There might be some interesting observations in here, but this really feels like a grab-bag of complaints, many tangentially-related at best. The author doesn't really do any work to synthesize them to support his central claim.
"What we've institutionalized is run to failure: we'll just keep doing more of what's failed spectacularly until the entire status quo collapses in a fetid heap of greed, self-interest and gross incompetence."
This is buried toward the end of the article but I think it's a big statement with massive consequences for many practical issues.
He doesn't tie it to the rather tired complaint from most business leaders that regulation = bad. It was kind of an annoying reveal of his central point since it seemed like the lead up might actually introduce a new idea or atleast a new take on an old one
Alas the regulators, as arms of the government, represent the epitome of greed, self interest and mind boggling incompetence outstripping anything dreamt of by private industry.
Some interesting observations and certainly it meshes with my own corporate/public-sector experience in some aspects; but it ends as a list of complaints and an urge to buy a book. As well, some key words such as the repeated "Feeding through" really push it into realm of rants to elicit a predictable response or wink to the knowing/in-crowd, rather than an attempt to start a conversation or offer a solution :-/
I would also argue that in America specifically there ARE numerous counter-examples, and I'd vouch to say that HN is probably a statistically significant outlier of such. A lot of startups we discuss or celebrate (and even lots of startups that we bash;) work on very different principles and incentives than those listed here.
Think of him as the early warning siren that some thing is wrong. He didn't propose a solution, that comes from discussion. Complaining about a lack of solution is just complaining about what you got for free.
I am not sure I 100% agree that compliance is a outcome of incompetence. However I do agree that pretty much every company will hold onto an incompetent person until the money runs out.
In my world, compliance is about offsetting risks, sure there are plenty of risks involving incompetence, but that is only one of the issues you need to address. Putting the spotlight on incompetence is going to cause you to miss other significant issues in your organization.
Ultimately, lists and checking boxes are a long term solution to the classic "How do I do xyz?" "I dunno ask Bob he usually does that".
I think this is classic case of things need to get worse to get better.
Things have been good enough for long enough that the incentives for running smoothly and efficiently have eroded away.
We are closing in to the bottom where the a rather radical solution has obvious and major benefits that it will finally be taken. And then the change will be swift.
Note that in previous iterations the solution has often been a large scale military conflict.
Failure is a single outcome with many reasons leading up to it. Incompetence being one of them. I have no doubt that the claim could be true, but when a bailout happens you cannot assert that it must have been incompetence. Good startups that start with the best intentions can still be destroyed by many things that are not monopolised greed or incompetence.
The saddest conclusion that occurs to me (not really addressed in his article) is that mechanisms for accountability aren't working very well, if they exist at all. A corollary is that accountability mechanisms are really gross in nature, so any observer or involved person might ascribe something like a demand for leadership change to causes other than the real underlying incompetence.
Most of the gripes in the article are things that "feel" true but no supporting data is presented.
Do public infrastructures and services cost more in inflation adjusted dollars and achieve less? That's a pretty significant claim which needs serious evidence.
The contention that we are in some uniquely incompetent time is also dubious. American history and all history for that matter is loaded with stories of the rise and fall of fakes, cranks and cons.
Daniel Sickles, The origin of the Chase Manhattan company and John Brinkley just off the top of my head.
> Do public infrastructures and services cost more in inflation adjusted dollars and achieve less? That's a pretty significant claim which needs serious evidence.
Yeah, it would have been nicer if claims like this within the article had links to supporting discussions of some kind. On this topic, at least, I've seen numerous discussions on HN, so I googled a little bit and found some articles that look familiar:
> You've probably noticed things no longer work as well as they once did.
The author assumes these statements are obvious to the reader, but they are definitely not obvious to me.
Are things getting worse? The examples he cites, with the possible exception of infrastructure spending, seem to me about the way they have always been.
It may have something to do with age. I would wager I'm older than the average HN reader, and the steady decline of competence and quality has been pretty obvious in my lifetime. I've had discussions with friends in my age group about this exact topic and no one seemed to disagree. This is all susceptible to all sorts of cognitive tricks though. We may simply be old curmudgeons.
If you work in technology then this shouldn't be that surprising. We have gone from it being a small niche activity to becoming mainstream. When I started everybody I worked with was enthusiastic about it. Now for many it's just a job.
Outside of that though I'm not so sure. I wouldn't like to go back to the seventies.
Yes things have. For instance, potato chip bags have shrunk since the 2008 financial crisis while pricing has increased. Mass market textiles are also no longer durable like they were even twenty years ago (has anyone purchased Marc Jacobs apparel recently?).
I was just reflecting on The Organization Man last night and received from the get-go a nice little gem from a man giving a Yale commencement address in 1908:
"Here merit is the sole test. Birth is nothing...Here only a natural order of nobility is recognized, and its motto, without a coat of arms or boat of heraldry, is 'Intelligence and integrity'." (p16 2002 UofPenn Press)
And then the author, Walter H. Whyte, remarks:
"But the very industrial revolution which this highly serviceable ethic begot in time began to confound it...by the 1880's the corporation had already shown the eventual bureaucratic direction it was going to take...the big organization became a standing taunt to this dream of individual success. Quite obvious to anyone who worked in a big organization, those who survived best were not necessarily the fittest but, in more cases than not, those who by birth and personal connections had the breaks." (pp16-17 ibid)
The argument being, America escaped the moral inefficacies of the old world, yet it slowly crept back in once it became more profitable - and above all convenient - to be ambitious on a career ladder than ambitious before the nakedness of the sun and stars. Which means it is common to have to lie and conspire in order to get ahead - and how many people are willing to for a nicer car to drive around the neighborhood!
The Visible Hand by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. is a great read corroborating the growth of agglomerated industry, and Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy also has some good passages relating to this phenomenon of the homestead getting saturated.
But I'm an eternal optimist and see this as the price of progress :)
Much of this modern malaise, I think, is traceable to two related phenomenon:
1. The lack of a real "competitor" in a geopolitical sense for the West. I don't think it is a coincidence that the US arguably had the most competence and scientific development circa ±1940 - 1990, when it had a direct competitor to measure itself against. Incompetence against the Nazis or Soviets got you killed, whereas today, nothing really happens (immediately.) The ancient Greeks (and subsequently Nietzsche) recognized the usefulness of competition toward keeping yourself sharp and called it agon. Ironically the rise of China can be seen as a good thing from this perspective.
2. The loss of a civilization-wide teleological narrative. For the past ±1,500 years, that's been Christianity, in various forms. These days, there is no real "purpose" to the West, beyond some vague notions of individualism, choice and comfort. Institutions and standards become more and more difficult to maintain as a sense of apathy and the lack of a perceived future grows. Younger people especially seem unconvinced that there is anything waiting for them in 50 years.
Regarding 2: I would love to see some of the community aspects of christianity/religion brought back in a secular form. It seems like believing in God isn't really the key part. It's interacting with your neighbours, which seems to be something really missing from a lot of the western world over the last few decades.
For sure, and I think that's a widespread political problem too. I wonder if online hostility and polarization would be reduced if people simply had calm in-person discussions with each other once a week. Social media is optimized for outrage and offensiveness.
"I wonder if online hostility and polarization would be reduced if people simply had calm in-person discussions with each other once a week"
That might work for some people? I don't know?
But I do know that the Charleston church shooter sat down with a bunch of little old ladies for the duration of a bible study engaging in, what I can only assume was, a calm in-person discussion. Then he blew their heads off.
Point is that, for some reason, the internet has a much stronger hold over people than do in person connections. People deeply believe they are more connected to people in their virtual spaces than they are to their neighbors or even physical friends. That sense of connection is real to those people. To some of those people, it's real enough to kill for.
That's not really a good counterexample. Do you think that Roof attended the bible study with the intent of actually discussing -- let alone listening to -- anything? It was almost without question just part of the setup for his attack.
I think you are arguing from outliers here. contrary to how it may seem on the news, mass shootings are quite rare events, even in the US. the fact that you and I have registered accounts and made at least one post on HN makes us outliers even in this community.
are there some people for whom virtual spaces are more real than their neighbors and IRL friends? sure, but most people don't seem to be like that. as far as I can tell, most people use social media to interact with an extended network of IRL friends/family. some people do try to get tons of followers that they don't know on instagram, but I think even this is best understood as jockeying for status among IRL peers.
note: IRL is a somewhat antiquated term this days, but I use it as a shorthand for "relationships that originate in in-person interactions". so if I had a friend A who moved away and befriended B there, but we all play video games together, B is still an IRL friend to me.
I've seen this in a lot of socialist circles -- an emphasis on building resilient communities, supporting your neighbors and fellow workers, and trying to lift everyone up.
I expect that there will be a strong reaction on this forum to the word 'socialist', but the communities you describe definitely still exist.
But also, historically, these sorts of communities have been targeted by governments. Police literally went to war with unions to break up community power for coal miners. While communism is different than socialism, there's a huge public smear campaign trying to couple those two together. (And, in fact, historically there were major pushes to blacklist folks who were connected to communism.)
Use popular media to normalize inviting your neighbors round for a bbq, asking your handy neighbor for help when you have a plumbing problem, regularly say hello and sometimes have a chat/catch up with neighbors to maintain lines of communication to make the above possible.
Basically using popular media to make people interact more IRL, suggest people consume less and basically de-throne media goes against the aligned incentives of the whole system and its success. Did we paint ourselves into a corner? Ok, the paint will dry eventually but it might be a completely different color from when it was wet.
Does it need to work on a national scale? Sometimes the best solutions come from the bottom up. On a national scale, the government just needs to get out of the way.
Quite a few. Maybe not at the national scale as much, but definitely at the community scale. For instance, socialists in Seattle are collecting donations to buy school supplies, laptops, tablets, etc. for kids who are unable to afford them while attending school from home. Another thing is paying bail for people who cannot afford it.
