[lostcolony]

People love to say governments are inefficient, but I always find that an interesting claim. It invariably relies on comparing government to much smaller scale organizations (such as charity), which obviously isn't comparable.

That is, I can be 100% efficient with my donation to charity by just...giving $20 to a homeless person. Oh look, 100% of my donation went to someone in need. A charity can be 90% efficient by collecting and distributing donations citywide; it's more widespread, and donations are less centralized, but there's cost in paying people to actually do the legwork. A government is doing stuff nationwide, distributing unequally based on need (measured in a flawed way, yes, but still requiring measurement, since it's politically untenable to do simple things), and is less efficient still. But that's...to be expected.

You see the same thing in private sector; the larger a company is, the less efficiently it runs. Walmart is the largest private employer; no one is claiming it's a well oiled machine of efficiencies comparable to a lean startup. Necessarily; it's just like with technology, the more distributed the system is, the less efficient it is. Saying that governments are inefficient and just throw money at the problem is like saying distributed systems are inefficient and just throw compute at the problem. While true, it nevertheless is still the only way to solve many problems at that scale, and comparing the 'inefficiencies' of hardware of, say, Google, to the hardware for local search on my home PC, isn't particularly meaningful rhetoric.

[PaywallBuster]

Walmart still have a lot of (combined) efficiencies otherwise, people would jusy shop at the local grocer if that was cheaper :)

Unlike the government, no one's forcing people to shop at walmart, and if they were loosing efficiency (charging higher due to Admin costs) people are more than welcome to move to any alternative that suits them best

[suture]

You entirely missed the point made and are addressing a different point. By the way, who is more efficient at providing healthcare to the elderly: Medicare or the private sector or charities? Private health insurers fought hard to not have to spend as little of their budgets on salary and administrative costs as Medicare.

[BobbyJo]

Your argument is rather confusing. You say they aren't comparable, then point out a plethora of comparisons. You then finish by demonstrating some of the reasons governments are inefficient.

All of this after leading with seeming disagreement. I'm a little lost.

[suture]

Clearly the argument is that inefficiency grows with size. Small charity (even a so called large one) is nowhere near comparable in size to a nationwide government program. Therefore comparing efficiency between these organizations is not apt. Clearly.

[lostcolony]

I can compare apples and oranges. "Well, oranges tend to be rounder, and more orange, and tarter, and...". Doesn't change the fact that it is THE cliche for bad comparisons that you shouldn't attempt.

Maybe I should clarify, especially if English isn't your first language, saying something "isn't comparable" doesn't mean you literally can't compare them, but that doing so is unhelpful and misleading.

[BobbyJo]

The Apples and Oranges idiom refers to comparing things on axis that don't make sense.

Comparing government's and private charities' efficiency at delivering help is a perfectly rational comparison to make when deciding which things should or should not be delivered by the government. The government's efficiency is always a concern when talking about it taking on new responsibilities.

If government efficiency was moot, why not have them handle delivery/allocation of all basic goods? We know that's a bad idea because the experiment has been run, and private industry is better as producing and distributing food because.... efficiency.

[lostcolony]

>> The Apples and Oranges idiom refers to comparing things on axis that don't make sense.

Feels like an arbitrary distinction to what I said. "Efficiency" is an axis that doesn't make sense when the scale and scope are massively different, for all the reasons mentioned above.

>> We know that's a bad idea because the experiment has been run

So many issues with this. First, your claim is "Efficiency is about benefit per dollar, and governments are really really bad a(t) that"; you make a claim about all governments. Cherry picking data points is not helping that claim; you have to show that government is never, and can never, be more efficient than private industry. I'm pointing out why even trying to make the comparison at national scale is difficult. Second, where has this example occurred? Again, I think your choice of data points is telling.

Food is actually a super interesting example where, again, the scale of the operation doesn't really make for direct comparison. Grocery stores are obviously the way consumers get access to food, but their stock happens via multiple wholesale distributors, who themselves are middle men between multiple suppliers. That is, while Ralphs/Kroger/King Soupers/etc may be as near a nationwide grocery store in the US as I'm aware of, they're stocked by Sysco, US Foods, etc (who are carrying multiple, sometimes even competing, brands), as well as sometimes specific distributors for a large enough company (Coke may have their own, for instance), and who transport product between warehouses using separate longhaul trucking companies, etc etc. There is a LOT of inefficiency involved in that, a lot of middle men collecting along the way, and as we saw during the pandemic, a lot of places the supply chain can break down. And you're comparing it to...what? Russia during peak communism? The closest the US has had is when the government got involved during WWII with rationing, and that actually worked really well, given the shortages we had.

Let's try going the other way, and scaling government down. I too will cherry pick some data - municipal broadband. Oh, wow, now we have something way more efficient than 'the free market', even without tax subsidies, in every market it exists in; so much so that the only way private industry can compete is via legislation to prevent municipal broadband from expanding.