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FiftyTwo comments on Politics Discussion Thread August 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (166)
My understanding is that US insurance companies pay for some treatments but not others depending on the cost of the insurance?
True. The times where this would be relevant tend to be questions of "should we treat illness X", often 'photogenic' illnesses get disproportionately treated (e.g. breast cancer). But I would imagine similar issues exist in terms of customer demand and legislators forcing insurers to pay for treatments (which you mentioned above). Also, given the choice between a mild bias to popularity and a heavy one to wealth in spending distribution I thought have thought the former would have better outcomes.
General infrastructure planning tends to be decided on long term efficiency as its not a day to day political issue.
Possibly, but the dead don't tend to pay taxes, I would imagine other than in the very last stages of life a living citizen is more valuable than a dead one.
Interestingly the NHS spends a lot of money on people in the final stages of their lives, while they could save a lot money by legalising or enforcing euthanasia, so that seems a counterexample.
What planet do you live on?
Neither do retirees. Furthermore, anyone with a chronic illness, or anyone who isn't rich for that matter, is a net drain on finances. But this analysis implicitly assumes that governments are run to maximize revenue which is blatantly false, at best some department might have a fixed budget and might try to figure out how to spend it to maximize some metric.
Being that explicit about it would loose them votes; however, at the margin such things do happen.
This is never a convincing argument...
Neither is the raw assertion it was responding to.
You could easily have said something like, "this is not obvious, please provide the evidence which caused you to believe it." FiftyTwo's statement required support, but yours sounded mindkilled. And even if your mind isn't, that sort of statement will make it extremely difficult for an average person to continue having a productive dialog with you.
I'm remembering why we avoid political discussions. Questioning my credibility is not a counter argument.
At its most simple organisations with a set of goals they have to achieve and which know their budget in the future will tend to minimise the cost at which they achieve those goals, so they can either save that money for the future or spend it on secondary goals. Additionally goals can be set on the basis of improvements in efficiency etc.
Unfortunately, the goals of the organization do not necessarily align with the goals of the people running the organization, and the larger the organization, the worse this problem becomes.
Or as Jerry Pournelle put it in his iron law of buerocracy
Why should I believe this is a law? Could you give me a theoretical or empirical argument supporting its universal validity?
Theoretical argument: Those who spend time working on the actual goals of the organization, have less time to spend on the political and signaling games over who gets into positions of power.
Also, here are two examples from Pournelle's blog: 1 2. And one of my favorite examples comes form this TJ Rogers speech, (also seriously read the whole thing).
Thanks, I'll read through that speech when I have the time. The example you quote doesn't seem to be an instance of the law, though. The Office of the Surgeon General and the Dept. of Agriculture aren't run by the same people, so the fact that they support conflicting policies isn't really evidence that the people running them aren't working for the goals for their respective organizations. The organizations might just have conflicting goals. It's also unclear to me how the two examples on Pournelle's blog (especially the second) are good evidence for the law. Pournelle seems to be interpreting the law to mean something like "Bureaucracies do wasteful and counterproductive things", but that's not what the law says.
More broadly though, Pournelle's law seems to assume that working to further the goals of the organization and working for the organization itself are always incompatible. That's plausible in the example he gave, involving education, but I don't think it's generally true. Often a very effective way to further the goals of a bureaucratic organization is to bolster the political clout and prestige of the organization itself.
Depending on how far up the chain you go. Also FiftyTwo was trying to argue that the people providing health services will include future tax revenue in the set of things they seek to maximize.
True, assuming you ever actually get around to furthering your goals. Unfortunately, if you optimize your organization too much for obtaining political clout and prestige it will be hard to shift to accomplishing your goals.