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Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

You don’t understand. The incentives are all wrong. There is absolutely zero benefit for a bureaucracy to make itself more efficient and require less money each year. No one is incentivized to ensure money is being spent well. The biggest incentive for a lifelong bureaucrat is to increase budget and headcount - the more money and headcount you have, the more important you are. There is never a time when you aren’t requesting more money and more people. If you have money left over at the end of the fiscal year you 100% guarantee you spend it lest your budget is cut rather than increased.

I have seen so many bright and starry eyed idealists think they can fix government when they get in. In fact the best man at my wedding / best friend is a DC bureaucrat, and you get him a few beers deep and the stories he tells… My goodness. The money is not being spent well and he is jaded as fuck.

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Couple that with the fact that it’s nearly impossible to fire people from these jobs, regardless of their competency.

Some of the absolute laziest and rude people I’ve ever interacted with are CA government employees who deal with the public.

How many fucks would you give if it was effectively impossible to get fired? It isn’t exactly surprising. When I worked at McDonald’s decades ago I would have greatly enjoyed telling numerous people to go fuck themselves, but I’m a consummate professional and needed the cash.

Now isn’t it crazy that government employees, who ostensibly serve us the tax payers, treat their fellow citizens like shit? A travesty all around but it makes sense when you analyze the incentives.

I worked for government for a long time. It’s no different managing government employees, it’s about leadership. Most people just want to do their job and go home. You probably had a decent manager at McDonald’s — many of them frankly suck.

In city government, frequently the professional managers are on a leash. Some councilman, friend of the mayor, etc has the juice to take care of their friends or countrymen. In citizen facing situations you can usually see this when everyone in the office looks or sounds the same - those are likely not civil service employees, but patronage jobs serving at someone’s pleasure.

I’ve worked in and around many big companies too — plenty of incompetence to go around there, even in sales orgs where getting fired happens routinely.

I have come to appreciate that in the private sector, eventually, you will get fired. I recognize the nepotism and nonsense is rampant in the private sector. However there is the market test. In government it can be neverending.

There absolutely people who just keep messing up in the private sector until they reach retirement, never suffering consequences. You just have to be executive level.

This dichotomy you're making between the free market and government is cartoonish and not particularly useful.

The performance of executives may be more influenced by factors outside of their control than the performance of e.g. IC engineers, though. I wonder if that plays into the perceptive of many executives being incompetent, and how much context is considered when hiring an executive.

An engineer is influenced by the same factors and the executives themself. Fired diagonally upwards is a real thing.

Maybe. I think there’s more egregious bullshit in public sector for sure, in large corporations useless people, they just have to not work a little smarter.

“ You don’t understand. The incentives are all wrong. There is absolutely zero benefit for a bureaucracy to make itself more efficient and require less money each year. No one is incentivized to ensure money is being spent well.”

I would argue this extends to big tech as well. You don’t get the promo without building some useless shit to show “impact”.

Some years back I had a sobering realization: there is no outer limit for how inefficient a government program can be.

The US seems especially bad, though. Do other countries do things differently in terms of incentives?

A subset of services in Ontario, Canada are handled by a private company on a tendered government contract. It’s called Service Ontario, and is sort of a DMV equivalent, but also handles healthcare cards and other daily minutia.

http://www.ontario.ca/page/own-private-serviceontario-centre

I’ve used Service Ontario services many times, and they certainly feel like a balanced blend of bureaucratic process and efficiency.

It’s certainly an oasis in the desert of dealing with the government.

In Denmark government money is pretty good, especially when taken in with the benefits, for areas like being a social worker. Working in Gov tech is not that great but it isn't bad either, the problem is every gov I have ever seen makes it difficult to fire people and gives lots of benefits to make up for the fact that they don't give money.

Why would you work a government job given that it is underpaid unless there were benefits to even it out? And don't say helping people is a benefit, that kind of thing lasts a couple years and then most people burn out on helping people.

The pay scales are all public info for public sector jobs (in California at least). sfgov.org/careers or something should point you in the right direction, most of the tech positions I've seen listed fall under 104x or 106x. However (and I don't think this is unique to SF) most of the tech jobs are listed as civil service exempt. So it's kinda like USDS. No civil service exam required, mediocre pay, next to none of the typical civil service perks.

  Why would you work a government job given that it is underpaid unless there
  were benefits to even it out?

To make the world a better place. Seriously. When I was starting out I went through the whole process with the SF school district. The folks I interviewed with seemed quite decent and were also realistic about the work environment. The top pay band was not far enough off from private sector pay to. matter to me. Unfortunately they could only offer me the lowest band because reasons. Megacorp pulled something similar when they asked me to come back. Bureaucracy is nasty no matter who's signing your checks.

What exactly do you mean by "the US seems especially bad"? Bad compared to what? US government efficiency vs foreign governments' efficiency? US government efficiency vs private sector efficiency? After clarifying what you mean by "bad", _is_ the US especially bad in actuality? Are you basing this perception on any systematic analysis?