Interesting. At the risk of mentioning another trigger word I'll say the importance of supporting your community comes up a lot in libertarian circles as well. I think it shows that regardless of your political leanings or opinions on the responsibilities of the government, people in general value community and support circles.
The problem is that people disagree on (1) the size/scope of "a community" (2) the obligations a person has to said "community". It gets more complicated because the size and the obligations vary depending on what is being discussed. Most people are fairly comfortable with the idea of some kind of responsibility (even just taxes) towards national defense. Not many people are comfortable with the idea that they have responsibility for fixing the little bridge that crosses the small river in a town 300 miles away.
If "socialism" triggers a strong reaction, so should "Christianity" trigger the same reaction. It's hard to decouple Christianity, and Christ himself, from a lot of socialist ideals. There is some explanation here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_socialism#History
People naturally operate more socialistically on a familial and friend basis. Perhaps, when we were more dependent on our local community for goods, services, protection, etc. we were more willing to extend this boundary further, but this is not our current economic/social order.
There's a famous summary of human nature: people are cooperative, altruistic and non-violent towards their in-group, and distrustful, violent and selfish towards their out-group.
I try to look at the long arc of human history as basically the story of how we grow the size of the "in-group" and shrink the size of the "out-group". It isn't easy, but we have made significant progress over the centuries.
Believing in God is not the key part, but believing in some unifying idea is necessary. People are extremely tribal. You need something that defines an "Us" for people the rally around.
I think you would need some kind of semi-strong central anchor, like religion to make this happen. And I don't really know if that exists anymore on a local geographic level.
Yes - CS Lewis pointed out the value of going to church in your local parish rather than shopping around for a church that suits you. Instead of having your beliefs reinforced by people who are like you, they are influenced by the people who happen to live near you. Those people may be more diverse in age, wealth and nationality than your other friends, but they are linked to you by a shared interest in your neighbourhood. This builds community and helps open minds.
As someone who grew up in a small, rural Christian community, this is a nice sentiment, but far from true in my experience. People instead become highly punitive and disparaging towards anyone who does not think and behave exactly like them. Whatever community exists is built around a hateful exclusion of “the other.”
I by no means want to invalidate your experience, but from someone else who also grew up in a rural Christian (European Lutheran) community, I can’t recall churchgoers talking or caring much about each other’s beliefs - there was the whole range from secularists who were in it for the local community through devout fundamentalists and AFAIK (left as a teenager so it’s possible I missed things) it was never an issue.
That being said, there was definitely a “fear of the other “ with people being extremely suspicious of the few handful of outsiders who moved in and didn’t have any connection like relatives, existing connections, or children going to school there.
It gets much stronger when politics become mixed up with religion like it is in the United States. They feel their values should be imposed on others via law and regulations (see the recent nomination of the Supreme Court judge here who is very likely to be the deciding vote in removing healthcare protections from millions as well as denying women the right to do what they want with their body, possibly rescinding rights of people of color and LGBQT+ people back to the 1950s where they were openly attacked by police and put into mental wards). It's going to be a mess unless the Democrats stack the Supreme Court and neuter it.
I think the shared belief, sense of purpose, and sense of something greater beyond this life _is_ a key to it. I don't think secularism can provide a strong enough motivation channeled into something productive. It can evoke strong emotion, but it usually ends with days of rage and such. Religion and belief in deity has pretty much always provided that (and even then there are lots of examples of that not working). I don't think we are going to buck the lessons of thousands of years of human history and find some kind of "enlightened secularism" that hasn't worked before.
I think the postmodern intellectual narratives are breaking it all in the West. The denial of objective truth, the rise of moral relativism, the notions about expressing the individual via many group identities, etc. It's a demoralizing view of life that is far-reaching in our contemporary culture. Even if you look at architecture, design and urban planning, you can find bits of that "wisdom" everywhere.
In addition, there is no positive vision of the future for society as a whole. What does the US look like in 2075 or 2100? All we get are dystopias.
I get that the World, and Europe in particular, got badly burnt by Utopias in the 20th century. But still seems like something is needed - especially given the looming geopolitical changes.
How is this not an argument that the masses are too stupid to handle themselves and need to be brainwashed for social control and stability? That's essentially what religion is, especially Abrahamic religions based on nothing but completely made up stories.
It seems true to me that most individuals (myself included) are not up to the task of inventing a reason to exist. You can moan about how the stories are made up til Kingdom come, the point of it is practicing the belief. Otherwise you get what we're talking about in this thread, billions of people growing up believing nothing, having no rational reason to believe they are valuable, no reason to think the future warrants their contribution.
> I don't think we are going to buck the lessons of thousands of years of human history and find some kind of "enlightened secularism" that hasn't worked before.
this is a rather ethnocentric view of religion based on what is clearly a limited historical understanding evidently informed mostly by judeo-christianity. just to pick one counter-example: the ancient greeks sought virtue and purpose from philosophical inquiry, not from their religious practices, which were much more transactional.
Fortunately, there already exists a secular church, so to speak: Unitarian Universalism[0].
The modern Unitarian Universalist (UU) church is very welcoming to people of all faiths, religions, and creeds. You do not need to be atheist to join, nor do you need to believe in anything. Most congregations are very welcoming of new members.
Four US Presidents, eleven Nobel prize winners, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee are Unitarians. There are many Unitarians out there, though they do not tend to proselytize much, which is maybe why you haven't heard of them.
As always, finding the right congregation is very important. The UU church has a good site here to help:
They are good people and a good community. I had a similar experience as an agnostic and was welcomed with open arms into their community. I move from that town a while back but still keep in touch with some of the members. Completely different experience than the close minded, judgemental,self possessed, obsessive evangelicals that I grew up around.
While Unitarian communities are awesome, they're still a niche thing. I don't see anything becoming nearly as dominant as the old Church used to be - not if we have our pick of ideologically diverse reading material, supportive subcultures for every individual interest, and the lack of severe punishment by God or His earthly sheriffs upon divergence.
People were united by a monopoly on education and political power. It's too bad that we're losing that ubiquitous societal fabric, but in the face of the alternative, seriously, good riddance.
If spiritualism is your thing though, do drop by at a Unitarian Church close to you. It's an interesting experience. Not for me, but still warmly recommended.
I don't have the actual study at hand, but it's cited in the book "The Righteous Mind".[1] They looked at independent communes[2] in the US in the 1800's, and 20 years after the founding of a commune, 6% of the secular ones were still around, as opposed to 39% of the religious ones. The latter had more things binding them. One insight: In religious communes, sacrifices (no alcohol, etc) correlated with longevity. In secular communities, there was no correlation. Over there, every sacrifice had to be argued about and justified. There was less thrash in religious communes.
(Just found the author of the study/studies: Sosis[3]
I think we need to distinguish between public and private institutions here. Government was always incompetent, wasteful average at best. Cost overruns have always been a fixture of the government machine.
That doesn't make it incompetent or wasteful if it's doing hard or novel things. Looking at the interstate highway system or trips to the moon or massive global health investments and dismissing them as over budget is absurd.
I think all big organizations are wasteful and there is almost no way around it. My company is pretty successful but if every project there got reported publicly you would see a ton of totally failed projects and plenty of incompetence and internal corruption.
Europe is doing worse than the US on a cases per capita bais at the moment. Not good for either of us. I don't know how I can go to the upcoming funerals
I think it comes down to a few factors such as being more trusting of their government measures, being used to wearing masks because of poor air quality and also not having transparency. In China, for example, it's hard to tell what the situation was because reporting was very state controlled.
Also I'm not sure if Asian countries are battling with disinformation campaigns/conspiracy theories as much as their western counterparts do.
They are, but there is still more trust in the government. Speaking for the Chinese perspective - there are objective measures that most people can evaluate to say that their government has been successful. Sure, there's always disinformation on WeChat and such, but in general the central government is seen as competent and corruption is tolerated as an acceptable part of that. Remember that for the older generation, they literally went from rationing, food shortages, no education, etc., to now what we see of Shanghai/Beijing, their kids have decent access to higher education, travel, consumer goods, etc. Even South Korea/Japan/Taiwan have an older generation who can remember the difficulties of a past era.
The real question is whether this trend can continue forward. My bet is yes for the foreseeable future, but no power system lasts forever. So while we're seeing the gradual (seeming) decline of the West, we'll probably be repeating the pattern in a few decades for East Asia.
There appear to be other factors at work in Japan. Despite a high level of mask usage, a recent study found their infection rate was one of the highest in the world. Of course it wasn't a random sample so it's hard to tell what's really happening.
is the US really worst of all? in some parts yes, in some parts no. it's a big place that offers a lot of autonomy to state and local governments. my take is that coronavirus has shown the strength of the US federal model. even with the woefully incompetent POTUS leading the executive branch, my state has been free to implement a more-or-less sane response to the pandemic. we shut down pretty hard early on, but now indoor dining is back, most shops are open, and we have a very low transmission rate.
I might as well just say it, it wouldn't be too hard to figure it out from my posting history at this point. I live in maryland. I should warn you though, while the coronavirus response has been pretty good imo, there's plenty of unrelated insanity in this state. also if you're a software engineer, I hope you like working for defense contractors.
Can't find it now, but there was an article somewhere that discussed coronadeaths per capita in the last three months, because we now have some ideas about treatment. The death rate in the US was 5 times that of Europe, IIRC. That's concerning because it says something about public health and healthcare delivery.
1) in the 1960s, we saw the rise of "operations research", a field of study specifically aimed at understanding and improving how (mostly large) human organizations operated. It was seen as part of the great hope of the future, but because it explicitly said that large organizations, including governments, could function better and do great things, it became seen as quite a problem for conservative/libertarian philosophy which wanted more support for the view that government is, as you put it yourself "always incompetent". OR is now fairly unfashionable field, and the continuing search for better ways to do things within human organizations has lost a lot of the urgency it had in the 60s and early 70s.
2) You have almost no idea how incompetent or wasteful most private organizations are, unless they are so bad that they go bankrupt and dissolve.
