However, we did try it.
by Robert Waldmann
“If non-bureaucratic mechanisms like markets or decentralized experimentation could achieve the same or better results at less cost and without the political taint of Big Government, why not try it?* “ Might have been an interesting question in 1993, although it starts with an “If” clause which assumes the new Democrats are right.
However, we did try it. I think the evidence is that in huge swathes of the economy bureaucratic mechanisms are much more efficient than non-bureacratic mechanisms. One, obviously, is health care where the spending is systematically higher in countries with a non-bureaucratic approach without better outcomes. “non-bureacratic mechanisms like markets” certainly includes Medicare advantage which achieved the same results at 14% higher cost.
I’d say that outsourcing intelligence to Booz Allen Hamilton worked fine if you consider (as I do) the effort to be mainly a threat to our liberties, so complete failure is better than operational success.
I don’t think outsourcing defence of diplomats to Blackwater worked that well. Also Benghazi.
Also market friendly deregulation didn’t work out so well.
Also the rate of deep poverty (income less than half the poverty line) has broken all records.
The point of experimentation is to learn. “Decentralized experimentation” is a means to improve policy by analyzing the outcomes of the experiments. I think that most of the new Democrats who were willing to do that have discovered that the public bureacracy is surprisingly efficient compared to the alternatives.
Look it’s 20 years later. New Democrats just can’t argue that they just want to “try it”. It’s been tried. We can learn from the results of the massive experiments. I think it is very clear that some of the people who argued with rigid ideological straw men are rigid ideologues who will not deal with data. Others including Diane Ravitch, Peter Beinart and Ed Kilgore have learned from the, at best, mixed success of new Democratic policy experiments, and that’s a wonderful thing.
What’s “progressive” about insisting that the ideal governing model was found in the impure compromises and constant experimentation of the 1990s?
*For the blog, note that Kilgore ballanced the presentation of the new Democrat case with “But the high comfort-level of New Dems with market forces brought all sorts of temptations to excessive compromises with conservatives and coziness with powerful business interests.”
My adopted home state of NC is taking a big leap into “non-bureacratic mechanisms like markets”, with a governor who insists that the state should be “run like a business.”
I wonder what the people who believe this hogwash will think when the only schools are privately run, and families are on the hook, individually, for not only tuition, but books, transportation, meals? Has it occurred to any of the 99% who voted for Mr. McCrory that many children in the state will go uneducated, mostly theirs?
At the same time patronage jobs at the Department of Health and Human Services are being filled with highly paid political operatives, case workers are being laid off.
I am amazed at how few people connect the dots. As a good friend of mine often says, “Don’t confuse me with the facts, just dazzle me with the BS.”
It’s not bureaucracy vs non-bureaucracy. The question is who’s incharge of it. We the People or Me the Person. I mean it’s not like a corporation doesn’t have it’s memo’s and forms.
Oh yeah, since when is politic’s not at play in a business?
A couple of years old — and not spot on topic — but my cut-and-paste two cents of Repubs:
30 years of Republicans fulfilling every (last) voodoo economics wish have left America awaiting a second-dip low-demand recession inside a prolonged illiquidity contraction (normal recovery 7-8 years) and US Treasury bonds downgraded and ducking default.
80’s Reagan got his 25% across the board income tax cuts — building unprecedented peacetime debt – his dereg’ing savings and loans crashing the industry. ’90’s Sen. Gramm and friends tore down the Glass-Steagall Chinese wall between retail and investment banking – not without help from Clinton Democrats — setting the stage for our much troubled 2000s. ’90s Greenspan noted Wall Street partying too hard while failing to remove the punch bowl – the burst bubble end gave us the 2001 recession.
2000’s Bush cleared away more financial reg’s — while smiling on little reg’ed shadow banking’s proliferation – converted Clinton budget surpluses into trillions in tax cuts for the better off — which cuts flooded by now much degreg’ed banks and never much reg’ed non-banks with too much savings to be lent to too many borrowers – inflating an oversize real estate bubble whose burst aftermath left said prolonged illiquidity contraction and said low demand dips — while trillions of piled up Reagan-Bush debt inhibit routine Keynesian easing of low demand dips with temporary deficit spending.
Plus:
I wish every time anybody quotes the official federal poverty line or any fraction thereof that they would note that the official line is about two and a half times too low — being computed at three time the price of an emergency diet (dried beans please; no expensive canned) and nothing else, which has to be the looniest government statistic anywhere on any planet.
Denis
I’ll vote for you.
If you’re going to discuss privatization of bureaucracies and the way those policies have been disastrous for tax payers and other stakeholders you need to include the prison industrial complex.
Prison privatization started as a policy initiative well before education “reform” really got rolling and can be seen as a template for all the corruption it spawned. Misallocated resources, overbuilt capacity, rivers of cash all followed these initiatives wherever they blossomed. Ask a CA taxpayer how well prison privatization has worked out there.