, where do you think these reforms come from, exactly? Grassroots movements? Where do you think the standards were before they were lowered and why were they initially higher? Do you think these ideas are voted into effect by individual citizens well informed on the facts of how it would affect the economy? Or based on advice by experts who did the same?
If corporations and private firms were so appalled by the government lowering the standards, they could've easily formed internal agreements to simply not lower their own standards or lobbied against it. But they didn't, did they?
Again and again, companies exert enormous effort to create and find loopholes and weaknesses in law, abandoning all ethics in the process and causing massive problems for society. And somehow this is blamed on government? It's ridiculous.
A cat and mouse game between legislation and reckless behavior is not a moral equilibrium where both sides are responsible for the outcome.
Sometimes an explanation aimed at children is the right explanation, and all the adults are just shifting the blame and hiding behind the status quo.
The government was guaranteeing a significant fraction of subprime mortgages. This meant risk-free gains for corporations that bought the securities backed by them.
That in turned guaranteed a rise in the market demand for MBSs backed by subprime mortgages, and with it, systemic risk. It was an inevitable consequence of the policy:
Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, does not lend money directly to consumers. Instead, it purchases loans that banks make on what is called the secondary market. By expanding the type of loans that it will buy, Fannie Mae is hoping to spur banks to make more loans to people with less-than-stellar credit ratings.
> If corporations and private firms were so appalled by the government lowering the standards, they could've easily formed internal agreements to simply not lower their own standards
Wouldn't that have been illegal on multiple grounds?
No, quite the opposite. It's almost always possible to be safer than what is lawfully required, instead its hard to be riskier than what is lawfully required.
Refusing to sell mortgage backed securities based on subprime mortgages is unlikely to cause you to be prosecuted. In fact, I do it every day.
The strawman that supposedly justifies taking the risk anyway (everybody else is doing it and we would lose to the competition) is coherent but equivalent to "Billy was also doing it, and he's getting all the girls" when you got caught smoking cigarettes at school.
>Again, where do you think these reforms come from, exactly?
From the federal government. That's the whole point.
>they could've easily formed internal agreements to simply not lower their own standards
No.These policies were literally designed to make it illegal.
>Again and again, companies exert enormous effort to create and find loopholes and weaknesses in law, abandoning all ethics in the process and causing massive problems for society. And somehow this is blamed on government?
Yes.
>Sometimes an explanation aimed at children is the right explanation
The advanced economies you so cherish require government oversight to get to where they are, otherwise you would have a country suffering from the tragedy of the commons a few orders of magnitude worse than anything seen today.
Those interventions I am referencing did not get the advanced economies to where they are. They are causing stagnation in housing, healthcare, etc.
The US didn't become an advanced economy due to government restrictions — what you euphemize as "oversight" — on building houses, investing in companies and providing healthcare.
No, the financial crisis was created by private financial institutions securitizing sub-prime mortgages, without considering that failures can be highly correlated, which is what happened when the bubble burst and prices fell across the board at the same time.
The main contribution of government to the crisis was that they didn't do anything to pop the bubble at an earlier time, when it would have caused less damage.
I can't read the Krugman opinion article you linked because it's paywalled, but I found that Dean Baker wrote about claims like yours about exactly this article, and he titled his article "When Someone Says Paul Krugman Called for Greenspan to Create a Housing Bubble Back in 2002, They are Trying to Say That They are Either a Fool or a Liar".
> The same applies to the harm caused by public sector unions. It is due to self-serving people working in government.
> And the damage from the former has very few limits due to the state's monopoly on violence.
It depends... I don't see an issue with say teacher's unions, but police unions can be highly problematic and often work to protect police officers who deliberately broke the law from consequences.
There is no honest take that can conclude that he wasn't endorsing the creation of a bubble:
The basic point is that the recession of 2001 wasn't a typical postwar slump, brought on when an inflation-fighting Fed raises interest rates and easily ended by a snapback in housing and consumer spending when the Fed brings rates back down again. This was a prewar-style recession, a morning after brought on by irrational exuberance. To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.
What Krugman endorsed is exactly what the Federal Reserve ended up doing:
The Federal Reserved lowered interest rates and created a housing bubble.
And what followed is a vast network of unionized academics and journalists engaging in historical revisionism to deny what actually happened, and falsely accuse the private sector of creating the systemic conditions that led to the bubble so as to further vilify the private sector that at every turn they look to exploit through government coercion.
>It depends... I don't see an issue with say teacher's unions, but police unions can be highly problematic and often work to protect police officers who deliberately broke the law from consequences.
That's the standard take of the coalition of unions. Justice is what they want to see undermined, since their grift depends on the normalization of injustice and the demoralization of private citizens, so they point out the harms of police unions so that police can be vilified more, but then they overlook the harm caused by all other types of unions.
Thanks, so it's clear from the article that Krugman didn't endorse any bubbles here.