Re: the Christianity part, I’d say that starting with the early 1800s until after WW2 the true teleological narrative was the idea of Progress (under different shapes and forms), it was only with the invention (and use) of the atomic bomb that its shine began to fade.
Absolutely, but the concept of Progress is directly tied to Christian (more specifically, Abrahamic) eschatology; i.e. the End Times and the notion of linear time. Compared to say, Hinduism, where traditionally time is seen as cyclical.
Your atom bomb mention is interesting considering Oppenheimer's Hinduism reference.
The mainstream denominations of Christianity have always said very clearly that the history of salvation isn't the history of the world. We aren't here to build heaven on Earth, the Kingdom of God works on its own without us.
I'm talking about broader societal effects of religious beliefs. Abrahamic religions have a linear concept of time, which lends itself to viewing metaphysics and the world in a linear fashion. This is reflected in everything from capital-P Progress, to Millennialist movements, to Hegel and Marx, etc. It permeates everything.
Christopher Lasch wrote an entire book on how he considered the very concept of "progress" to be a rather recent phenomenon, and the problems it creates.
I now full on agree with #1. The USA needs a strong China to be the other superpower.
Forgive me as I try to articulate what I'm thinking.
Being the sole super power somehow turned out to be bad thing. We (the USA) needs to an opponent, a competitor to better define and understand ourselves.
During the Cold War, aspirational preaching about human rights and democracy and capitalism was a way for us to differentiate ourselves from our opponents. A bit like Scott Galloway's thesis about Apple using privacy as brand laddering technique to differentiate itself from Google, Samsung, etc. Privacy is not central to Apple. But it makes for great ad copy.
I'm not saying USSR, China, whoever were (are) better or worse than the USA. I have no opinion and I really don't care. (Well, I do have an opinion. People in glass houses...)
What I am saying is the USA needs the idea of an opponent. So that domestically it (we) can set aside our differences to meet the external threat. And to have some kind of narrative to pitch why aligning with the USA is the better choice.
I don't think the USA is unique this way. Us vs them is base human psychology.
I do hope that The Powers That Be, on both sides, under stand the realpolitik is just kabuki and it matters don't degenerate into another Cold War. We don't need another arm's race.
there already is an arms race look at the spending the new Chinese air craft carriers and anti satellite tests and the USAs continued monstrous military budget.
While we did have to fight the Cold War, which led to much progress on a technological front, the US also had the advantage of reduced competition from previous world powers (UK, Germany, France, Japan, etc) which had been destroyed by WWII.
The Communists gave us focus. The end state of WWII provided the economic ability to put that focus to good use.
Or something like that. But, I do agree that the lack of a single unifying enemy is a problem when it comes to motivating society as a unit. It feels like we're more likely to be destroyed (as a nation) from internal factors than external, and that's not good.
2) Christianity is a terrible "driving force" and has a horrible history of "success" I can't believe anyone would actually use that on HN as evidence for anything. I believe humanism and secularism and respect for science is the only thing that is going to save humanity. Without belief in the value of the individual what use is any of the rest of it?
> You've probably noticed massive cost overruns in public projects. That $1 billion bridge is now $3 billion--oh, sorry, make that $4 billion. If we ever get it finished, better estimate $5 billion.
This rings home as I was recently talking to someone at an engineering firm that often bids for government contracts. And they were explaining that you build your timeline back from the deadline in the proposal even if you know it isn't feasible. A lot of companies will then bid under-cost and hope that there was a flaw in the design that requires adjustments. Then since they are already on the site with a bunch of workers they will charge extortionary process for the modification to make money on the whole project. So that $10M dollar bid jumps to $15M because they needed to reroute a gas line before starting the building (not a real example, but representative)
Of course a lot of the problem is that the city has strong processes and policies to avoid corruption, however the end result is that it is very difficult to hire the people you know do good work, instead you are stuck with the lowest bidder. Of course there is a process for banning companies however it is long, complicated and very bureaucratic, so even if you could get the ban in place it is easier for any project manager not to bother.
I guess it all comes down to lack of trust, and this is why we can't have nice things.
Here in Seattle, we've built out a light rail system under budget and ahead of schedule. And of course, we've also really flubbed the cost/schedule for a highway tunnel.
I'm not sure that the result is axiomatically over budget for major projects. That said, I'm less worried about budget than I am worried about who benefits (e.g. I'm generally ok with transit going over because it provides such a valuable benefit for the city.)
I guess my point that at least for the city I was talking about the bids were rarely a good estimate of the cost and time required. I'm not saying that they never make it for around that cost, but it is rare. The bids more reflected some complicated mating ritual to get their food in the door, then they deliver the bad news that the actual cost is higher the first chance they get.
I do wonder, however, how our environment is different. There's water everywhere, it's very hilly, and Seattle is literally built on top of older versions of Seattle.
I'm open to the idea that we spent more than we should have (even if it was under budget), but I'd want to see more data about the project and where the costs were unreasonably high.
Water is a feature of all cities for historical reasons. Hills are common as well. As for old : you a practically new born, compared to cities in Europe.
The highway tunnel was failed execution. Between using the largest boring machine ever built and feeding multiple steel well-casings into the cutter-head of said machine, the errors were of engineering and management.
You have that exactly backwards: the tunnel was a fixed price design-build contract and somehow the courts held it to the original price (still $1billion more than fixing the viaduct, the benefits which accrue to private land owners downtown). The light rail was originally going to be to the University District by 2006. Ridership wasn't even close to original predictions. It's slow and will never replace more than a small fraction of traffic by design; the stations are too small, the area around them isn't zoned dense enough to bring in more more people, and there are no express bypasses so it will always be slow.
The sad part is the trust got moved to the least trustworthy actors. At least the gov workers are beholden to their job and maybe their office People are for whatever reason terrified to allow gov workers to just do their job. Instead they allow them to contract out millions and billions of dollars to companies that are beholden only to themselves and maybe a contract that will take 10 years to dispute in court.
The saddest part is honest companies want nothing to do with these huge gov contracts. The only way to navigate the minefield of regulations is to lie which honest people dont want to do. This results in nefarious companies that specialize in ripping of the government.
And just to get my mandated downvotes. Trump has been beating the drum of their being too many regulations since he got in office. I'm guessing HN won't want to hear that though.
I don't see how anyone sees the government as more trustworthy in this process.
The people paying these companies outrageous sums are the ones taking campaign donations from those companies. The people that decide that the high speed rail which needs to stop at every town along the route (and that the route needs to include all their towns) are -- again -- the politicians.
At every turn politicians stick their noses into the workings of infrastructure projects. Quality and cost finish well behind kickbacks to the politician and largesse to their supporters.
There's a big difference between just running a bulldozer through a building (regulations bad because regulations!) versus fixing bad building work (audit regulations for effectiveness and loopholes). I'm not going to hire an electrician who thinks electicity is made by evil spirits haunting wires and wants to rip them all out, I'm going to hire someone that will methodically find wiring faults and fix them.
Many regulations are written in blood. There is no shortcut to fixing problems, no matter how loud someone is shouting simplistic answers.
I've been wondering if it might make sense to maintain a score across those involved in any project, where your score goes up for involvement with a successful project but down when that project has issues (delays, overruns, faults), with all movement in proportion to the individual's share of the financial returns from the project.
Then, when seeking bids, you could factor in the scores of those involved in the organizations bidding - giving it a weight or requiring a threshold (for average or median or P95 or something) among the participants.
This is similar what they have for the banning process, but the score is well specified and has a number of points. There have been terrible projects that got a passing score. So you have the classic problem of if it is public they will game it, but if it isn't public than it is corruption.
But I think this is on the right track. As a simple approach you can have final-cost ratio. "Unknown" bidders would use the average score across all projects (or all first-time projects?) and known-good bidders would be able to use their own score (which may be close to 1). Known-bad bidders may have 1.5-2 multipliers which "corrects" for their underbid.
Of course this too simple. You want to:
- Account for time.
- Account for how easy they were to work with.
- You need to factor in unexpected changes. (which do have a cost, but how do you determine the true cost?)
- Using the average for unknowns may make it too difficult for new companies to enter. I way I see it you want some new entries to keep your pool in check. (Although the majority of projects, and quite possibly the largest projects should be going to known-good companies).
I think this is part of the problem. There are so many factors that it is difficult to rigidly define them, and if they aren't rigidly defined than you have chances for corruption.
The TL;DR is that unless you just let a human make the decision it is a very hard problem, and right now we don't think that humans are trustworthy enough.
An important point for my proposal is that we only track scores for individual humans, not aggregate entities. I think this makes a difference in a lot of ways.
A new company can (should!) hire some people with solid local experience, so can have a score (we still need defaulting rules for individuals, of course).
Individuals risk reputational damage if people elsewhere in the project behave badly, which should increase cooperation with controls. Similarly, well managed companies will find it easier to hire, while poorly managed companies will find it more difficult.
Companies that have a lot of poorly scored individuals because of poor historical practice will be extra motivated to bring on people with a history of working on well managed projects, which would help knowledge flow about how to keep projects well managed.
I have seen something similar to what you are describing and not just the lowest bidder (my experience in government contracts, but not related to construction). They have proven past performance clauses (you have to show you successfully completed X number of similar projects to acceptable levels and budgets), feasibility clauses (you can’t just say you can do it, you have to provide details how you can do it with your stated time and budget and show you account for reasonable problems that come up), and capacity clauses (you have to show you actually have the equipment, personnel, experience, etc. to perform the job you are bidding for). Then all those criteria are given point values and bids are tallied up and awarded to the highest point bidder. So if you come in with a low bid but have poor past performance and inadequate equipment, you'll lose out to the higher bid from a proven performer.
I've heard of things like that, and my proposal was definitely informed thereby. However, an important part of my proposal was that scores follow individuals rather than organizations. I expand a couple comments over: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24802597
One of the issues with the lowest bidder approach is that the organization writing the bid must completely understand its needs before writing the actual bid.
