Even if this is the case, “process” is immensely more important in government and military than in companies because government has the authority, the prerogative even, to use violence, ruin lives, and kill people. The onerous processes are in place to protect civilians.
When you shoot from the hip at a tech company, the bad outcome is that a lot of money gets wasted and people lose their jobs. When the federal government shoots from the hip, trust in the institution erodes and people die.
Not that there is no room for streamlining and reducing bureaucratic and IT bloat, but it is very important to remember that the government is not a business, and in many ways should be run very differently from a business.
That's all true. Process and bureaucracy are guard rails, and guard rails limit change. So when the whole system is barrelling towards a cliff (default, hyperinflation, kinetic war), what should the leaders try and do?
It probably seems like I'm defending their actions, I genuinely don't know if their actions are correct and I'm not defending them. I'm just acknowledging it seems like many US institutions haven't been appropriately evolving, and now the US as a whole is between a rock and a hard place.
If I'm going to spend time thinking about these things (that I have virtually no control over), I would prefer to do it in a curious and mostly emotionally detached way.
I don't quite get the metaphor - you might have reversed it. The whole system is barrelling towards a cliff because of the current administration, who took away the guard rails that stopped the system barrelling towards a cliff, and then set course directly towards the cliff.
The old system could well have been, like, scraping against the guard rails, flattening them gradually over time. The solution to that is not to remove the rails and aim directly for the cliff.
Unless you're an accelerationist. Accelerationists are people who view bad times as inevitable, and want them to come as quickly as possible so we can get through to the other side (where times are good again) as quickly as possible, instead of prolonging the collapse by doing it more slowly. Does that describe you?
In this video Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger talk about how the US system is heading towards a cliff, and the video was recorded in 2005. They articulate it well, although the video has a couple glitches in it.
If you are actually interested in what's going on, I think what they are talking about is a big important piece of the puzzle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCgHj1_GBuY
20 years ago. We had the 2008 GFCI and COVID since then. I'll take whatever cliff they are referring to over the deliberate madness of Trump.
It's awfully convenient that "in economics you can say what's going to happen but not when." So you really don't know where the cliff is, how steep it is, what else is between us, etc etc. They even say at the end it's possible to outgrow the debt, but then just dismiss it.
I know you're trying to approach the whole thing in an abstract unemotional way and not defend Trump. But there is just no world in which what he's doing is somehow better in the long run... Well maybe being a pariah state solves the trade problem, but that's not "better" in my book.
The answer is for Congress to balance the budget and intelligently incentivize new industries. The fact that Congress has failed doesn't mean an incompetent strongman is the answer. The things he's doing to reorganize the executive and ship people to foreign gulags with no trial have nothing to do with improving the economy. And the legal argument he's using to claim tariff power is specious at best.
The structural reform we need in the US are things like: ranked choice voting, proportional representation, eliminate the electoral college and/or redraw state boundaries, and for the love of God get limitless corporate money out of politics.
I think that the most appropriate strategy depends on the specifics of the situation. For some types of problems the best course of action is to do nothing, some times the best course of action is to make small adjustments, sometimes do less, sometimes do more, sometimes slow down, sometimes speed up, and sometimes the best course of action is to make radical changes. I don't over-generalize and prescribe the same ideological answer to everything.
I have also witnessed first hand how new terminology can have very different meanings to different people. Ask 100 product leaders to define what a "customer need" is and you will probably get dozens of different answers. Ask 100 CIOs to define what a "data mesh" is, and you will probably get dozens of different answers.
I think that when an environment is changing at an accelerating pace, its necessary for the organisms living in the environment to adapt at a similar pace in order to survive/thrive. I also believe that our environment is changing at an accelerating pace.
I suspect that you think I have reverse the metaphor because you have been paying more close attention to recent rage-baiting news, and I have spent a longer time paying closer attention to "boring" economic analysis. My model of the situation includes many historical examples of hyperinflation and what led to them, the consequences of Muammar Gaddafi dropping the petrodollar, the impact of citizens united on the military industrial complex, the exploding web of "NGOs" meddling in world affairs, how technology is an extremely deflationary force and how regulatory capture shifts economic benefits of new technology from the consumer to industry incumbents, how the Bretton-woods era started and ended, and how the neoliberal era started (and was ending regardless of political party), etc, etc.
Despite all this perspective I mentioned, I feel as though I know a tiny % of what is important to know in order to judge the situation accurately. The more I learn the more it seems like I don't know, and the more curious I get. Color me in the Dunning Kruger "valley of despair".
So no, I don't think the simplistic blanket decision making protocol you defined describes me.
