‘We know from the last major try at downsizing the federal government…To get back some of the expertise they lost, many government agencies relied on private companies, which aren’t cheaper than government employees’.
But this is exactly what they want to do—to move as much as they can to the private sector because the public, to whom they play, assumes that government is always inefficient, wasteful, and incompetent and business can always do any task cheaper and better. They didn’t even check empirical data: this is an unshakable a priori belief and nothing will disconfirm because the assumption will be that if it hurts now it will make things much better in the long run.
The Administration did this at my place. We had student tutorial centers run by faculty and staffed by students we hired and managed. Worked great. Then they contracted with a tutorial firm to provide ‘free’ tutoring to students at a cost that they refused to reveal to faculty and it isn’t working fine. There’s no way a business taking a cut for profit could be cheaper than funding departments to hire work-study students selected and managed by faculty who know what they’re doing, in house, at cost. Don’t let me continue with the travel agency through which we now have to book all travel…
It's an article of faith that outsourcing is efficient and profit-making enterprises do everything cheaper and better. How do you address that? And how did it get into the heads of the American public that it’s business that’s on their side, defending their interests from the predation of the Deep State?
People like Musk are not in favor of "small government" in some principle way but just want to reduce the government where they selectively and opportunism do not like it
I don't think we can limit ourselves to thinking of this as a mistaken phase of a government capability and expertise ebb and flow cycle. Given the techno-libertarian ethos (pathos?) driving a significant portion of the silicon valley and crypto worlds, Musk is more likely set on making it a "burn the boats" inflection point where we move beyond relying on slow-learning, fallible and difficult to control humans and rebuild via minimalist, execution focused AI systems. The massive risk is of course whose values set the objectives and what data are used to train the inevitable biases that will be baked in.
‘We know from the last major try at downsizing the federal government…To get back some of the expertise they lost, many government agencies relied on private companies, which aren’t cheaper than government employees’.
But this is exactly what they want to do—to move as much as they can to the private sector because the public, to whom they play, assumes that government is always inefficient, wasteful, and incompetent and business can always do any task cheaper and better. They didn’t even check empirical data: this is an unshakable a priori belief and nothing will disconfirm because the assumption will be that if it hurts now it will make things much better in the long run.
The Administration did this at my place. We had student tutorial centers run by faculty and staffed by students we hired and managed. Worked great. Then they contracted with a tutorial firm to provide ‘free’ tutoring to students at a cost that they refused to reveal to faculty and it isn’t working fine. There’s no way a business taking a cut for profit could be cheaper than funding departments to hire work-study students selected and managed by faculty who know what they’re doing, in house, at cost. Don’t let me continue with the travel agency through which we now have to book all travel…
It's an article of faith that outsourcing is efficient and profit-making enterprises do everything cheaper and better. How do you address that? And how did it get into the heads of the American public that it’s business that’s on their side, defending their interests from the predation of the Deep State?
People like Musk are not in favor of "small government" in some principle way but just want to reduce the government where they selectively and opportunism do not like it
I don't think we can limit ourselves to thinking of this as a mistaken phase of a government capability and expertise ebb and flow cycle. Given the techno-libertarian ethos (pathos?) driving a significant portion of the silicon valley and crypto worlds, Musk is more likely set on making it a "burn the boats" inflection point where we move beyond relying on slow-learning, fallible and difficult to control humans and rebuild via minimalist, execution focused AI systems. The massive risk is of course whose values set the objectives and what data are used to train the inevitable biases that will be baked in.