For physical infrastructure that's often the case but with software you get 2-3x cost overruns simply because the project is effectively re-done 3 times. Because often what the buyer is asking for is simply not what he needs. Of course, bidding laws makes it illegal to contact the bid writer and if you try to anticipate anything not explicitly written, you'll end up with a more expensive proposition than your competitor.
The IBM Phenix payroll system is a prime example of that, but there are many more.
I don't agree with most of these.
As an older British person, I say try going back to 1970's Britain and see if you think things worked better then. They didn't. There is an awful lot that could be improved for sure, but overall things are going pretty well in my opinion.
I agree with many (bot not all) of the points in the article. However, the article is not well reasoned and it’s not clear how many of the conclusions about cause follow from the description of the problems.
You can just as easily argue that services cost more because we expect more from them. You now need to make sure those with disabilities are covered, that the environment isn't damaged, that workers who build them aren't abused or die, that waste is disposed of into something other than the local river, that the thing looks aesthetically pleasing, that a bidding process took place so the governor's cousin doesn't get all contracts, etc, etc. Things seem cheap when externalities aren't included but that doesn't mean they're actually cheap.
The Clean Air Act was enacted in 1956. Clean Water Act in 1972 (amended in 1977 and 1987). Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Occupational Safety and Health Act was in 1970. How can you follow a law that hasn't even been enacted?
I find it odd that he heads with the least defensible of all these examples: You've probably noticed things no longer work as well as they once did. For example, the store's online inventory says something is in stock and when you get to the store, it's not on the shelf. A small issue, but telling nonetheless.
This has never worked! And widespread online inventory systems date back, what, 10 years? This is a weird place to begin an essay about how good the good old days were.
The point he's trying to make is that things used to be more reliable - there were no online inventory systems in the 50's, but whatever systems they did have back then were dependable.
He is, of course, totally wrong - back then they couldn't even make a reliable car, much less a reliable global supply chain management system. Computers are orders of magnitude more complicated than anything mankind had built as of 1970 so really it's more amazing that they work at all than that there are bugs.
The real difference may be one of intelligibility - in the 50's your car wasn't very reliable, but when it did break, you could understand and quite possibly fix what had gone wrong. Now, the world is way too complicated and nobody can possibly understand more than a small fraction of how anything works.
Of course you understood and could fix your 1950s car. Anyone who couldn't didn't dare drive. Thus you had incentive to learn. Cars today still have the same carnot cycle engines, with mostly the same parts. The controls are enough better that nobody cares about the air fuel mixture
And many car issues can still be fixed if you’re willing to learn. Maybe this is less true the further up you go on the performance scale, but in the ten years I’ve owned my Honda, I haven’t had a single problem I couldn’t fix.
Exactly. The only work I don't do is tires and paint/body. Those I could do as well, but the equipment and experience (respectively) required make them wildly inefficient to do personally.
In many places where people live in apartments/condos, and in many states (cough California), you need to have quite a bit of infrastructure to legally do many repairs for cars. Sure, you can get away with draining your oil into a pan, but in some counties and cities it is less than smiled upon.
Or if they weren't working they'd quickly fix them because people cared more. It's hard to have the same sentiment nowadays when all systems are changing so fast, we sortof learned not to care because there's really nothing we can do about it
I didn’t read the inventory part but the part about rising cost of infrastructure like bridges is extremely accurate. Also, the part about how culturally we’ve shifted to only looking out for ourselves is the zeitgeist of our younger generations which I postulate is due to TV and popular culture romanticizing machiavellianism.
Things work better than they ever had, but human's incompetence towards operating and fixing them is rising. Every "thing" is now a complex system comprised of numerous components delegated to various organizations and individuals, and once something breaks, you have no clue about what's going on.
Have I noticed all these things? You can cherrypick examples to fit whatever narrative you want.
Our space program is finally running at a more reasonable cost thanks to some private competition. What services are costing more now outside of healthcare? Most things are getting commoditized/cheaper. What enormous investments in infrastructure education etc? The problem right now is a lack of investment into fixing bridges- not that the money we're pouring in is wasted. And - the new laguardia terminal seems pretty great. Isn't that an example of an infra success? Are all the highly paid academics clueless and delusional? In the past few years we got CRISPR, an explosion in AI, the Higgs boson, gravitational waves, etc etc etc. All from academics. If every decision is made to maximize self interest - what about the near eradication of polio and Guinea worm disease by the gates and Carter foundations?
Personally, I'm not that compelled by the "everything sucks because you know it just feels that way" arguments. You can make someone feel whatever way you want by picking your examples properly. Isnt America doing so great now? Spacex and CRISPR and a booming tech sector so on? And this is pretty clearly just meant to get you into the mood the author things will make you most likely to buy his book at the end.
This - I've looked at a number of projects. There's some kind of tipping point with public / govt infra projects at which point they just go crazy in terms of cost, it's like the make work / interia / rent extractors just tip out the get things done folks at some point.
NY / SF, even germany for a bit with Berlin's airport. I look at what they did in the past (huge railroad bridges in 100 days) and even now with private money (Tesla in germany is going up fast and sports stadiums go up like weeds despite their scale) the contrasts are remarkable.
Space Launch System is $20B with not a single flight. SpaceX comes along, get's no $1B/year base, get's paid a fraction of the "big players" - and has done 80+ F9 launches.
Also - success academies in NY seems to have some pretty amazing results relative to local schools. I realize some confounding factors, but if I was a parent in NY - that would be the choice if I lived in an area they served.
>Space Launch System is $20B with not a single flight. SpaceX comes along, get's no $1B/year base, get's paid a fraction of the "big players" - and has done 80+ F9 launches.
You might be conflating Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. Falcon Heavy is a more applicable comparison to SLS. Falcon Heavy had one launch in '19 and two in '20.
When it comes to infrastructure, I think there are a few confounding factors. 1) Our level of risk is lower. We no longer find it an acceptable risk to lose workers at the rates that were acceptable 100 years ago and 2) the systems are inherently more complex. Even so, we tend to oversimplify them when planning [1]
Indeed. Someone recently linked to an article that does a pretty good job of going over the massive infrastructure costs[1]. The U.S. also has relatively well funded education[2]. I think many of the comments here reflect one of the reasons we're in the situation we are in - the inability to consider that we might be able to do things better, even when there are plenty of examples from other countries to look at. To quote from the first article:
> The answer, I believe, has to do with American incuriosity. Incuriosity is not merely ignorance. Ignorance is a universal trait, people just differ in what they are ignorant about. But Americans are unique in not caring to learn from other countries even when those countries do things better.
I think there's a lot of truth in that; look at how almost all the discussions about healthcare ignore the successful systems in other countries. It goes beyond that, though. We shouldn't have to look at other countries to consider the possibility that we could be doing things better. But whenever it's suggested that we could make things better, there seems to be a lot of hostility to the idea and push back against it.
Caring for a smaller, homogenous, less geographically distributed population is definitely different from a larger, heterogenous distributed population - and that's a valid criticism of attempting to wholesale copy other countries. I just wish that the criticism was used as a launching point for questions like "How can we overcome those challenges?" or "What parts of the system would potentially transfer well?" instead of the rhetorical blunt instrument it seems to have become.
Why not solve those issues at the state level rather than federal?
States are meant to experiment and innovate on policy for their residents. The reason conservatives push those policies into states is they’re more beholden to their local populations and more able to address local concerns than federal policy is.
The US does great on educating the kids it cares about. The many kids that are written off (poor and/or non-white usually) drag down the average. If we spent on family stability instead of prisons, we'd turn things around quickly, but that might benefit the "wrong" people.
This just isn't correct. Many majority non-white school districts are very well funded -- cities like Chicago or Washington or LA. It's simply not an issue of lack of funds.
Correct. We fund the "wrong" things when it comes to education.
Simply pumping more money into poorly performing school districts isn't a solution, but we continue to do so. Some of that money might be better spent on social services to help ensure stable households and early education for the kids in those areas. Or higher minimum wages to help ensure the parents don't need to work 12 hours/day to make ends meet. Etc.
And neither side of the political aisle can come to a consensus on what to change, so here we are. Le Sigh.
Except schools largely aren’t failing because the school itself is terrible, they’re failing because the students have massive disadvantages.
Vouchers might allow a few exceptional students to leave but strands the average students. And those exceptional students still need to find transport to the school across town. It also assumes a better school actually exists.
Society would be better off ensuring equal opportunity at all ages, stable households, good healthcare (including food) instead of blowing up the system to the advantage of a small number of people.
I listened to a recent podcast that went into excruciating detail about how NY basically shunted white students into "gifted" programs and stacked black and Puerto Rican students in overcrowded schools that had to rotate classes at lunch. Kids basically got half a days education.
This is not an isolated incident, just forgotten. Well funded districts are often not spending on every child.
It isn't ignorance or lack of curiosity. It's called American Exceptionalism: in that America (the USA) is exceptional and the rules of other countries don't apply to it. This can be used for both good reasons (perseverance when others failed) and bad ones (the "that will never work here" argument).
This is just a trite excuse and no where near the truth. We can do better we can learn from others and have done it before. A lot of it has to do with generational disadvantages for poorer parts of society as well as lack of opportunity and mobility.
From my observations of Canada, the reason is that it "creates jobs". It it's the classic "not-invented-here" syndrome. Noone wants to borrow the solutions of another country, or even a province or city within Canada!
Always finding some rationale to do it their own way, or do more local (inferior) studies to tick a box. Then hire a bunch of inexperienced engineers to build something that they have never done, and get x10 expensive, and 10x worse results.
All under a flag that it will create local jobs.
Imagine that's how tech would work? We want to be build a complex micro-service system, that we have never built, and we are only going to hire talent from within the distance of 10 km, to "create jobs". How would that work out?
main problem: if you are planning to open up a healthcare center in the united states you must prove that you will not compete with any others. thank government regulation
I've never heard this reasoning before, are you saying the reason competitive healthcare services/pricing doesn't exist is because competing healthcare providers within a region are disallowed?