Plus, many of the laws government has to follow are exactly about the process by which things are done. That is what helps ensure it is fair, effective, transparent, etc.
I agree, but what was fair and effective in 1970 might not be anymore, right?
Do you agree that these processes need to evolve over time?
And if so, what if they haven't been evolving as fast as the rest of the world and have fallen behind?
What is a leader to do, when many processes no longer are in anyone's best interest other than the people who maintain them and those have learned to exploit them?
The government doesn't seem like a machine to me, more like society's nervous system. It's a very scary idea that it has become so rigid and so outdated that a massive overhaul is necessary. It does seem like an opening for extremism (fascism, tyranny), which I'm sure we both fear. I just find it very hard to tell whether disrupting the system or letting it continue will lead to a better outcome for Americans.
Yeah, structural changes don't happen slowly and by the rules. What people don't like is what they think the new system is going to look like. But we don't know what that is going to be because Trump seems to be better at destroying than at building. It will depend on his successor(s) being good at building institutions. Or it may fail and the old system regenerates.
This seems accurate to me. They are destroying many US institutions, and what replaces them may be better or may be worse. I am not sure anyone can tell right now.
This wouldn't be happening if everyone was happy with the status quo, if the US was in a golden era, but it wasn't. Many things clearly weren't working. Sometimes it's easier to tear something down and rebuild it than fix it (not always, but sometimes).
I'm not convinced things were as bad as people claim. The right wing has been conducting a concerted propaganda war for the last 20 years to make people scared.
Fair and transparent are arguable. I have never met someone who deals with the government on a regular basis that has ever described it as effective, and at this point I am willing to sacrifice some fairness and transparency for effectiveness.
In a fairly recent interview where he was asked about DOGE, Bill Gates estimated 10-15% waste in government spending. Saving that amount is not worth all the collateral long term damage Trump is doing.
You may not put much stock in another billionaire's opinion, but personally I think he's been engaged with our system enough to have a good perspective on things.
That doesn't mean every government operations are 90% efficient, but I'd rather walk the side of slowness and bureaucracy than graft and corruption, let alone Trump's outright fascism.
And by the way, my father worked at a federal manufacturing plant so I've heard plenty of stories, good and bad.
First of all, my comment has nothing to do with Trump, so let's leave him out of it.
I would doubt Gates's number because I have never been in a company that had 15% or less waste. e.g I don't think you could find a tech company out there that couldn't reduce its AWS bill by 15% without any service degradation, but it's just not a priority.
But the meaning of "waste" is highly subjective so some people wouldn't count that type of inefficiency as "waste". It may take a lot of resources to follow the process that the government mandates or use the ancient technology that it uses, and if the government efficiently follows the process with the existing tech, then it's not "wasteful." But I would call the process itself and the failure to upgrade the tech waste.
As for corruption vs bureaucratic inefficiency, why should I favor one over the other except by cost comparison? If the government pays $100 million to build a road that really costs $50 million because the contractor is owned by the governors cousin, that's a lot better for me than paying $200 million for the same road because the bureaucratic process to keep the governors cousin from unfairly getting the contract costs $150 million. And that's not even getting into the fact that the bureaucratic path also costs more in terms of time.
IMO the process is just as much graft as the nepotism. All those lawyers and consultants and government employees that consume the $150 million are just as much the recipients of ill gotten gains as the governor's cousin. I recognize that this can't be eliminated, so I simply would choose whichever one was cheaper. And in the US I think we are in a situation where the bureaucracy consumes much more than would be taken by corruption. China is quite corrupt and yet their government gets a lot more done for a lot less money, and in a lot less time than ours does.
I'm not totally disagreeing. But the problem is that there is not just the dollar cost of contracts.
If the governor's cousin cuts corners to save money, it puts lives at risk. Or the thing doesn't last as long and costs more money later. The cost difference is rarely just pure price gouging.
A cop planting evidence to make an expedient trial is also a form of cost cutting that I really don't want. But when people see corruption or legal corner cutting they will believe it's acceptable to do themselves. There is a broken windows or slippery slope situation.
Legible but inefficient systems can be corrected through sensible redesign. Corrupt systems are a cancer that spreads as good actors are pushed out.
I would be supportive of a DOGE style effort that actually looked carefully and critically at systems to rearchitect them. But accepting illegality will simply produce a low-trust society with many bigger problems.
I don't really see the bureaucracy as preventing that sort of thing. The $800 million Obamacare website was both a complete waste of money and it didn't work. A corrupt contract might even be less likely to be a failure because the governors cousin knows that if he fails to deliver there will be a public outrage and he could go to jail. Whereas there are almost no consequences when a government contractor screws up after having gone through the legal process.