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People often attribute the government's inability to solve a problem even after throwing billions of dollars at it; as a sign of incompetence. While there is pl

People often attribute the government's inability to solve a problem even after throwing billions of dollars at it; as a sign of incompetence. While there is plenty of incompetence within government; I think the 'Preserve the Problem' response is mostly to blame. If we 'solved' crime, homelessness, drug use, poverty, etc.; then budgets would decrease and political power would diminish. Those in charge of solving the problem often have the least incentive to do so.

grim_io 2mo ago
Big Pharma is trying to preserve cancer. Wake up sheeple!
- edoceo 2mo ago
  Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’ https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patie...
  - izacus 2mo ago
    Famously, a pharma company.
  - wat10000 2mo ago
    That report proposed three pretty reasonable approaches to this problem, and none of them were "avoid curing diseases."
  - jryle70 2mo ago
    They asked a tough question that needs to be addressed. It's as necessary as "is there a place for assisted suicide?" question. They proposed 1) Address large markets; 2) Address disorders with high incidence; and 3) Constant innovation and portfolio expansion. Does that sound like to you they proposed not curing patients?
- oatmeal1 2mo ago
  Not quite, but big pharma promotes preventive screening in excess of what is justified. They don't care if false positives create stress and unnecessary, dangerous procedures that eliminate the benefit of screening. They just want to make sure before you die they get a chance to sell their most expensive drugs.
have_faith 2mo ago
Does anyone within the system genuinely feel threatened by the idea that something like "crime" can be "solved" to the point that they're avoiding solving too much crime? Same logic for the others.
- dmitrygr 2mo ago
  A LOT of crime can be solved. A huge percentage of perps are multi-repeat perps. Putting them away permanently would solve a lot of crime. "75% to 83% of released prisoners are arrested for a new crime" https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/2018-update-prisoner-recidivism-9-year-follow-period-2005-2014 https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/2018-update-prisone...
  - tchalla 2mo ago
    … in the US
    - skinfaxi 2mo ago
      Yes, kind of obvious from the .gov right?
      - numeri 2mo ago
        I read the comment you're replying to as saying, "in the US, but other countries may have different policies that result in lower recidivism, and that might change the conclusion; maybe people aren't inherently criminally insane, but can become useful members of society, if given a chance"
        deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
        skinfaxi 2mo ago
        While I think your interpretation is possibly overly charitable, I agree my comment was unwarranted and unnecessary. I can't delete it at this point.
MattGrommes 2mo ago
I'm genuinely curious about even a hypothetical more detailed example of how some group would go about preserving a problem like homelessness, even unintentionally. I can't wrap my mind about how it would actually happen beyond simplistic sayings. I live in Portland, OR where we have a large homeless problem and I continually hear that the groups being given money to help are incentivized to keep homelessness high for their own purposes. Like, obviously people who are paid like to keep getting paid but how would they go about making this happen when their job is the opposite?
- treis 2mo ago
  You start by fixing the problem of people sleeping on benches and in tents. Then you go to those in cars, then those crashing on a couch, then those living 8 to a house, then families with small places, and so on. What the problem is keeps expanding until the resources allocated to it are spent.
  - jerlam 2mo ago
    Often, the homeless programs provide aid to the homeless with food and clothing and health care, not necessarily to make them not homeless. It is much harder and expensive for homeless programs to create shelters or homes. It is also difficult if not illegal to force people into housing.
  - MyHonestOpinon 2mo ago
    In your example, (it seem to me that) is not that the problems is expanding (getting worst) but it is reaching (helping) more people.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    But they're not even doing that. It's not the case that tents and benches have been solved and the definition expanded. There are still people sleeping on benches and in tents - more than ever before.
- SoftTalker 2mo ago
  In the homelessness example, it's not so much that the programs and groups want to justify their continued existence (though that might be happening too). It's that the programs themselves incentivize more of the problem. When they give things to homeless people, such as food, shelter, clothes, social services, even needles and a "safe place" to get high in some cases, and often with few or no conditions, they make being homeless more tolerable. Word gets around, and people who could not feasibly be homeless where they are are drawn to Portland because they will get more support there.
foolswisdom 2mo ago
While preserving problems is undoubtedly a natural incentive, I think Hanlon's razor applies here. Just today I was reading Competent Bureaucracy - Rebuilding State Capacity (<https://cdn.sanity.io/files/d8lrla4f/staging/cf7eedaf5d21d2746030c5b0599338fceef5ed4c.pdf https://cdn.sanity.io/files/d8lrla4f/staging/cf7eedaf5d21d27...>) on the topic of agency structure promoting success (the author has done a nice amount of work in the past - e.g. https://www.statecapacitance.pub https://www.statecapacitance.pub into this history of this topic).
- wombatpm 2mo ago
  Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: every organization has two groups of people. The first group cares about the organization's main goal. The second group cares about the organization itself. Group two always wins, takes control, and writes the rules. So NGO’s go from combating homelessness to being the organization about homelessness. I sometimes think organizations should be set up with hard end dates. At which point the organization is disbanded and resources redistributed. If the problem still exists a new ord should be created with a new scope and new timeline.
  - edoceo 2mo ago
    Simply: the Bureaucracy exists to perpetuate the Bureaucracy.
  - cwmoore 2mo ago
    I am not aware of any real tests of effectiveness of these organizations, but I am a huge proponent of progressive UBI so that the systems might actually serve people with chronic or recurring need and not simply being dragged along. What we do as a democracy is cede the status quo to paternalistically penalizing the poor out of contention, and is pretty ethically corrupted bh it’s own effectiveness.
yongjik 2mo ago
The interesting twist is: now what does that tell us about people who say they will cut the waste of government incompetence?
HPsquared 2mo ago
It becomes a "problem farming" situation. Someone who profits from a problem existing, will work to preserve the problem either consciously or unconsciously, or perhaps even just through a process of evolution. This applies to both public and private spheres. Just as justice systems farm criminals, dating apps farm romantically frustrated people and so on.
al_borland 2mo ago
Problems like those don’t just get “solved” one time. They require ongoing maintenance to keep levels low/manageable. If that isn’t understood by those in government, I would say that is a level of incompetence. This can play out in a couple ways. People can avoid solving the problem, because they think at that point the work is done forever. This is incorrect. People can also be scared (for good reason) that whoever is in charge will mistakenly assume no maintenance is needed after “solving” a problem and let everyone go. This would be incompetence in leadership. I see both of these things play out on a smaller scale at work all the time. We keep solving the same problems, because ever time it’s “solved” people move on to new projects the upkeep falls behind, and the problem grows again.
- DrScientist 2mo ago
  Indeed. You could go even further and say that the modern Western preference for whack-a-mole politics rather than long term competence is one of the reasons that countries like China is on the rise.
skipants 2mo ago
Am I wrong in thinking this comment is absolutely bonkers? It's basically a conspiracy theory. When I lead teams and thought of how to motivate them to get certain things done, like code quality, I found it best to frame why certain things got done as a mixture of constraints and incentives. ie. What was preventing people from doing a thing and what motivated them to do thing. You're basically arguing that there's no constraints to these problems and that people are incentivized to proliferate them. Do you distrust people that much? Isn't it easier to surmise that there could be a lot of constraints and not a lot of incentives to solve these issues? Or heck... just a shit ton of constraints than incentives? I mean... there are people who are incentivized to keep drug use going: drug dealers and kingpins. And I'm sure there are some with their hand in governments. But there's no way that's the default.
- fwip 2mo ago
  Yeah, it's a little bonkers. I've run into it a few times IRL, and I find that it tends to come from the kind of guy mocked in this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/ That is, somebody who is basically unfamiliar with the subtleties of the problem, thinks of an "obvious solution" for it, and then assumes that anybody who doesn't do it isn't trying to solve it.
QuiDortDine 2mo ago
Possibly the dumbest take I've ever seen on HN. Like politicians are going "without the homeless, I won't have anything to do anymore!". Like the street workers are thinking "shit, what'll I do if this goldmine dries up"? Ridiculous.
Ferret7446 2mo ago
It's just an incentive problem. If the people in the government would get fired or lose their personal income if they did not deliver results, then they would be effective like you wouldn't believe. As it is, they're spending other people's money on other people's problems with effectively no accountability.
galaxyLogic 2mo ago
3 groups are suspect: Doctors, Police and Firemen. If they did their job well, they would have no job. Politicians too, by having big problems they guarantee they can get people to vote for them by promising to solve those problems. But people are getting smart to that. The Who said it well: We won't get fooled again. Doctors have their Hippocratic oath. Do police and firemen have something similar, or don't they need it?
- childintime 2mo ago
  Why stop at them? Lawyers, politicians, psychologist, bookkeepers, the list goes on and on. Why? Because our GDP includes them. Look the numbers are higher. It doesn't matter if your work promotes a parasitic outcome. The system produces it's own problems and then diligently works to solve them... Yeah, right.
brabel 2mo ago
> If we 'solved' crime, homelessness, drug use, poverty, etc.; Crime is really hard to solve, but many cities in the USA and elsewhere have managed to largely do it. Homelessness is something I think is very much an American problem among developed nations. It’s always shocking to see the campgrounds in American cities, some of the richest in the world, coming from Europe. I suspect it’s mostly related to drug abuse and the lack of social assistance for those in need which the Americans are allergic to solving due to the culture of freedom, or autonomy at all costs (which somehow gets interpreted as not having to pay taxes to help those in need).

