My experience as a consultant with both (local) administrations (in Germany) and much larger corporations is that the corporations weren't even close to being as dysfunctional.
I'm certain there are great parts of government, but I've never experienced it, and all I'm hearing from friends who work at the federal level is that it's no different there.
Has Germany had one of two major parties spending decades trying to undermine government to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy that government is bad by definition? We are 45 years into an intentional effort to sabotage public services to convince people they don't work, to cut taxes for the wealthiest people who don't want to fund them
Germany has issues as well becuase it's been a de facto austerity state since 2009 due to their debt break, but the American administrative structure is very different from Germany's, so it's an unfair comparison in either direction.
The only countries remotely similar to the US might be Canada and Australia.
> but the American administrative structure is very different from Germany's, so it's an unfair comparison either direction.
> The only countries remotely similar to the US might be Canada and Australia.
Like the US, Canada and Australia are federations - but Germany is too. Unlike the US, Canada, Australia and Germany all have parliamentary rather than presidential systems
So I’m not sure what you are suggesting that Canada and Australia have in common with the US but Germany doesn’t (obviously English and a common law legal system, but I doubt either makes a big difference to government employment)
All federations aren't equal, and administrative procedures and laws are very distinct country to country.
> but I doubt either makes a big difference to government employment
It does, because employment law (and any other form of law) is largely built on top of a mixture of administrative policy acts along with past rulings and cases.
Fundamentally, Germany and the US are not comparable becuase there are very significant differences between past case law along with administrative hiring procedures.
IMO, the only large federations structurally comparable to Germany are probably Italy, and maybe France or Spain.
You suggested Australia and Canada have something in common with the US in this area that Germany doesn’t - but when challenged you can’t actually name anything specific, you just fall back on vague generalities
> IMO, the only large federations structurally comparable to Germany are probably France and Italy.
Unlike Australia/Canada/Germany/US (among others), neither France nor Italy are federations, both are unitary states with some degree of devolution (significantly more for Italy)
> You suggested Australia and Canada have something in common with the US in this area that Germany doesn’t - but when challenged you can’t actually name anything specific
I didn't realize you explicitly asked for that.
In this case, it's the English Law Tradition, and alignment between US and Canadian administrative norms as being part of the same common market.
I recommend reading this paper about the differences in Administrative Procedure legislation (which includes federal employment rules and norms) in Germany versus the US [0]
Fundamentally, "Germany has a tendency to underestimate the importance of the administrative decision-making process while the US takes the procedure more seriously" [0]. That along with Germany's juristic legal tradition becomes the crux of the issue when comparing Germany versus the US, becuase our precedents are entirely different, leading to different causes for dysfunction.
In general, I think online Europeans need to stop comparing the US to their countries. The causes for our dysfunctions are different, and our entire legal, constitutional, and political traditions are VERY different because of a 300-500 year split.
> I recommend reading this paper about the differences in Administrative Procedure legislation (which includes federal employment rules and norms) in Germany versus the US [0]
No, administrative procedure law (US APA, German VwVfG) is not the primary legal regime for government employees, they are governed by civil service law (e.g. the Bundesbeamtengesetz in Germany, Title 5 of the United States Code).
> In general, I think online Europeans need to stop comparing the US to their countries. The causes for our dysfunctions are different, and our entire legal, constitutional, and political traditions are VERY different because of a 300-500 year split.
The common law tradition, followed by the US and Canada, originates in Europe (England); among EU member states, Ireland’s legal system is completely based on common law, while Malta has a mixed legal system which combines Roman/French and English legal traditions. Such a mix is not unique to Malta, you can find a similar mix in Louisiana, Quebec, Scotland. Cyprus’ legal system is heavily based on English common law, but also with Ottoman and French influences (the French influence comes via Greece, since modern Greek law was modelled off France)
In terms of political systems, Canada and Germany have a lot in common, both being parliamentary federations - yes one is a constitutional republic the other a monarchy, but that makes little difference in practice. The presidential system used in the US, while common in Latin America, is basically unheard of in Europe; although, the semipresidential system used in France can be viewed as a hybrid between an American-style presidential system and the parliamentary system which is the European norm
So I think North Americans and Europeans have more in common in terms of political and legal traditions than you acknowledge
I'm sure they are. Yet the arguments for why government is doing just fine and large corporations are at least as bad are very similar, so there seem to be some similarities as well.