Yup. We basically built a worst-of-all-options* system in the US. It's not free market. And it's not fully socialized.
* From the perspective of an average consumer. It's a brilliant system if you're in a position to profit off it. And it has resulted in the best health care in the world (for those who can afford it).
I've heard of that requirement before (of course the artifical limiting of the numbers of doctors able to start practicing every year is somewhat a similar type of practice,) but I'd be curious to see what the original rationale for the Certificate of Need program was.
Is '[too much] competition' not supposedly the bedrock of our Wonderful System of Market Capitalism?
24% is a -low- number for overbudget. Talk to any civil engineer or look at city records, particularly in heavily regulated cities and famous NIMBY cities.
Exactly. Things that affect everyone fairly equally are now just more expensive. Healthcare. Infrastructure. Housing. Higher education.
It's great that our universities are capable of turning out transformative technologies like CRISPR, but it's arguably slowing down, and it's happening at a time when our basic assumptions about what education opportunities should be available to our children. And make no mistake, they're narrowing.
Space travel may retrospectively look in a thousand years like an absolute necessity. But that will be from a perspective of inequality here on earth having exploded. And fewer people will be involved than our collectivity would like.
Of course it’s because we’ve increased administrative costs by privatizing it into numerous bubbles of ownership who all believe they’re somehow entitled a bigger piece of the pie to divvy up.
These are mathematical truths as much as any other, all documented in our theories of economics, government transfer of capital, etc.
Does the public cost on the books matter when we’ll socially bail out the failures and all be left with a desiccated environment?
Who benefits from that belief and agency around such semantics?
Normalizing the real logistics around these things would streamline costs.
But of course the gerontocracy demands we continue LARPing the story they’re normalized to. Figurative sacrifice & death is too scary, let’s just drag our grandkids off the cliff.
They shoveled high this fiat pile of dollars! You will honor that or no healthcare!
Costs go up when the process gets complicated, especially when the complications are increasingly tangential to the activity. YIMBYism, environmental impact, indigenous land rights, historical considerations (preserving sites with historical value) all play a part in increasing costs in the west in building physical things.
That is not an argument AGAINST these things. It may be a valid trade-off that we all accept. Or it may be a power grab by some department or group. It is tough to know generally speaking.
That is true in all areas where costs are rising wildly - medicine, education, cost of building real estate in pre-COVID bay area, cost of infrastructure. Whether you think the trade-offs are justified will depend on your mood affiliation as much as anything else.
They aren't- that's the point. My examples are equally bad since they're also incomplete. I'm not really arguing the opposite as much as I'm trying to illustrate why nuance and data are important. Some things are getting better, some are getting worse, but it helps the author sell their book if they can get you to ignore one aspect of it. You might even say that there's a lot of self interest in the way the argument is made
American cars is one thing, they are tons better when compared with cars from the 90s and previous. It's easy to get 200k-300k out of a car now with standard maintenance and upkeep.
> Have I noticed all these things? You can cherrypick examples to fit whatever narrative you want.
And you can also be deliberately avoidant of the things you don't want to think about. Yes, the space programs are doing okay, but the city streets are decaying and filled with crime. Yes, we know about the Higgs Boson, but we also have no savings, and an opioid epidemic.
> If every decision is made to maximize self interest - what about the near eradication of polio and Guinea worm disease by the gates and Carter foundations?
Good things can come from self-interested acts, nobody denies that, but you're thinking about this from within the paradigm of liberalism and so you're missing the critique, like someone who can't see the forest for the trees. In fact, that adage has never been more apt, because the issue with liberalism and with self-interest in general is that it boils down to a cult of the individual.
Within the decaying liberal system, the individual is above all else. Only the experiences of individuals matter. "Communities" don't exist, except as categories; and the categories themselves only exist as ways of aggregating individuals for marketing purposes. We are all atomized, all recluses even when we are being social.
> In the past few years we got CRISPR, an explosion in AI, the Higgs boson, gravitational waves, etc etc etc. All from academics.
Each of those academics is motivated by many factors, some of them selfless, some of them pure curiosity, but ultimately in the case of every successful participant there is the selfish interest in being the person to publish the paper, getting that credit, getting a bit of career advancement, maybe even a bit of fame. Individuals.
The result here is that the academics who do get some notoriety are those who are working on sexy projects, like the ones you named. CRISPR, very cool; funded with a lot of tax money; never likely to do a goddamned thing for 99.999% of the population who fronted the money for it, nor for their children, but hey, maybe 100 years from now we live in some gene-edited hellscape. Yay.
Pure antisocial crime is way down. Rape, murder, serious assault. Minor economic crimes less so.
When I worked south of market I'd see drunk art school students walking down seedy alleys at 2am. Past drug dealers, homeless men, and crazy people. Nothing ever happened to them. But leave a pack on the passenger seat of your car at two in the afternoon.
At least in the Bay Area I've noticed that a lot of property both private and public have been fixed up over the last 30 years. Used to drive through Oakland in the 90's and most of the houses were run down and now they aren't.
most things are going very well. a few things that matter a lot to ordinary people are not (healthcare, education, housing in some locales).
some of the dysfunction is just baffling. the rent for the apartment I live in increases faster than my salary. this is in a city where the population has been decreasing YoY for at least a decade and in a neighborhood where I can see two large apartment complexes under construction out my window. how is this possible?
What services are costing more outside of healthcare.
Housing and Higher education are obvious standouts. Relative to other countries networking and cellphone service are absurdly overpriced, but so is tax prep, highway construction, and other government adjacent industries.
Companies/industries that exist because of government outsourcing work to them. Defense contacting being the obvious example, but there are a wide range like education outsourcing text books and testing services. As a rule of thumb if the industry suffers when efficiency increases, things get worse.
"... the rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher labor productivity growth"
That doesn’t explain why collage tuition increases so much faster than the cost of a classical music performance which is part of the original 1960’s study. Baumol's cost disease is in effect a labor price floor, but says nothing about a sectors overall efficiency.
Because of the 1992 Higher Education Amendments to the 1965 Higher Education Act and the 1993 Student Loan Reform Act, colleges have no incentive to compete on price: anyone who can't pay for tuition out-of-pocket can get government money to do so.
FAFSA is basically a perfect price discrimination system for colleges: why wouldn't they attempt to extract the maximum amount possible from each student?
An additional factor to consider is that higher education has increased the number of roles in their org-chart where Baumol's original proposition applies: the number of administrators in higher education just keeps rising. I'm not super familiar with the economics of orchestras, but I would be very surprised if the San Francisco Symphony is staffed with 4x the number of administrators that it was in 1978, even though the number of chairs in the orchestra remains the same.
That’s one theory, but it doesn’t explain why private high school tuition has also spiked. Vermont’s average is up at $31,532 per year. In reality there are a host of social, economic, and political forces in play.
Most private high schools are using a roll-your-own-FAFSA version of price discrimination. Additionally, private high schools have quite a different distribution of attendees (by parental income) than colleges do.
Essentially the most expensive schools are priced as feeders into the elite collages of the North East. Exclusivity is a benefit when students are competing with each other students for placement into top schools. Other parts of the country have a much stronger focus on institutions with a religious rather than purely academic focus.
Which gets back to my original point. You get inefficiency when that’s what’s rewarded. It’s not that schools can’t operate cheaply, rather people actively want a different model.
That's part of it. Two other factors I've seen are ridiculous build out per capita (student population) and also states lower % they contribute to schools more every year almost.
Being able to get into and complete several years of college signals to a potential employer that you are a better candidate. The more prestigious the institution, more difficult to get in etc, the better for the candidates that manage to. That increases demand, but the (roughly) fixed supply at a college results in increased prices and other things that reinforce the college (eg better sports and more successful sports teams).
>> Have I noticed all these things? You can cherrypick examples to fit whatever narrative you want.
The problem with the position that "everything is fine" is that it doesn't resonate at all with the observable reality experienced by 99% of people (outside of HN). Maybe it's hard for you to believe but for most people, the premise of the article could not be more obvious. It's like trying to convince homeless people who are sleeping outside the gates of a mansion that they are actually wealthy because they own a sleeping bag...
My position isn't that everything is fine. My position is that everything is nuanced, and that its easy to use anecdotes and emotion to convey an unnuanced worldview to sell a book
> The problem right now is a lack of investment into fixing bridges- not that the money we're pouring in is wasted.
I can't really agree with this. If you look closely, ridiculous budgets for infrastructure disappearing into black holes are rampant in the US. A great example is the southern California High Speed Rail project. As other commenters have also stated, US infrastructure development costs are out of proportion with the rest of the developing world and seem to be absurdly expensive simply because they can be [1].
That’s a terrible example since that’s a moonshot project. Moonshot projects are always a money pit, you’re trying to figure something out no one else is doing.
Is it really a moonshot? What's the innovation in building a high speed rail connecting two major cities ~400 miles apart? I guess no one has done this in California before.
Was it a moon shot when China or any other country with comparably sized high speed rail systems did it?
A quick google shows China's existing high speed rail system at 23,600 mi, in comparison to the total of 800 miles planned for CA.
I don't disagree that it was a moon shot, but it was not a moon shot for reasons of technical difficulty or novelty, but for the reason that it is now so systemically difficult to competently implement any large scale infrastructure in America, and California particularly. I won't comment on what the reasons for that might be.
My interpretation is that this kind of decay in capability is that the author is driving at.
I can't agree. Tons of other countries do it. Hire good people from there. It was a travesty how terribly run that whole ordeal was. It should be taught as an example of how -not- to do a railway.
To clarify some of the confusion- my point is not that the world is great. My point is that if I free myself from intellectual rigor and data/evidence based claims, and allow myself to focus on emotion, vague statements, and anecdote, I can paint whatever picture I want. lots of good examples in replies about how dome of the wishy washy statements don't really hold up - thats the point - I only mentioned spacex while leaving out the money pit that is SLS for example.
