Difference between peacetime and wartime

Military operations are, arguably, especially mistake-prone, because militaries aren’t like other organizations. A normal bureaucracy has a job, and it does that job all the time. Militaries, on the other hand, tend to spend most of their time not really engaged in their main purpose: fighting wars.

Teles noted James Q. Wilson’s observation about the fundamental difference between a peacetime army and a wartime army. In peacetime, it’s easy to observe inputs but impossible to observe the output -- which is to say, how ready your troops are to go out and kick some enemy butt on the battlefield. When you get into a war, this completely reverses. In the chaos of battle, it’s very difficult to know exactly what your people are doing. On the other hand, it’s relatively easy to observe whether they killed the people they were supposed to kill and took the territory they were supposed to take.

That means that the people who advance in a peacetime army are, unfortunately, not necessarily the same people you want around when the shooting breaks out.
 

Megan McArdle on why armies mess up so often. I liked this quote from Steven Teles, “In wartime, you want people who would rather ask for forgiveness than permission. In the peacetime army, it’s the opposite.”

The same applies to companies. Being in wartime is very different from being in peacetime, from the CEO level on down. Ben Horowitz writes nicely about the difference for CEO's in his great book The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

Monetizing what's scarce

One school of economic thought says that the price of goods or services should eventually drop down to the marginal cost of production, but of course there are many exceptions to that rule. A better rule is that the price of a good is whatever the market will bear, and value is quite a malleable concept.

One place where supply and demand has held up quite well is in the world of journalism where the internet has lowered the cost of distributing writing so that many folks who in a past life would have needed to admission into the journalism cartel to get an audience can now find many readers without having to work for the NYTimes or other big brand names.

As a result, more and more people have had to turn to monetizing what is truly scarce. For musicians, recorded music is easily digitized and not scarce. The value they derive from that is now negligible. What is scarce is seeing them perform live, so concert tickets continue to shoot up in price, with seats near the front of the stage, the scarcest of inventory, routinely costing upwards of $1,000 a ticket for premium acts like Jay-Z.

The scarcest resource of all is a person's time. We all have only so much of it. More and more we see notable folks monetizing their time directly. Slate + includes, among its benefits, “exclusive access to your favorite Slate writers and editors.” The brilliant Ben Thompson of the must-read Stratechery has a new membership program in which the top tier includes email access to Ben. Consider so many Kickstarter projects and how many of the perks for the highest pledge tiers involve meeting with someone in person.

Of course, this is a practice that is quite old: consider the political fundraiser, in which a presidential candidate can charge tens of thousands of dollars for a table at a dinner. Pledge enough and maybe he or she will shake your hand, take a photo with you. However, in the age of the internet, where scarcity has been reduced in so many areas, I expect we'll see more and more notables turning to direct monetization of one of the scarcest of commodities they can offer: their time.

This May Hurt a Bit

Did you know that many surgeons play music during operations? It was going so smoothly that we were humming along to “Who Says You Can’t Go Home?” It was during the bridge of the song that your blood pressure suddenly dropped. The anesthesiologist called it out. I looked at the monitor and saw numbers flashing in red.

There was a lot of red, actually. Blood in the wound, blood in the suction container, blood in transfusion bags, bloody footprints on the floor. No more than with any other patient. But I think somewhere along the way I learned to take the sight of liters of blood for granted.

I was scared. I stopped watching them stitch and stared at the monitor, which suddenly seemed like my closest connection to you. They called out the medications they were giving you to raise your blood pressure.

After a few minutes, it worked. Your blood pressure slowly climbed to green numbers. I was still shaking as I silently willed the numbers to stop bouncing around.

But the numbers stubbornly drifted down. Even though they were keeping up with the fluids. Even though you were on medications that force your blood vessels to clamp down and your heart to beat harder.

The red returned and was unrelenting. Your blood pressure was too low, your heart rate too high, the tracing of your heart rhythm irregular and non-shockable.

“We can be done in ten minutes,” the surgeons said.

I’ve never seen surgeons work so fast. They’re usually so particular about their stitches, getting the perfect angle and length for each one.

I’ve also never seen so many anesthesiologists at the head of an operating table.

I’ve never seen an ICU bed booked so quickly.

I’ve never seen someone lose their carotid pulse.
 

From Shara Yurkiewicz, a fourth-year student at Harvard Medical School, at her blog This May Hurt a Bit at Scientific American.

I Never Learn

Really love this new album from Lykke Li.

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.