I don't mean this to be argumentative or something, I'm just trying to understand what you're basing your thinking on.

You can often trace the apparent efficiency of a bureaucracy back to the length of time that particular one has existed and its complexity.

Because of World War II, and other mid-20th century government changes, European bureaucracies can sometimes be much newer than those in the United States, making them appear they are better designed, when they simply haven’t existed for long enough to become as terrible.

Then why is the federal IRS so much better than the state revenue services?

Better?? Taxes in the US are a byzantine monster. State taxes are far simpler.

Employees of the federal IRS are Waldorf Astoria concierges compared to state revenue agencies, regardless of what you think of the underlying statutes.

But we’re not talking about “employees”. We’re talking about the entirety of an organization.

Yes. The IRS is a relatively good organization, and a much older one than many of the state revenue agencies that underperform it so pitifully. This thread isn't a debate on whether we like the tax code (which the IRS doesn't control, not that it matters) but rather a discussion on whether the age and size of a bureaucracy determines its efficiency. Here's a counterexample to that claim.

I think there are a two reasons the US is worse.

1. Scale, a lot of countries are closer to a city state than the size of the US government. State governments are run poorly for different reasons having to do with our political system. Yeah Luxembourg and Singapore are run really well but India and china aren't.

2. No political party is interested in fixing efficiency. The Democrats ignore it because they don't want to bring attention to government inefficiency/corruption issues. The Republicans want government to be as inefficient as possible so we are incentivized to get rid of it.

I use my adaptation of Hanlon’s razor frequently:

> Never mistake for stupidity that which is explained by incentive structure.

Seems to fit here also!

I don't think it's about incentives. Or, alternatively, if it's about incentives, then you have already failed.

For a long time, the US tried to export democracy and capitalism around the world. Sometimes it worked, but it was more common that the attempt failed. It failed, because the culture, the values, and the institutions needed to support a Western-style society were not there.

There are countries where the bureaucracy is more efficient and functional than in the US. But maybe the attempts to import the best practices fail, because the culture, the values, and the institutions needed to support them are not there. So it's up to individual incentives, which is usually a recipe for failure.

I could not disagree more. In the countries where the bureacracy is considered "efficient", it's because in that time and place the best jobs for the most talented were in the government. In the US context that was 1930 to 1970, when the Great Depression, WWII, Korean War, Vietnam, and the aftermath made stable government employment attractive.

Once the situation tilts back to the private sector, which IMO is the natural state of things, it starts to get corrupted.

My thesis is that over the longterm you must align incentives. In certain times in certain places you can avoid this. But the arc of the moral universe bends towards self interest.

A concrete example: In many countries, most taxpayers don't have to file taxes. Those countries have taken many steps over the decades to make the tax bureaucracy more efficient. The US could try to do the same, but the existing institutions make it difficult.

Another example: Many countries have a system of administrative courts. If someone challenges a decision made by a public official, the case goes there. The process is reasonably cost-effective and predictable, as the judge usually considers only whether the decision was made according to the correct processes. Determining whether the decision was good is left to elected representatives. If a similar case goes to a civil court, the process tends to be more expensive and less predictable, as the judge is more likely to consider the substance of the argument.

I am a "tax return should fit on a postcard" type of guy so we have no argument there. However I don't think you will find many in the center or right political axis that thinks we don't want to streamline tax filing and make the whole thing more efficient.

The reason in the US that things aren't easier is endless lobbying. Literally every sector that makes a few million bucks hires a state lobbyist to ensure no one local fucks them.

The lobbying problem is worse than usual in the US, because you chose to make corporate lobbying constitutionally protected speech. That made proper regulation of it impossible. And then it's difficult to change the decision, because it was made by the Supreme Court, which has somehow assumed a significant legislative role. In principle, it would be possible to change the Constitution, but that is also more difficult in the US than in most other countries.

Structural issues like these are a major reason for the inefficiency of American bureaucracy. You chose to shape your society in a certain way, and these are some of the consequences.

You don’t have to do tax returns in China. But you have to fill out a form with some numbers from your pay check stubs as HR tells you. It’s absolutely bizarre, it doesn’t change what taxes you pay at all, but you are in trouble if you don’t file the form (which is in Chinese anyways and I’ve never read through).

Wouldn’t it seem weird if the official government form wasn’t in the official government language?

Oh no arguments about that, it was a disclaimer that I had no idea what this form really was for. It was called a “self reporting tax form” but was pretty systematic in how it was filled out. Our HR just gave us a PowerPoint on what numbers to put where.

So it could have been a language gap thing that the useless paperwork was actual useful for some reason that I would only know if I could read Chinese.

> which is in Chinese anyways

...which is not a problem any more since the advent of OCR and translation services...

> and I’ve never read through

Maybe you should? Just point a camera at the thing and run it through a translator.

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