[AtlasBarfed]

Sufficiently large cities,much like sufficiently large companies, fall into the tight hierarchical management and red tape. Basic services become more expensive and less effective.

This also mirrors large enterprises, especially in things like IT services for providing infrastructure before AWS started hollowing them out.

In large enterprises with a dozen different datacenters (often from acquisitions and mergers), I never understood why these assets were placed under the same management and policy. Instead, the opportunity to provide internal services competition was ignored, with two or even three or four different infrastructure provider services competing to serve IT systems and applications.

Likewise, in a large enough city you could have competing services for snow plowing, garbage collection, pothole maintenance, and even if you don't have consumer choice or transparency, have a relatively cheap oversight group rate and reallocate funding. School choice has been pretty popular in cities.

And when privatization occurs... why go all in? Use it for competition, not replacement. Although charter schools have been generally a failure of policy if we use that as an example of this strategy.