[manux]

Inefficiencies aren't always bad.

Efficiency, for example, is often the opposite of robustness. Many companies have learned that the hard way when COVID hit, even though they had an efficient supply chain and production pipeline, it was not robust.

[fourtrees]

I'd go further: many people died because the healthcare industry has embraced efficiency (likely not the precisely right word) at the expense of robustness.

[username90]

The healthcare industry used exactly that argument to bottleneck the economy and create a lot of inefficiencies so healthcare can't be provided to everyone. Lots of lives would be saved if it got a lot easier for immigrant doctors to practice, but that would be too efficient and not "robust" enough so they can't do it.

[fourtrees]

I agree that immigrant doctors should have an easier time practicing (and that we should be producing more doctors regardless of their origin). I think that the overall lack of qualified medical workers did lead to unnecessary deaths during the worst of the pandemic.

I think a robustness/efficiency dichotomy isn't the right way to look at this. One doesn't preclude the other. A medical system that is both efficient and robust is certainly possible. This discussion deserves its own thread.

[screye]

I guess part of it is just personal anecdotes. India was (democratically elected, but single party monopoly) socialist from 1945-1991. It is still pseudo-socialist in many senses.

Watching how deeply these inefficiencies from bureaucracies plague us, has been genuinely angering.

So yeah, I do come into it with personal priors which lead to be deeply suspicious of any unnecessary inefficiency. (emphasis on unnecessary. Your covid example clearly shows that the word necessary itself is subjectively evaluated)

[yowlingcat]

You're getting downvoted but you raise a fair point. Sometimes, the inefficiencies from bureaucracies don't trade off and create more robustness or greater scale. Sometimes they are purely extractive or arguably corrupt.

With that said, is it really fair to call India pseudo-socialist? For all intents and purposes, India is closer to the EU and a region/confederation of nations than it is to a single country. One can say that inefficiencies from Indian bureaucracy plague the country, but that would be to treat India like a monolith, which it certainly is not.

India is a panoply of genetic, cultural, and linguistic diversity -- a plurality, and one of the world's oldest democracies. Even so, India's growth remains blistering in real terms. Perhaps we see things a certain way because our finite lives exist in a certain point in history; but could our children or grandchildren see India the same way we see China today?

It's personally hard to fathom that the answer is yes, but it's equally hard for me to fathom that the answer is no. In a way, I almost expect to be surprised.