The sentence you quote is obviously sarcastic in context; particularly the second to last paragraph, which blames the stock market bubble that had just popped partially on Alan Greenspan (chairman of the Fed):
Mr. Greenspan needs one to avoid awkward questions about his own role in creating the stock market bubble.
Back when I first got professionally obsessed with Japan's problems, around four years ago, I made myself a mental checklist of reasons that Japan's decade of stagnation could not happen to the United States. It went like this:
...
4. We may have a stock bubble, but we don't have a real estate bubble.
I've now had to strike the first three items off my list, and I'm getting worried about the fourth.
More and more people are using the B-word about the housing market. A recent analysis by Dean Baker, of the Center for Economic Policy Research, makes a particularly compelling case for a housing bubble. House prices have run well ahead of rents, suggesting that people are now buying houses for speculation rather than merely for shelter. And the explanations one hears for those high prices sound more and more like the rationalizations one heard for Nasdaq 5,000.
If we do have a housing bubble, and it bursts, we'll be looking a lot too Japanese for comfort.
This does not sound like an endorsement to me; quite the opposite.
The important point to note here is that the housing bubble already existed in 2002, it was not created during the period of 2002-2004 when the Fed set low interest rates.
See also "Understanding Recent Trends in House Prices and Homeownership", Robert J. Shiller, from 2007:
While home price booms have been known for centuries, the recent
boom is unique in its pervasiveness. Dramatic home price booms
since the late 1990s have been in evidence in Australia, Canada,
China, France, India, Ireland, Italy, Korea, Russia, Spain, the United
Kingdom, and the United States, among other countries.1 There ap-
pears to be no prior example of such dramatic booms occurring in so
many places at the same time.
...
Conclusion
The view developed here of the boom in home prices since the late
1990s has it operating as a classic speculative bubble, driven largely by
extravagant expectations for future price increases. As such, the situation
may well result in substantial declines in real home prices eventually.
...
Monetary policy does not come out as central in the case studies
examined here. Monetary policy is in an important sense concen-
trated on the extreme short-term. The fundamental target variable
in the U.S. is the federal funds rate, an overnight rate. And yet, eco-
nomic decision makers are focused on a lifetime decision problem.
>Thanks, so it's clear from the article that Krugman didn't endorse any bubbles here.
Here is the excerpt in full:
>To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.
>Judging by Mr. Greenspan's remarkably cheerful recent testimony, he still thinks he can pull that off. But the Fed chairman's crystal ball has been cloudy lately; remember how he urged Congress to cut taxes to head off the risk of excessive budget surpluses? And a sober look at recent data is not encouraging.
So he writes that Greenspan "still thinks he can pull that off". What's "that"? It is creating a housing bubble.
But then Krugman expresses pessimism in Greenspan being able to pull "that" off: "But the Fed chairman's crystal ball has been cloudy lately". This line refers to the Fed's predictions being off, which implies that Greenspan believing he'll be able to pull "that" off is not credible because he has been wrong in other predictions.
The only pessimism Krugman has in this article is about Greenspan's ability to fuel a housing bubble using low interest rates, when he says:
"And a sober look at recent data is not encouraging" in reference to Greenspan's ability to create, I quote, "a housing bubble".
Why would you write that indications that the Federal Reserve will fail at creating a bubble are "not encouraging", unless you want a bubble created?
That he's pessimistic about Greenspan being able to create a housing bubble implies that he considers a housing bubble as a good thing.
He suggested that lowering interest rates could create a housing bubble that would fight the recession, and on repeated occasions from 2001 to 2004, called for the Fed to lower interest rates.
It doesn't take a lot of deduction to see that if you argue something will fight a recession, and then call for the policy change that you argue will cause that something to happen, you want that something to happen.
Again, to reiterate:
* He wrote a low-interest-rate fueled bubble could fight the recession.
* From 2001 to 2004, he repeatedly wrote that the Fed should lower interest rates:
>"KRUGMAN: I think frankly it's got to be -- business investment is not going to be the driving force in this recovery. It has to come from things like housing, things that have not been (UNINTELLIGIBLE).
>DOBBS: We see, Paul, housing at near record levels, we see automobile purchases near record levels. The consumer is still very much in this economy. Can he or she -- or I should say he and she, can they bring back this economy?
>KRUGMAN: Well, as far as the arithmetic goes, yes, it is possible. Will the Fed cut interest rates enough? Will long-term rates fall enough to get the consumer, get the housing sector there in time? We don't know"
>"KRUGMAN: I'm a little depressed. You know, inventories, probably that's over, the inventory slump. But you look at the things that could drive a recovery, business investment, nothing happening. Housing, long-term rates haven't fallen enough to produce a boom there. The trade balance is going to get worst before it gets better because the dollar is still very strong. It's not a happy picture."
