The first was an NPR piece on a public teaching hospital in Haiti, touted as a model for aid programs. My ears perked up and I listened carefully as they described the low cost ($16M+$4M+ in kind) and the facilities (fiber optic, 6 surgery theaters, etc) and how they hoped this would help keep Haitian doctors and nurses from decamping to the US. I'm still missing something here... Did they use local labor? The reporter compared other "less successful" projects (cholera treatment is still in tents, government palace is still waiting demolition, etc), and ended with a devastating stinger as a throw-away line: The Haitian government doesn't have a budget item for operating expenses.
So no, it is not a model for aid programs. We've seen this many times before, and it does not end well.
The next story was on student protests in Morocco. College graduates have organized daily demonstrations demanding government jobs. Morocco has the usual bloated and useless government bureaucracy, but faced with the protests officials often give in and create a few new positions. The leaders keep lists of who shows up to protest every day, and only the devoted regulars are on the list submitted to the government. Did I mention that nobody really wants to work in the private sector when government jobs are lifetime and perk-filled?
It sounds like a kind of extortion that rewards noisy jerks, but one thing the government gets out of it is a list of people who know how to show up for work every day...
The astute reader will notice that I have to rely on a modicum of integrity in reporting. Prior knowledge told me what to look for in the report on aid projects and left me with red flags when information was missing. Anyone with any experience with planning (even us peons) knows how to interpret the confession at the end. But suppose that last vital comment about the budget had been left off? This little story would have been added to my mosaic picture of the world with the little tag "not enough information". But that little tag isn't isn't easy to remember a year later, and I'd be left with a prettier image of Haiti than I ought to have. And news reports regularly lack those critical little details.
From an economic point of view, the difference between private-sector and public-sector jobs is so stark that it's a shame we use the same word for both and conflate the statistics.
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't have to be so stark.
ReplyDeleteWe hire people to keep the snow plowed off the city streets. That is ordinary maintenance, not much different from hiring janitors to keep a building clean.
We've got some good DMV offices in Madison, where they try to be efficient at making sure you're qualified to drive and then taking care of registration details quickly: doing tasks we all want them to be doing. I've gotten far worse service from bureaucrats at the phone company.
The problems come with the sinecures and the unwarranted regulation and disproportionate enforcement. The public health and safety are at risk with incompetent drivers, but why should a hair stylist have to be licensed?
It's not that the public sector jobs are bad, or that they don't fulfill a need, or even that they shouldn't be handled by the public sector. It's that they're irrelevant to the growth of the economy, or even a drag on it. They shouldn't ever be confused with private sector jobs from that point of view. They're a luxury that the private sector's health supports.
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