[afavour]

Feels like a self fulfilling prophecy. There’s no reason government can’t be effective at decision making if things are set up the right way (their involvement could be distant). There’s also no reason to assume a giant company (like, say, Intel) is going to be particularly fast at it.

[xyzzy4747]

The people in government aren't incentivized to be effective largely because they have no personal financial reason to be. There's no stock options or things like that, no good bonus programs, etc.

[magicalhippo]

Here in Norway the government fully owns several "private" companies[1], like Statkraft[2]. They can have bonus programs and similar. Some are too good[3][4], others[5] not quite as wild.

[1]: https://www.regjeringen.no/en/topics/business-and-industry/s...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statkraft

[3]: https://www.nrk.no/norge/statkraft-oker-inntekter-og-bonuser...

[4]: https://www.dn.no/energi/narings-og-fiskeridepartementet/lo-...

[5]: https://www.mesta.no/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Mesta_Vedleg... (page 2)

[afavour]

What about a competitive salary they lose (i.e. get fired) if they underperform? We’re used to underpaying and overprotecting government employees but if you were setting up a new publicly owned company there’s no reason you’d have to do it that way.

[glimshe]

It's already difficult to fire people in large businesses, but firing people from government is in a whole different level. Especially for performance unless we're talking about extreme underperformance or job abandonment.

[afavour]

What I’m saying is that a publicly owned company has a lot of flexibility in this regard. Employees are not government employees. It’s like a regular private company except the government is the sole shareholder.

My broader point here about self fulfilling prophecy is reflected in your comment: it has been this way, therefore must always be this way. That’s not true.

[smallnamespace]

> there’s no reason

The reason as always is politics.

For example, the Federal civil service ("general service") pay scale tops out around $160k. This really doesn't make sense and costs the government multiples of market wages for hiring for roles where market pay is higher than this. One route is to hire that person via a contracting firm with a huge (double or triple) markup.

And of course the reason we don't just revamp the pay scales and pay market wages is because it's political suicide to pay people half a million or more at market rates.

The American people, on average, don't like the level of wage inequality in society. For any particular issue where you shove it in their faces (like proposing to pay the project lead "competitive salary"), you will get shouted down.

That's also why we get strange arrangements like Congress members making around $170k a year with legal insider trading. The insider trading money they make looks like "free" and isn't easily quantified.

[ajmurmann]

Great connection you make on the insider trading! That never occurred to me despite recently being fed up with local mayoral candidates; looking at mayor comp and immediately noping out because a substantial paycut for the pleasure of dealing with the biggest BS imaginable seems rather unattractive.

[hiddencost]

Turns out that what happens in practice is corporations get chopped up for parts, and government usually does better.

Medicare for example is much more efficient than private health insurance.

The motivation for government employees is "because they care about doing the right thing". You should try it some time.

[nullfield]

From working in government, “no, they don’t care about doing it the right way.” The people who get hired are, largely, the ones who will work for the lower salary paid, and plenty lack enough experience and/or capability to even do what they need to. At least in IT.

[throw0101d]

> The people in government aren't incentivized to be effective largely because they have no personal financial reason to be. There's no stock options or things like that, no good bonus programs, etc.

I would hazard to guess that most employed people do not have stock options or get bonuses (only salary), but are still "effective" because they consider that doing a job well is its own reward: i.e., they have intrinsic motivation (rather than extrinsic).

I have worked in private sector, and in government (including academia/research), and most folks want to do a job well because they like the satisfaction of being able to know they did the job well.

[cjblomqvist]

I'd say it's not that clear cut. Do we have any facts (research) here or are these just beliefs? I can point to several but companies doing very well owned by governments, as well as many doing very badly.