Any similarity is only at the surface level, because the entire corpora of case law, administrative procedure acts, and past rulings are going to cause entirely distinct dysfunctions.
Both Gonorrhea and the Plague create bubous, but their causes and cures are entirely different.
It's the same with reforming organizational culture.
And yet the organizational outcomes are surprisingly similar when you zoom in. Maybe culture is the only thing that matters and incentives don't at all, but I doubt it.
I think many of the factors which can make public sector entities less efficient - e.g. harder to get rid of underperforming employees, fewer institutional rewards for reducing unnecessary expenditures - apply broadly across countries.
I think something Germany and the US have in common, compared to many other countries, is less blatant corruption in government, due to strong laws against it.
> I think many of the factors which can make public sector entities less efficient - e.g. harder to get rid of underperforming employees, fewer institutional rewards for reducing unnecessary expenditures - apply broadly across countries
It's much easier to remove a Federal Employee in the US compared to Germany. The "give 3 documents" rule makes it easy to not have to deal with lengthy arbitration. At worst, it's comparable to private sector hiring/firing rules in Germany.
Furthemore, hiring practices for federal jobs are much more decentralized in the US compared to Germany.
And finally, the entire corpora of statutes, legislation, and administrative policies in the US is significantly different from that in Germany, such that any surface level similarities are basically convergent evolution.
My experience of working in corporations in more than 2 decades, from startups to FAANG, is that those are riddled with mismanagement and poor decision making, be it for incompetence, egocentrism, ignorance, etc and so forth. The only difference is that corporations tend to be optimized for generating profits, all else be damned.
I certainly wouldn't trust corporations with government functions.
It depends on what you consider government functions, but I'd be cautious as well.
And while the German's government eventual recognition that fax machines are no longer the state of the art is an extreme case, I believe it's exemplifies the problem. Private companies, both large and small, have done that much earlier.
Those profits they're chasing above all else are a powerful driver for innovation and optimization.
> Those profits they're chasing above all else are a powerful driver for innovation and optimization.
They are also a powerful driver for exploitation both of employees and of the general public.
Be careful with what you wish for. I certainly prefer dealing with a public sector that still operate on fax machines but that still may fundamentally work for the public good (as inefficient as it may be), than with a corporation that would bleed me dry if it would means some asshole CEO makes a few extra bucks in his annual comp.
> They are also a powerful driver for exploitation both of employees and of the general public.
Yes, but you'll always have that. An average person working for the government, be that as an employee or as an official, will optimize their work load and try to do the minimum amount required. That's individually much less of a problem than that greedy CEO you envision, but it adds up in large numbers and becomes a problem if not corrected - and there's no strong incentive to correct it when you play with the infinite money hack enabled.
Human nature has to be taken into account either way. It's just a lot easier when you acknowledge that it exists. Massively oversimplified: that's why the Soviets had to build walls to make it hard for their people to leave and murder those who tried. You can ignore human nature, but human nature won't ignore you.
> Yes, but you'll always have that. An average person working for the government, be that as an employee or as an official, will optimize their work load and try to do the minimum amount required.
Except that is not really my observation of someone that dealt with the public sector extensively in multiple different countries.
More often than not I dealt with people that were really trying to do a good job and were helpful to an extent.
Yes, there are lazy people that just want to coast (as if those don't exist in the private sector) and there is a level of corruption (also let's pretend that there's no corruption in the private sector). But that is definitely not the majority, especially in countries that more or less work.
> That's individually much less of a problem than that greedy CEO you envision, but it adds up in large numbers and becomes a problem if not corrected
Again, I disagree. The profit seeking and inherent greet of the any corporation creates a fundamental adversarial condition that is unsolvable. What is good for a corporation tends to almost always be bad for the general public. And there is no incentive to place constraints on the greed of corporations besides government regulations.
