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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Government?

I see that as the SOP for large companies too...

It's possible that once a company reaches a certain size, it's inevitable. Corporations internally have the same top-down centralized organizational structure as a typical government. Market forces can't eliminate that kind of inefficiency if it invariably affects all large enterprises, and the economies of scale enjoyed by such companies outweigh the perverse incentives of sub-organizations.

What strikes me as unique to government is the tendency for sufficiently powerful appendages to secure enough resources to start wagging the dog (e.g. the military industry in the US), although now that I think about it seems possible that it would happen within companies.

I think the common feature is just humans.

I think we imagine a lot of market forces that no doubt exist, but people aren't logical in the face of them.

Also don’t forget how unevenly applied market forces are: if McDonald’s started charging 10% more for a hamburger they’d lose sales to Burger King a LOT faster than, say, Comcast or Oracle because the products are basically the same and most customers can switch almost effortlessly whereas you have to be especially mad to trench fiber out to your house or migrate every database in a large enterprise.

Any business with a natural monopoly, high migration costs, etc. can support a surprising amount of inefficiency even if most of their customers find the experience unsatisfying.

True,

But large companies tend to have MBA types scurrying around rooting this stuff out as it pops up or shortly thereafter. Government has no such sort of immune system to fix these problems on the go. It just gets sicker and sicker until the tax payers vote for something drastic or revolt.

You see this in nonprofit entities too. They get big, abstract away from their mission and waste a lot of money until someone gets tasked with cleaning house or a more mission-driven comes along and replaces them.

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