Which is an old reference to my thoughts on Sectors of Society, which long-term readers might remember. Briefly, systems start in one state, with a different state being the goal. The crucial observation is that the processes used to transform the system into the goal state are aligned, or optimized for, the goal. I don’t recommend following the above link, as I was working out my thoughts online, rather than more properly organizing them in private.
And goals for other systems, for other sectors, are not the same. Using processes and, for that matter, sub-goals in a sector foreign to the origin sector of a process is a chancy business; the law of unintended consequences not only will apply, but be reinforced.
I see it as so chancy that asking What Should Government’s Profit Margin Be? should immediately instill doubt in the soul of anyone who’s running around yelling about privatizing this and privatizing that.
Apparently The New York Times got around to the first step recently, as Professor Richardson observes:
The New York Times editorial board today lamented the instability that Musk is creating, noting that the government is not a business, that “[t]here are already signs the chaos is hurting the economy,” and that “Americans can’t afford for the basic functions of government to fail. If Twitter stops working, people can’t tweet. When government services break down, people can die.”
I hope the Times went further to observe the fundamentals of why trying to move business processes into the public sector is a bad idea. Not that the President and Mr Musk will pay attention; it’d go against their confirmation bias, I suspect.
But it sounds like the world is waking up to unpleasant realities. Maybe I should get a sub to the Times. No. I just don’t have time for it, although with WaPo turning turtle as journalists hurried away after Bezos showed himself craven, it may be worth the aggravation.
