This morning I had a session with clients and as is normal for this group of two, we discussed many topics in just over an hour, ranging from the forest fires in California, to the tiny distance between Russia and US, suicide epidemics (that I might write about later) and what I will talk about now, government inefficiency.
But we didn't talk directly about it, but more in a general sense of inefficiency, when rather looking for the best result possible for the people, they are looking to make certain groups happy, at the expense of others. This results in resources being spread too thin making them ineffectual and, too many inclusions that do not bring value. I likened it to The Homer. Very expensive to build, but satisfies no one - and sends its shareholders broke.
That'd be Us.
Government inefficiency isn't the government's fault, it is just the way it is designed, where there are too many areas to cover, too many managers, too many competing wants, and too little accountability. It is the opposite of most businesses, where the goal isn't to grow profit, it is to grow itself at the expense of others. To keep consuming resources to sustain it, under the guise that what it is doing is working, but never having to actually prove it. When it inevitably fails, the leaders change, but the same framework of inefficiency continues.
But, I am a fan of inefficiency for the most part, because within is where possibility and innovation lays. If everything was absolutely efficient, there would be no more growth, no reason to change. I explored this a little many years ago in an article on architects and engineers.
The architect manipulates space without any limiting rules, save the self-imposed. They spend their time in a dream world of creativity and promise, possibility and exception. The engineer however, constantly develops new techniques and materials in order to strengthen, improve efficiency and increase effectivity. The engineer attempts to bring concrete integrity to an idea by increasing and applying knowledge of the rules to the physical world. This is a relationship of symbiosis, not conflict.
Every mistake is an opportunity to improve, and the governments are jam-packed-full of mistakes, from the ground up, always the way through to their successes. Because even when they are successful, like a broken watch telling the correct time twice a day, the framework of opposition will undermine it, not to improve results for us the stakeholders, but to reduce the power of those who succeeded.
However, government inefficiency is generally not of the kind that breeds innovation, because they aren't looking to do anything on the bleeding edge, they aren't willing to take developmental risks. Government inefficiency is born from incompetence and ignorance, not pushing the boundaries and failing. This means that the opportunity to innovate is reduced, because nothing new need be created, because the solutions already exist, they just didn't apply them. As said the other day, they are problem solvers, but the solutions they employ are already superseded well before what will inevitably be a terrible implementation process. They enter a a Formula One race, with a horse and cart.
They play it safe, because they are beholden to those who are benefiting from the status quo, the conditions that keep on generating wealth for the few, even though they are bringing less and less to the many who are financing them. This is different to the approach of private enterprise, because the shareholders there expect growth, which means risks will have to be taken and innovation happen, in order to compete for the limited resources of the market. However, the same approach shouldn't be applied for governance to improve wellbeing of people, because it is a model that reduces wellbeing in favour of profit. Privatisation of government services isn't a good solution to improve general wellbeing, even if it does improve economic efficiency.
The role of the government is to improve the wellbeing of the people governed, but if it doesn't do that, it needs to be audited and held accountable. However, replacing the government every few years doesn't change anything, because the structural and systematic problems will carry over, creating more inefficient incompetent decisions that don't bring the return on value they could - with the "value" being the wellbeing of citizens, not the increase in corporate wealth.
One of the so-called "problems" with distributed communities and development, is that they are very inefficient due to a lot of spread focus, and it takes a long time to get some things done. However, this is also one of its strengths, because decisions aren't made with a narrow perspective and pushed out to everyone as a one-size-fits-all solution.
Hive is a good example of robust and innovative inefficiency, where rather than looking at what needs to be done on the top layer to control everyone, the rules are built into the base layer and everyone is free to build upward. The speed of development upward in a narrow area can be rapid, but the changes to the base layer are slow and methodical, with each change looking to improve conditions for users, not grow itself.
It is interesting talking with these clients, as we have ongoing discussions that go back a decade, and I have noticed how they have changed over time to shift away from the general conformity of Finns that the state will take care of them, to the reality that it actually can't, at least in its present form. Yes, it does work better than many other governments in the world but as they start to increasingly align with the practices of the globalized world, they are getting worse and worse, not better at governance. This is because government is about personality, not policy; and about control and power over the people, not wellbeing of the people. But these can be left for another day.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