>"Consumers, who already have low savings and high debt, probably can't contribute much. But housing, which is highly sensitive to interest rates, could help lead a recovery.... But there has been a peculiar disconnect between Fed policy and the financial variables that affect housing and trade. Housing demand depends on long-term rather than short-term interest rates -- and though the Fed has cut short rates from 6.5 to 3.75 percent since the beginning of the year, the 10-year rate is slightly higher than it was on Jan. 1.... Sooner or later, of course, investors will realize that 2001 isn't 1998. When they do, mortgage rates and the dollar will come way down, and the conditions for a recovery led by housing and exports will be in place.
>"Post-terror nerves aside, what mainly ails the U.S. economy is too much of a good thing. During the bubble years businesses overspent on capital equipment; the resulting overhang of excess capacity is a drag on investment, and hence a drag on the economy as a whole.
>In time this overhang will be worked off. Meanwhile, economic policy should encourage other spending to offset the temporary slump in business investment. Low interest rates, which promote spending on housing and other durable goods, are the main answer. But it seems inevitable that there will also be a fiscal stimulus package"
>"The good news about the U.S. economy is that it fell into recession, but it didn't fall off a cliff. Most of the credit probably goes to the dogged optimism of American consumers, but the Fed's dramatic interest rate cuts helped keep housing strong even as business investment plunged."
As late as late 2004, he was advocating to keep interest rates low. Apparently the housing bubble wasn't big enough for him.
>Oh, and on a nonpolitical note: even before Friday's grim report on jobs, I was puzzled by Mr. Greenspan's eagerness to start raising interest rates. Now I don't understand his policy at all.
Zuckerberg-ing (sometimes) refers (jokingly) to the practice of co-founding a business with someone and then screwing the other founder out of their share of the business. I’m not familiar with any other name for that but it’s a useful one as far as colloquial definitions go.
Talking about and analyzing the problem might lead to mitigating or even substantially fixing it, which would remove its usefulness as a rhetorical attack on attempts to solve social problems.
It was a peculiar thing to say. "We don't need to give a name to anything well known! Names are for obscure concepts only, everything else can be indicated by grunting," you seemed to say.
But really your beef was with attaching a person's name to it, like an attribution?
It's from from acerbus "bitter to taste, sharp, sour, tart." So it's something said in a mildly mean, cynical, or indeed bitter way, which could include irony but doesn't have to.
Also cynicism is about dogs (and Diogenes), and sarcasm is to do with tearing flesh. There's something called the etymological fallacy that says I shouldn't explain words via their roots, but I like to anyway, I think it adds meaning.
I don't know, it's clearly a synonym to me. "Why? Are we running out of names to give out?" is clearly with the intention to be mean but be smug about it, so hence the passive agressiveness.
Corporate rent seeking would seem to be a more prevalent example, even in the context of government. For example, most of the US defense budget goes directly to the military industrial media complex instead of the uniformed military.
>For example, most of the US defense budget goes directly to the military industrial media complex instead of the uniformed military.
Source? I would be surprised if the highest category of military spend was not healthcare (including VA) plus salaries (including DB pensions) plus benefits, which is all payroll expense to employees.
Side topic… but I sure love reading about the MIC from the same people that complained about it for decades but now are jumping up and down to “Send Help To Ukraine” which is really just feed the MIC as a stimulus package.
True, but then how do problems actually get solved? Perhaps only by agents that would benefit if the problem were solved.
For instance, send UNICEF into nations with extreme poverty, and you will get back a bunch of sad stories, a bigger UNICEF, and a larger population to feed. Send a cigarette company, and magically the people will find a way to create an economy to fund their nicotine addiction. There are other solutions to the plagues of poverty, such as civil war, narco-states, natural resource extraction, and refugee migration.
Not your intent? Well, you probably didn’t actually want to solve the problem; you just wanted to feel good about your intent to solve the problem, and now I ruined it for you, so I’m the problem.
This is actually the point, and is analogous to convex optimization, in that systems always evolve along the boundary of constraint, and in the linear case, it will always be an exchange of active parts of the problem.
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There was a director-level organization of about 50 people trying to solve a technical research-level problem. The physicist found an innovative solution that was too simple and just worked. When he demonstrated it to everyone, he thought everyone would be very happy. On the contrary, his manager started having unexplained issues with him and he was shortly let go.
He has ultimately given up on corporate politics and is currently a physics teacher at a usual local college.
As the physics teacher, he found that the students in his class barely knew basic stuff (vector addition, etc.) from the pre-requisite courses. He tried to teach to cover up. He diligently and fairly checked the answers/solutions from the students in the mid-term exams, and found that practically no one passed.
He was shortly called by the college dean and heard back. The dean's primary concern was that irrespective of whether students actually learn or not, if so many fail the exams, the college would get shut down.
He is now forced to pass the students even while he realizes that by passing them now, he's setting them up for failure in the future if they actually pursue physics.
I surmise that if the Shirky Principle were to stop acting, say 80% of projects/institutions may just go away and should.
----
In some cases, it's even worse -- Institutions invent fake problems that they allege to be the solution for and then of course never solve them.