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by Symmetry
5168 days ago
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I don't think that politicians having real jobs for part of the year would help, particularly. They'd still only have one job, which wouldn't be nearly enough to get the expertise needed to legislate on all the topics that they make laws on. I could talk about how any organization tends to become less tolerant of risk over time. Failures happen and when they do the tendency is to make sure that they are prevented from happening again. And when they happen again (they will) the tendency to add more laws which, since the resources devoted to enforcing laws won't be increased, causes all laws to be enforced less well. I remember a while ago The Economist had a feature one issue on the Dodd-Frank Financial bill that was pretty critical. Dodd and Frank then wrote in the next issue with letters that I though were, frankly, rather illuminating. One gave the "Something had to be done, this was something, we did it" syllogism nearly perfectly. The other talked about all the hard work that went into the bill, how he'd talked with all sorts of professionals working in the financial industry and added all sorts of special cases so that the currently existing set of businesses weren't unduly inconvenienced. |
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Maybe there's an angle there. I'll use the example of an MBA degree to illustrate. A friend of mine complete an MBA at Pepperdine. Over dinner I asked him: "What's an MBA good for?". He said "Not a damn thing without context". He got the MBA after over a decade as an engineer. He knew what to do with it and how to apply it to something concrete.
Perhaps rules for government employ could change in that you would be required to have had a career in the private domain for, say, ten years, before even qualifying to apply. And I'm not talking about working at a fast-food joint. Different positions would have different requirements. There's a difference between someone working at the department of motor vehicles vs. the Mayor of a city. I would be OK with DMV workers having five years experience in a non-trivial job (no flipping burgers) but would want a Mayor with a solid twenty years in a position of responsibility in a private enterprise. I don't know if this even makes sense, but we need better people in government than what we are getting. That's probably a huge part of the problem.