> Massively oversimplified: that's why the Soviets had to build walls to make it hard for their people to leave and murder those who tried. You can ignore human nature, but human nature won't ignore you.
You mention the Soviet Union as an example of a government that worked against the people, ignoring plenty of good examples in different countries.
And I am not really the one ignoring human nature when you are essentially willing to surrender the public good to relentless greed. Greed only begets more greed. You would do well to remember that
> You mention the Soviet Union as an example of a government that worked against the people, ignoring plenty of good examples in different countries.
No, that's not what I meant. I mentioned them because they are the largest experiment in having everything run by the state and ignoring human nature (or, in their case, thinking they could change it by pretending it didn't exist for 20 years). The outcome was people voting with their feet and leaving. And because that's terrible PR and they needed the people to stay, they had to build walls to keep them in.
But that's not because they were "working against the people", it's because their assumptions were deeply flawed.
> And I am not really the one ignoring human nature when you are essentially willing to surrender the public good to relentless greed.
What public good? You mean public services? Why would I pay amount X for garbage collection if someone comes up with a better system and can do it for half of that amount? Currency is a placeholder for resources, why wouldn't you choose the more resource-efficient way? Would it be "greedy" to replace inefficient ways?
It is also more efficient to refuse hospital care for those with serious medical conditions. Letting them die is probably more cost-effective.
I can come up with countless examples of how it is more cost-effective and innovative to exploit people for profit, but I am sure you already got my point.
I think here is where we will have a fundamental disagreement in world views, probably in a way that is impossible to reconcile. You think that profit-seeking can be a force that results in progress, whereas I think it is fundamentally adversarial to the public at large. Some government functions are simply incompatible with it, and elsewhere it needs to be curbed with proper regulation.
> It is also more efficient to refuse hospital care for those with serious medical conditions. Letting them die is probably more cost-effective.
No, it's not, that's a silly argument. We have hospitals not because we're such great moral people, but _because_ we've figured out that it's much better for society if an illness doesn't mean you have to roll the dice whether you survive.
But at some point, costs become an issue, I'm sure you see that as well, e.g. with an ageing population. It's not even a moral question, at some point you're arguing against the laws of physics. And you may think that human laws are hard to change, but wait until you've tried changing those.
> You think that profit-seeking can be a force that results in progress, whereas I think it is fundamentally adversarial to the public at large.
There's some schools of thinking where living in the West is "fundamentally adversarial" to the public at large and we better go back to pre-industrial life, traditional and simple because reject modernity and all that. I don't subscribe to that.
I don't think there's a way to deny that profit-seeking results in progress - the only question is whether you could achieve a similar level of progress without it. I believe history has shown that you cannot, and then it has re-run this experiment multiple times, and always ended up with the same result.
> I believe history has shown that you cannot, and then it has re-run this experiment multiple times, and always ended up with the same result.
You seem to think I am a communist simply for thinking that profit seeking should be regulated by the government and that government functions should not be in the hands of corporations.
I never once said that corporations should not exist, ot that all profit-seeking activity should be forbidden. You just presumed that, because you hold fairly extremes points of view.
The fact that you don't see how extreme your point of view is turns this conversation in an exercise in frustration. Oh well.
I did not assume that at all. It's just that the communists denied that greed (or, framed more nicely: self-interest) is a common human trait, so they set out to prove that it's much better without it. And the rest is, as they say, history. My opinion is that we don't need to try that again.
You appear to believe that profit-seeking cannot result in progress, and I disagree. Is that an extreme viewpoint? If you, too, consider self-interest "of the devil", capable only to destroy but not to create ("profit-seeking can [not] be a force that results in progress"), then I suppose it is an extreme viewpoint, much like the idea that the devil could be a force for good.
I just don't believe in the devil, or god, but I believe that you wanting to optimize the outcome for you in a game constrained by rules that require you to create value for others in order to receive value, will end up being much better at creating value than if there was no external motivation for you.
I'm certain there are great parts of government, but I've never experienced it, and all I'm hearing from friends who work at the federal level is that it's no different there.