grim_io 2mo ago

Big Pharma is trying to preserve cancer. Wake up sheeple!

edoceo 2mo ago
Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’ https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patie...
- izacus 2mo ago
  Famously, a pharma company.
- wat10000 2mo ago
  That report proposed three pretty reasonable approaches to this problem, and none of them were "avoid curing diseases."
- jryle70 2mo ago
  They asked a tough question that needs to be addressed. It's as necessary as "is there a place for assisted suicide?" question. They proposed 1) Address large markets; 2) Address disorders with high incidence; and 3) Constant innovation and portfolio expansion. Does that sound like to you they proposed not curing patients?
oatmeal1 2mo ago
Not quite, but big pharma promotes preventive screening in excess of what is justified. They don't care if false positives create stress and unnecessary, dangerous procedures that eliminate the benefit of screening. They just want to make sure before you die they get a chance to sell their most expensive drugs.

have_faith 2mo ago

Does anyone within the system genuinely feel threatened by the idea that something like "crime" can be "solved" to the point that they're avoiding solving too much crime? Same logic for the others.

dmitrygr 2mo ago
A LOT of crime can be solved. A huge percentage of perps are multi-repeat perps. Putting them away permanently would solve a lot of crime. "75% to 83% of released prisoners are arrested for a new crime" https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/2018-update-prisoner-recidivism-9-year-follow-period-2005-2014 https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/2018-update-prisone...
- tchalla 2mo ago
  … in the US
  - skinfaxi 2mo ago
    Yes, kind of obvious from the .gov right?
    - numeri 2mo ago
      I read the comment you're replying to as saying, "in the US, but other countries may have different policies that result in lower recidivism, and that might change the conclusion; maybe people aren't inherently criminally insane, but can become useful members of society, if given a chance"
      - deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
      - skinfaxi 2mo ago
        While I think your interpretation is possibly overly charitable, I agree my comment was unwarranted and unnecessary. I can't delete it at this point.

MattGrommes 2mo ago

I'm genuinely curious about even a hypothetical more detailed example of how some group would go about preserving a problem like homelessness, even unintentionally. I can't wrap my mind about how it would actually happen beyond simplistic sayings. I live in Portland, OR where we have a large homeless problem and I continually hear that the groups being given money to help are incentivized to keep homelessness high for their own purposes. Like, obviously people who are paid like to keep getting paid but how would they go about making this happen when their job is the opposite?

treis 2mo ago
You start by fixing the problem of people sleeping on benches and in tents. Then you go to those in cars, then those crashing on a couch, then those living 8 to a house, then families with small places, and so on. What the problem is keeps expanding until the resources allocated to it are spent.
- jerlam 2mo ago
  Often, the homeless programs provide aid to the homeless with food and clothing and health care, not necessarily to make them not homeless. It is much harder and expensive for homeless programs to create shelters or homes. It is also difficult if not illegal to force people into housing.
- MyHonestOpinon 2mo ago
  In your example, (it seem to me that) is not that the problems is expanding (getting worst) but it is reaching (helping) more people.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  But they're not even doing that. It's not the case that tents and benches have been solved and the definition expanded. There are still people sleeping on benches and in tents - more than ever before.
SoftTalker 2mo ago
In the homelessness example, it's not so much that the programs and groups want to justify their continued existence (though that might be happening too). It's that the programs themselves incentivize more of the problem. When they give things to homeless people, such as food, shelter, clothes, social services, even needles and a "safe place" to get high in some cases, and often with few or no conditions, they make being homeless more tolerable. Word gets around, and people who could not feasibly be homeless where they are are drawn to Portland because they will get more support there.

foolswisdom 2mo ago

While preserving problems is undoubtedly a natural incentive, I think Hanlon's razor applies here. Just today I was reading Competent Bureaucracy - Rebuilding State Capacity (<https://cdn.sanity.io/files/d8lrla4f/staging/cf7eedaf5d21d2746030c5b0599338fceef5ed4c.pdf https://cdn.sanity.io/files/d8lrla4f/staging/cf7eedaf5d21d27...>) on the topic of agency structure promoting success (the author has done a nice amount of work in the past - e.g. https://www.statecapacitance.pub https://www.statecapacitance.pub into this history of this topic).

