[DangitBobby]

The other side of that coin is that they are not driven by profit motive, so the cost of improvement is not passed on to the users as "what the market will bear", but instead "at cost" so improvements are much more likely to be worth it for users of the service instead of just a new and exciting way to justify price increases.

As for "no reason to improve" well, there's no reason for people to do more than the very bare minimum, and yet they do it all the time. Sometimes organizations improve because they want to. I might even argue that it's harder to improve under existential crisis, not easier.

I think it's become a bit of truism that private businesses are more efficient than government run organizations. I wonder if that holds up under scrutiny?

[chii]

> Sometimes organizations improve because they want to

or that there's an alternative reason for their action other than maximal profit.

There's darwinian natural selection at work in the private sector (where reproduction can be taken to mean profit). Such a force doesn't exist in gov't funded entities providing a service. That doesn't mean there's no force to make those services improve - it's just not the darwinian natural selection force (may be a politician decides to make it his/her objective to improve XYZ as a promise for votes).