the problem of governments that outsource everything to contractors and NGOs, which then fail to do the job and can’t be held accountable or monitored because the government no longer has the staff or the expertise to oversee the project in detail.
I have seen this happen, both in government and in private companies. It’s like people don’t realize the full extent of the principal-agent problem. The solution seems easy “just outsource the task to someone else, and if you are not happy about the outcome, fire them and hire someone else”. Here is what sometimes happens instead:
you have actually no idea whether the outcome is good or bad; different people give you contradictory strong opinions, and of course the contractor says that it’s good and that the people who say it’s bad are merely trying to deceive you into taking their services instead;
it turns out that firing the contractor is impossible, because they have built a large and complex project no one else understands, and if they stop maintaining it for a moment, it will all fall apart, with all responsibility being yours;
it turns out that the outcome kinda sucks but you can live with it, and trying to replace the contractors and rebuild the solution would be possible but too expensive (also in terms of political capital: some important guy has approved of the project, now he would look like an idiot);
the outcome sucks and you could fire the contractor and hire a new one, but you realize that you actually have no way to make sure that the next contractor is any better, so maybe you should stick with the devil you know, and hope that they will get more competent as they keep working for you.
There are even contractors out there who create such situations on purpose; that is their actual business model. Like, they will provide you excellent customer service first, so you switch to their system, then they make sure that switching back would be too expensive for you, and then the customer service becomes crappy. (That’s basically how SAP works. You pay for their system and e.g. 5 developers to help you. The first year, they will give your their best 5 developers, and the system does everything you want. So you switch your entire company to SAP. From then on, they will give you 5 junior developers—for the same price—and every little change you want now requires buying a new module and expensive customization.
With government, another problem is that the election cycle means no one is interested in making things work long-term. Switch to contractors can be done overnight (and someone can collect a bribe for that), growing your own team of experts from zero is difficult and takes years, so it almost never happens. And even if it happens by a miracle, again with a proper bribe the system can revert back overnight.
when you say you’re “anti-woke”, how can we tell whether that means you’re against specific, recent types of administrative overreach or whether e.g. you actually want to drive gender-nonconforming people out of public life?
This feels like a false dilemma, are there no options in between? For example, I would be against specific administrative overreaches or whatever, but I am also against the general atmosphere of hate aimed at white men. I don’t want to drive anyone out of anything, but I want the same courtesy to be extended to myself. What happened to the idea of fucking equality? I didn’t choose my race or gender any more than any other person, so if you are going to hold that against me, expect some pushback.
It sucks that politics often becomes a battle of wide coalitions, where your choices are limited to choosing a group that includes those who hate X, or choosing a group that includes those who hate Y. Not sure what can be done about it.
I have seen this happen, both in government and in private companies. It’s like people don’t realize the full extent of the principal-agent problem. The solution seems easy “just outsource the task to someone else, and if you are not happy about the outcome, fire them and hire someone else”. Here is what sometimes happens instead:
you have actually no idea whether the outcome is good or bad; different people give you contradictory strong opinions, and of course the contractor says that it’s good and that the people who say it’s bad are merely trying to deceive you into taking their services instead;
it turns out that firing the contractor is impossible, because they have built a large and complex project no one else understands, and if they stop maintaining it for a moment, it will all fall apart, with all responsibility being yours;
it turns out that the outcome kinda sucks but you can live with it, and trying to replace the contractors and rebuild the solution would be possible but too expensive (also in terms of political capital: some important guy has approved of the project, now he would look like an idiot);
the outcome sucks and you could fire the contractor and hire a new one, but you realize that you actually have no way to make sure that the next contractor is any better, so maybe you should stick with the devil you know, and hope that they will get more competent as they keep working for you.
There are even contractors out there who create such situations on purpose; that is their actual business model. Like, they will provide you excellent customer service first, so you switch to their system, then they make sure that switching back would be too expensive for you, and then the customer service becomes crappy. (That’s basically how SAP works. You pay for their system and e.g. 5 developers to help you. The first year, they will give your their best 5 developers, and the system does everything you want. So you switch your entire company to SAP. From then on, they will give you 5 junior developers—for the same price—and every little change you want now requires buying a new module and expensive customization.
With government, another problem is that the election cycle means no one is interested in making things work long-term. Switch to contractors can be done overnight (and someone can collect a bribe for that), growing your own team of experts from zero is difficult and takes years, so it almost never happens. And even if it happens by a miracle, again with a proper bribe the system can revert back overnight.
This feels like a false dilemma, are there no options in between? For example, I would be against specific administrative overreaches or whatever, but I am also against the general atmosphere of hate aimed at white men. I don’t want to drive anyone out of anything, but I want the same courtesy to be extended to myself. What happened to the idea of fucking equality? I didn’t choose my race or gender any more than any other person, so if you are going to hold that against me, expect some pushback.
It sucks that politics often becomes a battle of wide coalitions, where your choices are limited to choosing a group that includes those who hate X, or choosing a group that includes those who hate Y. Not sure what can be done about it.