Ultimately the irony here is that the article itself is a pretty good example of self interest - its a bunch of the type of arguments they go after academics for making, and then uses it to try and sell their book.
> if I free myself from intellectual rigor and data/evidence based claims, and allow myself to focus on emotion, vague statements, and anecdote, I can paint whatever picture I want
Well said. This needs to be carved in granite somewhere
Well things that you cared about are mostly for rich, already well off. Rich will see what they cared about.
On the other side it's worse, health care, education loan, minimum wage not a living wage, affordable housing homeless etc. Things are are important for not everyone not just a few at top.
Incompetence is institutionalized merely by the act of setting competing standards while never defining competence.
People will get away with do less for higher pay so long as the system allows. That is not a violation of ethics. It’s an absence of ethics in the first place.
He writes as if any of these things are anything new.
I think humanity's actually doing quite well these days. Not perfect, of course, so let's keep working on making things better. But I'd rather be alive now than pretty much any time in the past.
Yes, doing so well that they're in disbelief about the catastrophe that is about to destroy it all, or most of it. Only global warming would start a war of survival never seen in history. Sprinkle that with an insect apocalypse and we're doomed.
But I understand what you mean though. Violence used to be the way of life and inseparable from it whereas nowadays some parts of the world are doing relatively much better. But it might be short term victory.
How many of these examples are just perception of a rosier past?
The "everything is getting worse" narrative ignores substantial improvements in life expectancy, literacy, health, yes, and even homelessness. Homelessness is down over the past decade [0]. So yes, many of these things actually are getting better.
Agreed. His base cause appears to be "self interest" but hasn't that always been case? What's different about today that makes self interest a bigger influence?
To reparaphrase a popular quote: those who forget about the past are doomed to complain about the present.
This is not a new phenomenon. This sounds like a rehashing of Systemantics by John Gall (1975), except attributing the causes to things the author sees as problematic rather than recognizing that these are problems inherent in complex systems. "Systems tend to oppose their own proper functions"
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 300 ms ] threadAnother explanation: those who hyperoptimise for efficiency get what they pay for.
This is buried toward the end of the article but I think it's a big statement with massive consequences for many practical issues.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
I would also argue that in America specifically there ARE numerous counter-examples, and I'd vouch to say that HN is probably a statistically significant outlier of such. A lot of startups we discuss or celebrate (and even lots of startups that we bash;) work on very different principles and incentives than those listed here.
In my world, compliance is about offsetting risks, sure there are plenty of risks involving incompetence, but that is only one of the issues you need to address. Putting the spotlight on incompetence is going to cause you to miss other significant issues in your organization.
Ultimately, lists and checking boxes are a long term solution to the classic "How do I do xyz?" "I dunno ask Bob he usually does that".
This is Moloch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDaOgu2CQtI
> the late David Graeber
He died on Sept 2 2020, aged 59, unexpectedly while vacationing. RIP
We are closing in to the bottom where the a rather radical solution has obvious and major benefits that it will finally be taken. And then the change will be swift.
Note that in previous iterations the solution has often been a large scale military conflict.
Edit: spelling.
Jared Diamond called this the "Anna Karenina Principle", from the opening line of Tolstoy's novel of that same name:
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
The idea being that a number of things all need to be correct to be successful; if any one of those things is missing, things will fail.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
Do public infrastructures and services cost more in inflation adjusted dollars and achieve less? That's a pretty significant claim which needs serious evidence.
The contention that we are in some uniquely incompetent time is also dubious. American history and all history for that matter is loaded with stories of the rise and fall of fakes, cranks and cons.
Daniel Sickles, The origin of the Chase Manhattan company and John Brinkley just off the top of my head.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Sickles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPMorgan_Chase https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Brinkley
Yeah, it would have been nicer if claims like this within the article had links to supporting discussions of some kind. On this topic, at least, I've seen numerous discussions on HN, so I googled a little bit and found some articles that look familiar:
https://fee.org/articles/the-unbearable-truth-about-infrastr...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22122460
EDIT: Replaced the second link with an HN discussion about it from earlier this year. Couldn't find one for the other article.
The author assumes these statements are obvious to the reader, but they are definitely not obvious to me.
Are things getting worse? The examples he cites, with the possible exception of infrastructure spending, seem to me about the way they have always been.
Outside of that though I'm not so sure. I wouldn't like to go back to the seventies.
I was just reflecting on The Organization Man last night and received from the get-go a nice little gem from a man giving a Yale commencement address in 1908:
"Here merit is the sole test. Birth is nothing...Here only a natural order of nobility is recognized, and its motto, without a coat of arms or boat of heraldry, is 'Intelligence and integrity'." (p16 2002 UofPenn Press)
And then the author, Walter H. Whyte, remarks:
"But the very industrial revolution which this highly serviceable ethic begot in time began to confound it...by the 1880's the corporation had already shown the eventual bureaucratic direction it was going to take...the big organization became a standing taunt to this dream of individual success. Quite obvious to anyone who worked in a big organization, those who survived best were not necessarily the fittest but, in more cases than not, those who by birth and personal connections had the breaks." (pp16-17 ibid)
The argument being, America escaped the moral inefficacies of the old world, yet it slowly crept back in once it became more profitable - and above all convenient - to be ambitious on a career ladder than ambitious before the nakedness of the sun and stars. Which means it is common to have to lie and conspire in order to get ahead - and how many people are willing to for a nicer car to drive around the neighborhood!
The Visible Hand by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. is a great read corroborating the growth of agglomerated industry, and Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy also has some good passages relating to this phenomenon of the homestead getting saturated.
But I'm an eternal optimist and see this as the price of progress :)
1. The lack of a real "competitor" in a geopolitical sense for the West. I don't think it is a coincidence that the US arguably had the most competence and scientific development circa ±1940 - 1990, when it had a direct competitor to measure itself against. Incompetence against the Nazis or Soviets got you killed, whereas today, nothing really happens (immediately.) The ancient Greeks (and subsequently Nietzsche) recognized the usefulness of competition toward keeping yourself sharp and called it agon. Ironically the rise of China can be seen as a good thing from this perspective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agon
http://www.nietzschecircle.com/v3/2017/03/17/book-review-ago...
2. The loss of a civilization-wide teleological narrative. For the past ±1,500 years, that's been Christianity, in various forms. These days, there is no real "purpose" to the West, beyond some vague notions of individualism, choice and comfort. Institutions and standards become more and more difficult to maintain as a sense of apathy and the lack of a perceived future grows. Younger people especially seem unconvinced that there is anything waiting for them in 50 years.
That might work for some people? I don't know?
But I do know that the Charleston church shooter sat down with a bunch of little old ladies for the duration of a bible study engaging in, what I can only assume was, a calm in-person discussion. Then he blew their heads off.
Point is that, for some reason, the internet has a much stronger hold over people than do in person connections. People deeply believe they are more connected to people in their virtual spaces than they are to their neighbors or even physical friends. That sense of connection is real to those people. To some of those people, it's real enough to kill for.
are there some people for whom virtual spaces are more real than their neighbors and IRL friends? sure, but most people don't seem to be like that. as far as I can tell, most people use social media to interact with an extended network of IRL friends/family. some people do try to get tons of followers that they don't know on instagram, but I think even this is best understood as jockeying for status among IRL peers.
note: IRL is a somewhat antiquated term this days, but I use it as a shorthand for "relationships that originate in in-person interactions". so if I had a friend A who moved away and befriended B there, but we all play video games together, B is still an IRL friend to me.
I expect that there will be a strong reaction on this forum to the word 'socialist', but the communities you describe definitely still exist.
I agree that they do exist. But they don't seem to be mainstream as they once were, and I'd very much like to change that.
But also, historically, these sorts of communities have been targeted by governments. Police literally went to war with unions to break up community power for coal miners. While communism is different than socialism, there's a huge public smear campaign trying to couple those two together. (And, in fact, historically there were major pushes to blacklist folks who were connected to communism.)
I try to look at the long arc of human history as basically the story of how we grow the size of the "in-group" and shrink the size of the "out-group". It isn't easy, but we have made significant progress over the centuries.
As someone who grew up in a small, rural Christian community, this is a nice sentiment, but far from true in my experience. People instead become highly punitive and disparaging towards anyone who does not think and behave exactly like them. Whatever community exists is built around a hateful exclusion of “the other.”
That being said, there was definitely a “fear of the other “ with people being extremely suspicious of the few handful of outsiders who moved in and didn’t have any connection like relatives, existing connections, or children going to school there.
I get that the World, and Europe in particular, got badly burnt by Utopias in the 20th century. But still seems like something is needed - especially given the looming geopolitical changes.
It seems true to me that most individuals (myself included) are not up to the task of inventing a reason to exist. You can moan about how the stories are made up til Kingdom come, the point of it is practicing the belief. Otherwise you get what we're talking about in this thread, billions of people growing up believing nothing, having no rational reason to believe they are valuable, no reason to think the future warrants their contribution.
this is a rather ethnocentric view of religion based on what is clearly a limited historical understanding evidently informed mostly by judeo-christianity. just to pick one counter-example: the ancient greeks sought virtue and purpose from philosophical inquiry, not from their religious practices, which were much more transactional.
The modern Unitarian Universalist (UU) church is very welcoming to people of all faiths, religions, and creeds. You do not need to be atheist to join, nor do you need to believe in anything. Most congregations are very welcoming of new members.
Four US Presidents, eleven Nobel prize winners, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee are Unitarians. There are many Unitarians out there, though they do not tend to proselytize much, which is maybe why you haven't heard of them.
As always, finding the right congregation is very important. The UU church has a good site here to help:
https://www.uua.org/find
With the current Covid-19 crisis, local churches near you may be closed or only doing virtual services. Please check with the minister.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarianism
People were united by a monopoly on education and political power. It's too bad that we're losing that ubiquitous societal fabric, but in the face of the alternative, seriously, good riddance.
