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dev_dull

Or simply walked into the DMV.

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1. Say "government is inefficient" and refuse to allocate resource to fix it.

2. Be angry that government is inefficient.

3. Goto step 1.

Have you been to (the equivalent of) DMV in other countries?

Have you been to France?

Government spending > 50% of GDP. Is it efficient?

That depends what benefits you get from it. Efficiency is a fraction: cost over benefit. You can't just whine about cost and use the word "efficiency". That's cost, not efficiency, and you're completely ignoring the entire point of money in the first place: to be spent to achieve benefit.

This seems weird, if we're talking about the same definition of efficiency, which I would say is the resources, denominated in money, needed to produce a given result.

So let's say that the government produces one driver's license per $100, and I'm angry that it costs that much. Your proposal is that I will be happy if I instead spend $120 per license?

I have a feeling when someone said "have you been to the dmv" they were talking about the length of time things take, not the monetary costs associated with producing a license.

In that case the GP would be talking about appropriating more money for more DMV employees so that people could be done with their business their more expeditiously.

In your case, you're talking about monetary efficiency which is a different thing and might be better served by less employees serving the people.

And I guess it's up to society to decide where that line should be drawn in terms of both monetary efficiency for the tax payer and temporal efficiency for the person waiting in line.

I agree that when people talk about the DMV, they're most likely talking about the lines. When people talk about government inefficiency in nearly every other context, they're talking about money.

More common:

1. Recognize "government is inefficient"

2. Use as an excuse to give the inefficient more with which to be inefficient

3. Goto step 1

Recognizing people are bad at some things doesn't mean it's a money problem nor does it mean that comparing different environments is apt.

1. Realize your computer doesn't have enough RAM

2. Remove a stick of RAM from your computer to teach it a lesson

3. Get mad that your computer didn't magically do more with less

RAM wasn't the problem, that's the whole point.

You're right, but that's missing the point. The problem is inefficient code using too much RAM. Instead of fixing the process, the user took out some RAM hoping the code would magically become more efficient when it needed to run with less RAM. Instead the program ran even slower, and the user was somehow surprised by this outcome. Either the user can continue to blame the program and remove even more RAM, or the user can fix the process that was using too much RAM to begin with. In some very misguided cases, the user might even remove RAM and increase CPU power, leading to even more wasted resources and no improvement in program speed.

Far too often the solution is to continue removing RAM in the hopes that the inefficient process magically fixes itself. It rarely does.

The DMV is a great example of efficiency, they're just optimizing for monetary-cost-per-transaction instead of client-time-per-transaction. You could move people through quickly, fill out the forms for them, and provide helpful and polite service, but all that costs money: it's just cheaper to make clients do all the paperwork and have massive lines so you maximize the work you get out of the few DMV workers by never having them sitting with the line empty.

There are certainly ways they could make the DMV more efficient, but don't mistake the almost universal unpleasantness of DMVs for inefficiency.

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