> While the public sector was always inefficient (honestly it was significantly worse than I pictured before starting...far far worse like you could easily eliminate hundreds of jobs without impact worse) private sector is pretty bad in many places as well.
I've worked in a public sector department that was run like a business. It was a contact centre that provided information and assistance with various government functions, but to do so it, it competed with private sector providers at open tender for the business of those various government departments.
Of course, it had a massive price advantage, as it was a) small and focused and b) not required to turn a profit.
That aside, it was run like a business, because if any customers were significantly displeased, the clients could easily move to another provider. So the focus on quality was high.
It ultimately provided a quality service to users, cheaply. But, and this was the important takeaway for me, the person running it burned all of his political capital protecting this highly performant section of a ministry from interference from other mandarins within the ministry.
He was a good man, and he expended his career protecting efficiency in the midst of public sector "meh".
Anyway, my long winded point is that public sector isn't inherently inefficient, and private sector isn't inherently efficient. Any sufficiently large organisation sprouts a self-sustaining bureaucracy. Public or private. In my mind, it's merely correlation that public sector organisations are typically inefficient. The causation is organisational complexity (that is, a large strata of middle managers)
Graeber's argument in the book is that businesses are actually run like the government, ie are bureaucratic institutions (that pretend to be "markets"). He has an interesting story about how they were modelled on the post office originally, when large businesses arose in the late nineteenth century.
In Europe, companies were originally gifts of a private trading monopoly made by a monarch. The Post Office model happened a lot later.
There should be more of a distinction between "efficient" used to mean "gets things done effectively and invents new and clever ways to get things done while saving everyone time and money", and the capitalist meaning of "accumulates profits by screwing everyone except senior management and perhaps the stockholders."
It's perfectly possible for the latter kind of "efficient" company to be very inefficient in the first sense.
In fact if you have a market with a very limited number of established large players, it's pretty much the default.
> Any sufficiently large organisation sprouts a self-sustaining bureaucracy. Public or private.
I agree with this. I also think there's an inescapable analogy here with software projects - I think people are just really bad at handling large amounts of complexity. In software, large projects are notorious for high failure rates, in the same way that large organisations seem to collapse under their own weight. We don't see able to administer or manage on a large scale effectively.
This is just thinking out loud, but the conclusion I draw from this analogy is that small focused projects and small focused teams work best. Don't try to create a behemoth. Hence the effectiveness of startups and the UNIX/Pythonic way of keeping things simple.
I wonder how much of that "interference" was the other ministers getting tapped by their private industry friends trying to do something about the government competition.
It may have been that, but from where I sat, most of it appeared to be fiefdom disputes. For example, the head of IT was displeased with this unit because it didn't use Citrix, his mandated solution, for all its needs.
Why? Because it didn't work. Especially not when they tried to make 100 people use Citrix over a 10Mbit connection to servers situated on another _island_.
Even worse, we were allowed to install Firefox, gasp (This was back in the days when IE6 was the go-to corporate browser). Such untried and unproven software! But we had a killer argument for tabs, so we got it.
But it earned us the enmity of a reasonably powerful bureaucrat in head office.
> Anyway, my long winded point is that public sector isn't inherently inefficient, and private sector isn't inherently efficient. Any sufficiently large organisation sprouts a self-sustaining bureaucracy.
I completely agree; the public sector part I was in is probably a bad example as it's probably some of the worst places for bureaucracy and politics. It was incredibly difficult for anyone who wants to use tax dollars wisely to make headway.
I've worked in a public sector department that was run like a business. It was a contact centre that provided information and assistance with various government functions, but to do so it, it competed with private sector providers at open tender for the business of those various government departments.
Of course, it had a massive price advantage, as it was a) small and focused and b) not required to turn a profit.
That aside, it was run like a business, because if any customers were significantly displeased, the clients could easily move to another provider. So the focus on quality was high.
It ultimately provided a quality service to users, cheaply. But, and this was the important takeaway for me, the person running it burned all of his political capital protecting this highly performant section of a ministry from interference from other mandarins within the ministry.
He was a good man, and he expended his career protecting efficiency in the midst of public sector "meh".
Anyway, my long winded point is that public sector isn't inherently inefficient, and private sector isn't inherently efficient. Any sufficiently large organisation sprouts a self-sustaining bureaucracy. Public or private. In my mind, it's merely correlation that public sector organisations are typically inefficient. The causation is organisational complexity (that is, a large strata of middle managers)