ruveyn wrote:
The proper size and scope of a government is a function of the nature of the society it serves. Complicated large societies with large populations will not be well served by "town meetings" writ large.
Even so, a society run by self serving burocrats who are incapable of running a lemonade stand at a profit, will be drained dry and destroyed in due course.
ruveyn
Why is this the test of whether or not a bureaucrat is competent? Public sector management is--I suggest--infinitely more complex than private sector management.
I think Lord Turner put it best in an interview with Sir David Hare:
Adair Turner wrote:
I come from the private sector myself but I do get tired of a certain private-sector arrogance. When people say, "Oh get some private-sector people into the schools, that'll sort them out." Actually I doubt if there are as many jobs in finance as hard as teaching a class of fourteen year-old boys in a tough school. Because business is in some ways quite simple, it has clearly identified aims. The aim is to make money. So you have a measure against which to judge all the subsidiary actions which add up to the overall result. Managing a hospital is rather more complex. Because it's very hard to know what your objective is. There's no money metric to help make the choice between better cancer care or having a better A&E. It's a judgement call. And running a hospital is an endless series of judgement calls where the criteria and objectives are very far from clear. So don't tell me that's easier than making money. Or that people whose responsibilities are hugely complicated can be 'sorted out' by people whose responsibilities have the benefit of being more clearly defined. And if at the end of all this the financial sector is smaller, and some clever people, rather than thinking of finance as the automatic profession of choice, decide to innovate pharmaceuticals or develop technologies to battle climate change, would that be a bad thing? Would it?
What Lord Turner says about running a hospital is even more true about running a government--or an agency within government--or even a single program within an agency.
It's easy to be critical from the outside (and let me be clear, I believe that this criticism is important--it should not be easy to spend public money). But I think there's a fine line between healthy criticism and uncritical abuse.
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--James
10 Sep 2011, 10:56 am