If spiritualism is your thing though, do drop by at a Unitarian Church close to you. It's an interesting experience. Not for me, but still warmly recommended.
Maybe that is why the devil and the hell were introduced at some point ;-)
Edited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustinian_theodicy
You're essentially describing (secular) Humanism, e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_humanism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanists_UK
https://humanism.org.uk/civi/humanism/local
(Just found the author of the study/studies: Sosis[3]
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig...
[2]: A commune being defined as a group of people not sharing kinship deciding to live and work together.
[3]: https://anthropology.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/944/...
Though honestly, the difference between the US can hardly be called drastically significant. Both are doing horid.
The real question is whether this trend can continue forward. My bet is yes for the foreseeable future, but no power system lasts forever. So while we're seeing the gradual (seeming) decline of the West, we'll probably be repeating the pattern in a few decades for East Asia.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.21.20198796v...
2) You have almost no idea how incompetent or wasteful most private organizations are, unless they are so bad that they go bankrupt and dissolve.
Your atom bomb mention is interesting considering Oppenheimer's Hinduism reference.
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
https://www.amazon.com/True-Only-Heaven-Progress-Critics/dp/...
Forgive me as I try to articulate what I'm thinking.
Being the sole super power somehow turned out to be bad thing. We (the USA) needs to an opponent, a competitor to better define and understand ourselves.
During the Cold War, aspirational preaching about human rights and democracy and capitalism was a way for us to differentiate ourselves from our opponents. A bit like Scott Galloway's thesis about Apple using privacy as brand laddering technique to differentiate itself from Google, Samsung, etc. Privacy is not central to Apple. But it makes for great ad copy.
I'm not saying USSR, China, whoever were (are) better or worse than the USA. I have no opinion and I really don't care. (Well, I do have an opinion. People in glass houses...)
What I am saying is the USA needs the idea of an opponent. So that domestically it (we) can set aside our differences to meet the external threat. And to have some kind of narrative to pitch why aligning with the USA is the better choice.
I don't think the USA is unique this way. Us vs them is base human psychology.
I do hope that The Powers That Be, on both sides, under stand the realpolitik is just kabuki and it matters don't degenerate into another Cold War. We don't need another arm's race.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/09/the-thucydides-trap/
While we did have to fight the Cold War, which led to much progress on a technological front, the US also had the advantage of reduced competition from previous world powers (UK, Germany, France, Japan, etc) which had been destroyed by WWII.
The Communists gave us focus. The end state of WWII provided the economic ability to put that focus to good use.
Or something like that. But, I do agree that the lack of a single unifying enemy is a problem when it comes to motivating society as a unit. It feels like we're more likely to be destroyed (as a nation) from internal factors than external, and that's not good.
This rings home as I was recently talking to someone at an engineering firm that often bids for government contracts. And they were explaining that you build your timeline back from the deadline in the proposal even if you know it isn't feasible. A lot of companies will then bid under-cost and hope that there was a flaw in the design that requires adjustments. Then since they are already on the site with a bunch of workers they will charge extortionary process for the modification to make money on the whole project. So that $10M dollar bid jumps to $15M because they needed to reroute a gas line before starting the building (not a real example, but representative)
Of course a lot of the problem is that the city has strong processes and policies to avoid corruption, however the end result is that it is very difficult to hire the people you know do good work, instead you are stuck with the lowest bidder. Of course there is a process for banning companies however it is long, complicated and very bureaucratic, so even if you could get the ban in place it is easier for any project manager not to bother.
I guess it all comes down to lack of trust, and this is why we can't have nice things.
I'm not sure that the result is axiomatically over budget for major projects. That said, I'm less worried about budget than I am worried about who benefits (e.g. I'm generally ok with transit going over because it provides such a valuable benefit for the city.)
I'm open to the idea that we spent more than we should have (even if it was under budget), but I'd want to see more data about the project and where the costs were unreasonably high.
The saddest part is honest companies want nothing to do with these huge gov contracts. The only way to navigate the minefield of regulations is to lie which honest people dont want to do. This results in nefarious companies that specialize in ripping of the government.
And just to get my mandated downvotes. Trump has been beating the drum of their being too many regulations since he got in office. I'm guessing HN won't want to hear that though.
You're right, but he is also the type of person that make the corruption-prevention regulations look like a good idea from my point of view.
But he was elected and I'm not from the US so maybe my point of view isn't the important one here.
The people paying these companies outrageous sums are the ones taking campaign donations from those companies. The people that decide that the high speed rail which needs to stop at every town along the route (and that the route needs to include all their towns) are -- again -- the politicians.
At every turn politicians stick their noses into the workings of infrastructure projects. Quality and cost finish well behind kickbacks to the politician and largesse to their supporters.
Then, when seeking bids, you could factor in the scores of those involved in the organizations bidding - giving it a weight or requiring a threshold (for average or median or P95 or something) among the participants.
But I think this is on the right track. As a simple approach you can have final-cost ratio. "Unknown" bidders would use the average score across all projects (or all first-time projects?) and known-good bidders would be able to use their own score (which may be close to 1). Known-bad bidders may have 1.5-2 multipliers which "corrects" for their underbid.
Of course this too simple. You want to:
- Account for time.
- Account for how easy they were to work with.
- You need to factor in unexpected changes. (which do have a cost, but how do you determine the true cost?)
- Using the average for unknowns may make it too difficult for new companies to enter. I way I see it you want some new entries to keep your pool in check. (Although the majority of projects, and quite possibly the largest projects should be going to known-good companies).
I think this is part of the problem. There are so many factors that it is difficult to rigidly define them, and if they aren't rigidly defined than you have chances for corruption.
The TL;DR is that unless you just let a human make the decision it is a very hard problem, and right now we don't think that humans are trustworthy enough.
A new company can (should!) hire some people with solid local experience, so can have a score (we still need defaulting rules for individuals, of course).
Individuals risk reputational damage if people elsewhere in the project behave badly, which should increase cooperation with controls. Similarly, well managed companies will find it easier to hire, while poorly managed companies will find it more difficult.
Companies that have a lot of poorly scored individuals because of poor historical practice will be extra motivated to bring on people with a history of working on well managed projects, which would help knowledge flow about how to keep projects well managed.
https://www.google.com/search?q=change+order+boat
For physical infrastructure that's often the case but with software you get 2-3x cost overruns simply because the project is effectively re-done 3 times. Because often what the buyer is asking for is simply not what he needs. Of course, bidding laws makes it illegal to contact the bid writer and if you try to anticipate anything not explicitly written, you'll end up with a more expensive proposition than your competitor.
The IBM Phenix payroll system is a prime example of that, but there are many more.
Yeah you're free to make an alternative, you might succeed, but if you get too big then the FAANG's will sue you right out of business.
Oh I forgot, or the FAANG's PR team will use the media to accuse you of being a home for trolls, hate, etc.
Expect the law to be followed shouldn't count a "high expectations". Sigh.
This has never worked! And widespread online inventory systems date back, what, 10 years? This is a weird place to begin an essay about how good the good old days were.
He is, of course, totally wrong - back then they couldn't even make a reliable car, much less a reliable global supply chain management system. Computers are orders of magnitude more complicated than anything mankind had built as of 1970 so really it's more amazing that they work at all than that there are bugs.
The real difference may be one of intelligibility - in the 50's your car wasn't very reliable, but when it did break, you could understand and quite possibly fix what had gone wrong. Now, the world is way too complicated and nobody can possibly understand more than a small fraction of how anything works.
Our space program is finally running at a more reasonable cost thanks to some private competition. What services are costing more now outside of healthcare? Most things are getting commoditized/cheaper. What enormous investments in infrastructure education etc? The problem right now is a lack of investment into fixing bridges- not that the money we're pouring in is wasted. And - the new laguardia terminal seems pretty great. Isn't that an example of an infra success? Are all the highly paid academics clueless and delusional? In the past few years we got CRISPR, an explosion in AI, the Higgs boson, gravitational waves, etc etc etc. All from academics. If every decision is made to maximize self interest - what about the near eradication of polio and Guinea worm disease by the gates and Carter foundations?
Personally, I'm not that compelled by the "everything sucks because you know it just feels that way" arguments. You can make someone feel whatever way you want by picking your examples properly. Isnt America doing so great now? Spacex and CRISPR and a booming tech sector so on? And this is pretty clearly just meant to get you into the mood the author things will make you most likely to buy his book at the end.
Infrastructure. Our (USA) costs are COMPLETETLY OUTRAGIOUS compared to the global standard. We're talking multiples.
Things like the gateway project in NJ/NYC cost 4x what they should for a crappier outcome.
NY / SF, even germany for a bit with Berlin's airport. I look at what they did in the past (huge railroad bridges in 100 days) and even now with private money (Tesla in germany is going up fast and sports stadiums go up like weeds despite their scale) the contrasts are remarkable.
Space Launch System is $20B with not a single flight. SpaceX comes along, get's no $1B/year base, get's paid a fraction of the "big players" - and has done 80+ F9 launches.
Also - success academies in NY seems to have some pretty amazing results relative to local schools. I realize some confounding factors, but if I was a parent in NY - that would be the choice if I lived in an area they served.
You might be conflating Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. Falcon Heavy is a more applicable comparison to SLS. Falcon Heavy had one launch in '19 and two in '20.
When it comes to infrastructure, I think there are a few confounding factors. 1) Our level of risk is lower. We no longer find it an acceptable risk to lose workers at the rates that were acceptable 100 years ago and 2) the systems are inherently more complex. Even so, we tend to oversimplify them when planning [1]
[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/project-management/
> The answer, I believe, has to do with American incuriosity. Incuriosity is not merely ignorance. Ignorance is a universal trait, people just differ in what they are ignorant about. But Americans are unique in not caring to learn from other countries even when those countries do things better.
