Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I buy the thesis here. There are plenty of western countries without the "vetocracy" structure of the US's republic. And yet they still haven't built much infrastructure or accomplished much in public works for the last 30-40 years.

The reason is simple -- there's no money. No public money. There's more private wealth than there's ever been, but public sector investment is a fraction of it. The state has lost the ability to collect reasonable tax revenues from private entities, and it's lost the ability to efficiently spend it.

And in large part this is because of a protracted ideological war that one side has effectively lost and another side has effectively won.

Excessive partisanship is a symptom of this ideological divide, not the cause.

View on HN

I don't think you can say "there's no money" in eg. France. French tax revenue is 45% of GDP.

I actually don't know much about how well France functions as a nation. My European experience is mostly in Germany where my dad's family is from, and infrastructure there is 50x better than in North America.

I'm speaking more from the Canadian perspective; we have a Westminster parliamentary system without vetoes (well there's the senate but that's mostly rubber stamp) and yet we have the same "getting things built" dysfunction that the US has.

That's a procurement and implementation problem.

We order projects, but they become enormously over budget and poorly thought out, causing people to restart again or just oppose the project.

I'm a government developer. I can easily see how our bureaucracy leads to the Phoenix pay system. It is less a vetocracy and more about an overload of features.

Thing is, I've worked in a few BigCorp private entities that have similar kinds of dysfunction, and things also blow up and are done inefficiently.

In both cases I feel it's a broader cultural problem. In companies, it's often putting career or team or self interest ahead of company success [empire building, self promotion, etc.]; in government it's often a lack of responsibility and ethics of citizenship.

I've been involved in bidding for government projects before, and associated with he non-profit sector to boot. It was awful to see how people think and behave.

Not sure if I agree or disagree, but I don't think the article fully understands its thesis & conclusion.

The problem mentioned of the article IMO, is that of bureaucracy. The problem with bureaucracy, is that it's inevitable as an organization grows (and every type of one at that). The larger an organization is, the more bureaucracy is needed (i.e. administrative checks, balances, and communication), the slower it becomes to change and act as a whole because of it.

The only way to remedy this problem is to simplify communication and decision structures in the organization, which the article suggests. However, there is probably some theoretically optimal structure to have. But no matter how you rebuild the communication and decision structures an organization, some level of bureaucracy is needed, and as it grows more of it is needed, and the slower it becomes to act together.

Basically there's only so much rebuilding an institution can do.

Not bureaucracy, that can be reigned in easily from the legislature.

The problem is there are a lot of things in local minima (or maxima if we're optimizing for maximum of some goal function).

The Penn Station story is very illustrative of this problem.

Klein writes that too many people vetoed it. But that's not what happened. No one had put up the money to do what they wanted. Every stakeholder wanted to get off easy. Sure the MSG owner did not want to move for free, neither the USPS, but why would anyone expect them to do for free?

The Federal decision to move the USPS was easy, but then no one reigned in them, so they were able to simply procrastinate for a decade. Why? Because no one gave a fuck about it in the administration. (How hard it would been to order the site manager to move in 2 years or get fired, and assign someone from MTA to check how the move is going? Easy peasy, but no, nothing like that happened.)

And ultimately NY/NJ/AmTrak doesn't want to pay for a new station, because they don't have the money for it. (To buy buildings, land there, to do a megaproject in the heart of Manhattan.)

And it's not even one institution, but many on many different levels.

And the solution seems simple, make it one, and give it a revenue stream, but don't allow it to spend it on anything else, and eventually it'll solve the problem.

> And yet they still haven't built much infrastructure or accomplished much in public works for the last 30-40 years.

Infrastructure in Germany seem to be in good shape. What exactly would you want them to build in addition?

See my other comment below, I don't actually think this applies to Germany. It seems to have its act together somewhat better. At least not from what I've seen when visiting.

What's the evidence for your theory?

Federal government spending as a percentage of GDP has been relatively stable for decades. Excepting a six year period during world war 2, government spending as percentage of GDP is basically as high as its ever been.

Are you including defense and security in that spending count?

I don't actually disagree with many of the responses to my comment (to the effect that public spending doesn't seem effective, is bureacratic, etc) that seem to have been downvoted. I actually agree.

I think it's indicative of the same cultural/ideological problem I point to above: if a culture doesn't believe in the common good, in society, in social cohesion, in group projects, and if we're in a constant ideological struggle with some 50% of the population that feels that the welfare of others is no concern of theirs, and that public spending and public institutions are "socialist" (used as an epithet) -- how can we expect that same culture to be committed to actually performing civic duties and constructing things with any sense of responsibility?

In a nation where it's shark-eat-shark and "take what's mine" it's no surprise that projects complete over budget and work is done sloppily or in an expensive way.

I don't think you can say "there's no money". There's plenty of money, even in the public sector.

It's just spent on different things.

I think there is an even simpler explanation: the massive bureaucratic mess that the government has become is ineffective at allocating resources.

Which is addressed in the article and doesn't explain why we also don't see large-scale projects from the private sector.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com