wombatpm 2mo ago
Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: every organization has two groups of people. The first group cares about the organization's main goal. The second group cares about the organization itself. Group two always wins, takes control, and writes the rules. So NGO’s go from combating homelessness to being the organization about homelessness. I sometimes think organizations should be set up with hard end dates. At which point the organization is disbanded and resources redistributed. If the problem still exists a new ord should be created with a new scope and new timeline.
- edoceo 2mo ago
  Simply: the Bureaucracy exists to perpetuate the Bureaucracy.
- cwmoore 2mo ago
  I am not aware of any real tests of effectiveness of these organizations, but I am a huge proponent of progressive UBI so that the systems might actually serve people with chronic or recurring need and not simply being dragged along. What we do as a democracy is cede the status quo to paternalistically penalizing the poor out of contention, and is pretty ethically corrupted bh it’s own effectiveness.

yongjik 2mo ago

The interesting twist is: now what does that tell us about people who say they will cut the waste of government incompetence?

HPsquared 2mo ago

It becomes a "problem farming" situation. Someone who profits from a problem existing, will work to preserve the problem either consciously or unconsciously, or perhaps even just through a process of evolution. This applies to both public and private spheres. Just as justice systems farm criminals, dating apps farm romantically frustrated people and so on.

al_borland 2mo ago

Problems like those don’t just get “solved” one time. They require ongoing maintenance to keep levels low/manageable. If that isn’t understood by those in government, I would say that is a level of incompetence. This can play out in a couple ways. People can avoid solving the problem, because they think at that point the work is done forever. This is incorrect. People can also be scared (for good reason) that whoever is in charge will mistakenly assume no maintenance is needed after “solving” a problem and let everyone go. This would be incompetence in leadership. I see both of these things play out on a smaller scale at work all the time. We keep solving the same problems, because ever time it’s “solved” people move on to new projects the upkeep falls behind, and the problem grows again.

DrScientist 2mo ago
Indeed. You could go even further and say that the modern Western preference for whack-a-mole politics rather than long term competence is one of the reasons that countries like China is on the rise.

skipants 2mo ago

Am I wrong in thinking this comment is absolutely bonkers? It's basically a conspiracy theory. When I lead teams and thought of how to motivate them to get certain things done, like code quality, I found it best to frame why certain things got done as a mixture of constraints and incentives. ie. What was preventing people from doing a thing and what motivated them to do thing. You're basically arguing that there's no constraints to these problems and that people are incentivized to proliferate them. Do you distrust people that much? Isn't it easier to surmise that there could be a lot of constraints and not a lot of incentives to solve these issues? Or heck... just a shit ton of constraints than incentives? I mean... there are people who are incentivized to keep drug use going: drug dealers and kingpins. And I'm sure there are some with their hand in governments. But there's no way that's the default.

fwip 2mo ago
Yeah, it's a little bonkers. I've run into it a few times IRL, and I find that it tends to come from the kind of guy mocked in this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/ That is, somebody who is basically unfamiliar with the subtleties of the problem, thinks of an "obvious solution" for it, and then assumes that anybody who doesn't do it isn't trying to solve it.

QuiDortDine 2mo ago

Possibly the dumbest take I've ever seen on HN. Like politicians are going "without the homeless, I won't have anything to do anymore!". Like the street workers are thinking "shit, what'll I do if this goldmine dries up"? Ridiculous.

Ferret7446 2mo ago

It's just an incentive problem. If the people in the government would get fired or lose their personal income if they did not deliver results, then they would be effective like you wouldn't believe. As it is, they're spending other people's money on other people's problems with effectively no accountability.

galaxyLogic 2mo ago

3 groups are suspect: Doctors, Police and Firemen. If they did their job well, they would have no job. Politicians too, by having big problems they guarantee they can get people to vote for them by promising to solve those problems. But people are getting smart to that. The Who said it well: We won't get fooled again. Doctors have their Hippocratic oath. Do police and firemen have something similar, or don't they need it?

childintime 2mo ago
Why stop at them? Lawyers, politicians, psychologist, bookkeepers, the list goes on and on. Why? Because our GDP includes them. Look the numbers are higher. It doesn't matter if your work promotes a parasitic outcome. The system produces it's own problems and then diligently works to solve them... Yeah, right.

brabel 2mo ago

> If we 'solved' crime, homelessness, drug use, poverty, etc.; Crime is really hard to solve, but many cities in the USA and elsewhere have managed to largely do it. Homelessness is something I think is very much an American problem among developed nations. It’s always shocking to see the campgrounds in American cities, some of the richest in the world, coming from Europe. I suspect it’s mostly related to drug abuse and the lack of social assistance for those in need which the Americans are allergic to solving due to the culture of freedom, or autonomy at all costs (which somehow gets interpreted as not having to pay taxes to help those in need).