I think there's a lot of truth in that; look at how almost all the discussions about healthcare ignore the successful systems in other countries. It goes beyond that, though. We shouldn't have to look at other countries to consider the possibility that we could be doing things better. But whenever it's suggested that we could make things better, there seems to be a lot of hostility to the idea and push back against it.
[1] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-c... [2] https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/education-spending.htm
Is the one thing that seems to be enough to shut every discussion down for a certain political group.
States are meant to experiment and innovate on policy for their residents. The reason conservatives push those policies into states is they’re more beholden to their local populations and more able to address local concerns than federal policy is.
This just isn't correct. Many majority non-white school districts are very well funded -- cities like Chicago or Washington or LA. It's simply not an issue of lack of funds.
Simply pumping more money into poorly performing school districts isn't a solution, but we continue to do so. Some of that money might be better spent on social services to help ensure stable households and early education for the kids in those areas. Or higher minimum wages to help ensure the parents don't need to work 12 hours/day to make ends meet. Etc.
And neither side of the political aisle can come to a consensus on what to change, so here we are. Le Sigh.
Vouchers might allow a few exceptional students to leave but strands the average students. And those exceptional students still need to find transport to the school across town. It also assumes a better school actually exists.
Society would be better off ensuring equal opportunity at all ages, stable households, good healthcare (including food) instead of blowing up the system to the advantage of a small number of people.
This is not an isolated incident, just forgotten. Well funded districts are often not spending on every child.
Apparently they forecast future prison populations by...3rd grade standardized test scores :(
From my observations of Canada, the reason is that it "creates jobs". It it's the classic "not-invented-here" syndrome. Noone wants to borrow the solutions of another country, or even a province or city within Canada!
Always finding some rationale to do it their own way, or do more local (inferior) studies to tick a box. Then hire a bunch of inexperienced engineers to build something that they have never done, and get x10 expensive, and 10x worse results.
All under a flag that it will create local jobs.
Imagine that's how tech would work? We want to be build a complex micro-service system, that we have never built, and we are only going to hire talent from within the distance of 10 km, to "create jobs". How would that work out?
It has been law in many states starting in the 1960's. The original intention was to prevent too much competition which could skew incentives.
* From the perspective of an average consumer. It's a brilliant system if you're in a position to profit off it. And it has resulted in the best health care in the world (for those who can afford it).
Is '[too much] competition' not supposedly the bedrock of our Wonderful System of Market Capitalism?
Infrastructure buildout in AZ is done in an incredibly efficient and cost effective manner.
Dallas is similar.
Utah’s buildout for the Winter Olympics was amazing and inexpensive.
Cali/NY/MA? Not so much.
I looked up Utah’s Olympics build. It cost $2.1 billion, and was 24% over budget. I don’t really know whether that’s efficient or not?
It's great that our universities are capable of turning out transformative technologies like CRISPR, but it's arguably slowing down, and it's happening at a time when our basic assumptions about what education opportunities should be available to our children. And make no mistake, they're narrowing.
Space travel may retrospectively look in a thousand years like an absolute necessity. But that will be from a perspective of inequality here on earth having exploded. And fewer people will be involved than our collectivity would like.
These are mathematical truths as much as any other, all documented in our theories of economics, government transfer of capital, etc.
Does the public cost on the books matter when we’ll socially bail out the failures and all be left with a desiccated environment?
Who benefits from that belief and agency around such semantics?
Normalizing the real logistics around these things would streamline costs.
But of course the gerontocracy demands we continue LARPing the story they’re normalized to. Figurative sacrifice & death is too scary, let’s just drag our grandkids off the cliff.
They shoveled high this fiat pile of dollars! You will honor that or no healthcare!
Our society is a joke.
That is not an argument AGAINST these things. It may be a valid trade-off that we all accept. Or it may be a power grab by some department or group. It is tough to know generally speaking.
That is true in all areas where costs are rising wildly - medicine, education, cost of building real estate in pre-COVID bay area, cost of infrastructure. Whether you think the trade-offs are justified will depend on your mood affiliation as much as anything else.
So, what makes your examples better than the author's?
And you can also be deliberately avoidant of the things you don't want to think about. Yes, the space programs are doing okay, but the city streets are decaying and filled with crime. Yes, we know about the Higgs Boson, but we also have no savings, and an opioid epidemic.
> If every decision is made to maximize self interest - what about the near eradication of polio and Guinea worm disease by the gates and Carter foundations?
Good things can come from self-interested acts, nobody denies that, but you're thinking about this from within the paradigm of liberalism and so you're missing the critique, like someone who can't see the forest for the trees. In fact, that adage has never been more apt, because the issue with liberalism and with self-interest in general is that it boils down to a cult of the individual.
Within the decaying liberal system, the individual is above all else. Only the experiences of individuals matter. "Communities" don't exist, except as categories; and the categories themselves only exist as ways of aggregating individuals for marketing purposes. We are all atomized, all recluses even when we are being social.
> In the past few years we got CRISPR, an explosion in AI, the Higgs boson, gravitational waves, etc etc etc. All from academics.
Each of those academics is motivated by many factors, some of them selfless, some of them pure curiosity, but ultimately in the case of every successful participant there is the selfish interest in being the person to publish the paper, getting that credit, getting a bit of career advancement, maybe even a bit of fame. Individuals.
The result here is that the academics who do get some notoriety are those who are working on sexy projects, like the ones you named. CRISPR, very cool; funded with a lot of tax money; never likely to do a goddamned thing for 99.999% of the population who fronted the money for it, nor for their children, but hey, maybe 100 years from now we live in some gene-edited hellscape. Yay.
Although there's been an uptick in recent years, violent crime is way down compared to the 70's. As for nonviolent crime, I'd like to see numbers.
When I worked south of market I'd see drunk art school students walking down seedy alleys at 2am. Past drug dealers, homeless men, and crazy people. Nothing ever happened to them. But leave a pack on the passenger seat of your car at two in the afternoon.
At least in the Bay Area I've noticed that a lot of property both private and public have been fixed up over the last 30 years. Used to drive through Oakland in the 90's and most of the houses were run down and now they aren't.
some of the dysfunction is just baffling. the rent for the apartment I live in increases faster than my salary. this is in a city where the population has been decreasing YoY for at least a decade and in a neighborhood where I can see two large apartment complexes under construction out my window. how is this possible?
Housing and Higher education are obvious standouts. Relative to other countries networking and cellphone service are absurdly overpriced, but so is tax prep, highway construction, and other government adjacent industries.
This is a known effect in economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
"... the rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher labor productivity growth"
FAFSA is basically a perfect price discrimination system for colleges: why wouldn't they attempt to extract the maximum amount possible from each student?
An additional factor to consider is that higher education has increased the number of roles in their org-chart where Baumol's original proposition applies: the number of administrators in higher education just keeps rising. I'm not super familiar with the economics of orchestras, but I would be very surprised if the San Francisco Symphony is staffed with 4x the number of administrators that it was in 1978, even though the number of chairs in the orchestra remains the same.
Essentially the most expensive schools are priced as feeders into the elite collages of the North East. Exclusivity is a benefit when students are competing with each other students for placement into top schools. Other parts of the country have a much stronger focus on institutions with a religious rather than purely academic focus.
Which gets back to my original point. You get inefficiency when that’s what’s rewarded. It’s not that schools can’t operate cheaply, rather people actively want a different model.
Also covered in economics! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_%28economics%29
Being able to get into and complete several years of college signals to a potential employer that you are a better candidate. The more prestigious the institution, more difficult to get in etc, the better for the candidates that manage to. That increases demand, but the (roughly) fixed supply at a college results in increased prices and other things that reinforce the college (eg better sports and more successful sports teams).
How about the price of food. Only Ramen and maybe fresh produce have stayed low. Also any kind of internet connectivity, housing.
The problem with the position that "everything is fine" is that it doesn't resonate at all with the observable reality experienced by 99% of people (outside of HN). Maybe it's hard for you to believe but for most people, the premise of the article could not be more obvious. It's like trying to convince homeless people who are sleeping outside the gates of a mansion that they are actually wealthy because they own a sleeping bag...
I can't really agree with this. If you look closely, ridiculous budgets for infrastructure disappearing into black holes are rampant in the US. A great example is the southern California High Speed Rail project. As other commenters have also stated, US infrastructure development costs are out of proportion with the rest of the developing world and seem to be absurdly expensive simply because they can be [1].
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2019-07...
A quick google shows China's existing high speed rail system at 23,600 mi, in comparison to the total of 800 miles planned for CA.
I don't disagree that it was a moon shot, but it was not a moon shot for reasons of technical difficulty or novelty, but for the reason that it is now so systemically difficult to competently implement any large scale infrastructure in America, and California particularly. I won't comment on what the reasons for that might be.
My interpretation is that this kind of decay in capability is that the author is driving at.
Do you really want to use them as an argument for "Just make rail 4Head?"
Ultimately the irony here is that the article itself is a pretty good example of self interest - its a bunch of the type of arguments they go after academics for making, and then uses it to try and sell their book.
Well said. This needs to be carved in granite somewhere
All services when the buyer is the government.
On the other side it's worse, health care, education loan, minimum wage not a living wage, affordable housing homeless etc. Things are are important for not everyone not just a few at top.
People will get away with do less for higher pay so long as the system allows. That is not a violation of ethics. It’s an absence of ethics in the first place.
I think humanity's actually doing quite well these days. Not perfect, of course, so let's keep working on making things better. But I'd rather be alive now than pretty much any time in the past.
But I understand what you mean though. Violence used to be the way of life and inseparable from it whereas nowadays some parts of the world are doing relatively much better. But it might be short term victory.
The "everything is getting worse" narrative ignores substantial improvements in life expectancy, literacy, health, yes, and even homelessness. Homelessness is down over the past decade [0]. So yes, many of these things actually are getting better.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...
To reparaphrase a popular quote: those who forget about the past are doomed to complain about the present.