Why cutting government is dangerous

Lots of people seem to think that A) government is very inefficient, and that therefore B) we can make society more efficient by cutting the size of government. But actually, (B) doesn't follow from (A). And in fact, the very thing that makes government inefficient in the first place might make cutting it a bad idea!

Why is government inefficient? Because of incentives. Companies generally make hiring and investment decisions based on a marginal cost/marginal benefit calculation (though corporate institutions can of course get in the way of that, and if there are externalities then it's not efficient, etc. etc.). But government makes its decisions based on some other kind of cost-benefit calculation entirely. Sadly, we don't have a good understanding of government decision-making, and this is an area that could use a LOT more research attention than it is getting.

Anyway, because government doesn't make decisions on a monetary cost/benefit margin, it tends to be inefficient. But because of that, if you take a hacksaw to government, starving it of funds, or demanding that it fire workers and close divisions, these firing and closing decisions will not be made on a cost/benefit margin. If you force a corporation to downsize, it will usually lay off the least productive workers first. But if you force a government to downsize, it very well might lay off the most productive workers while retaining the least productive ones!

The very thing that makes government inefficient can make cutting government inefficient!
 

More here.

Specifically, the government entities that tend to survive a purge are most likely to be entrenched interests, and those are often entities that serve a narrow but politically motivated minority.

As in other fields, the inability to measure productivity accurately across different units of government means great inefficiency in funding allocation. So many problems can be reduced to inaccurate measurement.

The decline of Mission Chinese Food

Michael Bauer has dropped Mission Chinese Food in SF down to a food rating of 1.5 stars.

Many favorites are a shadow of what they were when I initially reviewed the restaurant as well as when I updated it 18 months ago, about six months after Bowien started spending the bulk of his time in New York. On that visit, the food had lost a bit of luster but still showed his vision.

My all-time favorite dish - salt-cod fried rice ($12) with Chinese sausage and confit mackerel - shows how the cooking has devolved. On my recent visit it was as dry as sawdust, although there were glimmers of what I had loved in the interplay between land and sea.

Another favorite, ma po tofu ($12), which used to be thick with ground pork, seems to have been reformulated. It now has a greasy broth with too-large cubes of tofu and a one-dimensional heat that masked the earthy shiitake and aged chile sauce.
 

I agree. My recent few deliveries from MIssion Chinese have been so disappointing: the beef in the broccoli beef brisket was overcooked, as were the Chongqing chicken wings. Westlake rice porridge lacked the usual comforting flavor blend of salt and brine. It was just bland. The market greens, which have always been braised baby bok choy for as long as I've been ordering from them, have been successively less and less flavorful, lacking both salt and garlic.

Bauer theorizes the decline in the food quality at Mission Chinese Food may be due to the absence of Danny Bowien from the kitchen. Bowien is off in NYC working on Mission Cantina and searching for a new location for his NYC branch of Mission Chinese Food; the initial location was a hit but was closed by the Department of Health for pest-related issues last November (yikes).

With a much longer commute than I had in LA, a dearth of street parking throughout San Francisco, and the scarcity of good restaurants in SOMA near my apartment, I have come to depend on restaurant delivery for more meals than at any point in my life since my years in NYC.

The SF food delivery scene is, to be blunt, a desert. I'm not counting the possibility of using Postmates to expand the delivery options to include more restaurants that offer takeout; that's a fairly hefty price premium that I hesitate to resort to except when I'm desperate.

Obi Wan Bowien, come back and whip that kitchen into shape! You're our only hope.

The zeitgeist in verbal tics

Blame the English major in me, but at any given time some spoken or written tic causes me to cringe. For a while, it was really common for me to hear people say "I'm wanting to" instead of "I want to." To my relief, that seems to have faded.

The two phrases that I hear so often now, perhaps because they're so common in business settings, are “at the end of the day” and “the reality is.” I'll be in a meeting and hear both phrases used multiple times, everyone one-upping each other with each successive "at the end of the day" or "the reality is," each successive occurrence marching us closer to the true end of the day and some greater version of reality.

When someone drops an "at the end of the day" on you, the presumption, whether explicit or not, is that whatever you've said is not bottom line enough. You haven't been seeing the big picture, you've been in the weeds.

Something similar occurs when someone hurls "the reality is" at you, but it feels worse, doesn't it? What have you been doing, dealing in unreality?

At the end of the day it doesn't matter. But the reality is it does matter. At the end of the day. Not before then. At lunch, just after dinner, but before the day has ended, it doesn't matter. But later, closer to 10pm in your time zone, maybe after you've brushed your teeth and you're about to end your day, then, and just then, it matters a lot.

The rise of the knowledgeables

Over at the Typist, a missive on the future of journalism:

First, as the quoted tweet suggests, this isn’t about whether The Information itself will be successful — financially or journalistically — in the long haul. This is about the model by which it operates, and the major role I think that model will play in the future of journalism.

Secondly, let’s differentiate between journalism and reporting. The latter is only one part — integral as it may be — of the former. I think big organizations will dominate news breaking and reporting for a long time to come. They will still be responsible for the “what,” but less and less for “what does it mean?”. They’ll serve mainly as middlemen of information — an important and nontrivial task in itself — but not much more beyond that.

In the future, we’ll have ‘knowledgeables’.

Knowledgeables won’t “kill” today’s journalists. They will simply supplant them where anything substantially more complicated than a “what” is needed. Nobody is going to go out of business when this happens. In fact, as the separation between reporters and knowledgeables (both journalists) becomes more dichotomous, everyone wins. Everyone wins by doing what they do best. In this case: Journalists deliver, knowledgeables analyze. This is called specialization.

Forming small, self-owned, and single-focus groups, knowledgeables will play a different game than the one news companies are struggling to survive in. To be sustainable, these specialized cells won’t have to break any news, serve a meager diet of ads as content, or deal with every item out there just to feed the hungry ratings machine. They won’t cater to everyone, only to their everyone.
 

I agree with the general sentiment, and the increased returns to specialization in the internet era (maybe Nate Silver should have picked a hedgehog as a logo instead of a fox). Examples of knowledgeables include John Gruber, Bruce Schneier, and Patrick Smith.