Responsibility

The 1980s were a painful decade for American Manufacturing. Leveraged buy-outs broke up large conglomerates, as Wall Street found that the value of the pieces were greater than the value of the whole. The Japanese were on a roll, and breathless articles in the press reported that a Japanese worker could stop the assembly line to fix a problem, right then, without asking permission. The Japanese even had a word for the philosophy of building quality products: Monozukuri.

Despite books touting the inevitable superiority of the Japanese method - like The Japan That Can Say 'No' - American companies were mostly up to the challenge. Responsibility - and more importantly, authority - have been pushed down the chain of command to levels undreamed of back in the dark days of 1982. Despite Detroit's current troubles, there's simply no question that today's cars are a much higher quality product than the K-Car.

There's a whole discipline that has grown up around this, which famously goes back to Edward Deming, and less famously back to Henry Ford and the "American Model" of manufacturing. It involves quantitative monitoring of inputs and outputs, and in particular the number of defects.

The critical part of the process is analyzing that measured output, and figuring out how to do better. This becomes the input into an improved plan which will result is better quality - and lower cost - in future production runs.

In other words, it's not a linear process, it's a loop. It doesn't work without everyone involved having the authority that goes with the responsibility.

The lack of any equivalent to this process is the most striking difference between the private sector and the government. In a sense, government structures seem caught in a time warp - like a prehistoric insect frozen in amber, it's a reflection of cutting edge theory from 1912. Centralization rules. The lowest levels have precisely no authority.

This has nothing to do with which party is in power; while they argue over the relative size of government (at least in theory), neither seriously tries to change how the government factory produces its product. The reason is the flip side of responsibility, blame.

A private company is driven by the desire for profit, and so will take calculated risks to increase its bottom line. Some of those risks pay off, and some don't. The Venture Capital industry famously is looking for "Ten Bagger" startups - companies that will return them ten times in profits what was invested. The VC needs this, because most startups fail, taking the entire investment with them.

The people running government agencies can't improve their bottom line - profit isn't the yardstick that they're measured by. Blame is. When I was a wee lad, just starting work at Three Letter Intelligence Agency, they taught me the "Washington Post Rule":

Anything you read in the Washington Post about this Agency, is bad for this Agency.

Government is institutionally risk-adverse, because ultimately it is a political creature. Yes, we all complain about pork spending, but it's not clear that massive pork can win an election; it is clear that massive blame can cost an election.

The result is levels of service that would rapidly drive a private company out of business. Think about the Department of Motor Vehicles, which is not far removed from a Kafka novel. The real reason that the Soviet Union collapsed is not the brutal murder of millions of its people, or the mind rape of the rest, but because the organs of power were too risk adverse to keep up with the West.

Bill Bryson, in his 1991 book Neither here nor there, describes traveling to 1980s Sofia and finding an entire country run by the DMV:

When they opened, most shops posted some beefy sourpus in the doorway who would let customers in one at a time. The shelves were always bare. Things were sold straight out of a crate on the floor by the till, and presumably when the crate was empty the door was locked and the rest of the queue was sent away. I watched one woman come out of a baker's with a small loaf of bread and immediately join another long queue at a bucher's next door. They must have to do this every day with everything they buy. What a life.

The best argument for the left's lack of perception and sophistication is their touching belief that this only happens to other people, in other places. Bulgaria, old chap. What would you expect, eh? Never happen here.

Except it does. The left likes to tell us that we should be more like Europe, with its "Third Way" approach to government-guided progress. So how does that work out?

UK Nurse Suspended for offering to pray for patient.

Having lived in the UK, I can only explain American liberal's support for government health care as being driven by ignorance. The UK press is simply full of this sort of thing, like the time a woman gave birth in a hospital restroom, and the nurses refused to help her:

I first saw this in the Times (Baby's birth and death in lavatory of hospital with no trained staff), but there is a considerably more detailed account in This Is London (Mother forced to give birth alone in toilet of 'flagship' NHS hospital) (A very similar account appeared in the Daily Mail.)

Never happen here.

Really? Is our government less risk adverse than the UK government? More willing to delegate authority down the chain of command? Less inclined to mutter mistakes were made as they turn their faces away from a government-created mess? More willing to create a process loop that continually improves the product?

[Crickets chirping]

Now I don't much trust Tony Blair - NuLabor looks to be screwing up in a big way, but he at least does pose the question to those on the left:

What type of social model is it that has 20 million unemployed in Europe, productivity rates falling behind those of the USA; that is allowing more science graduates to be produced by India than by Europe; and that, on any relative index of a modern economy -- skills, research and development, patents, IT, is going down not up.

A centralized, bureaucratic, top-down relic of the Jurassic, that has an infinite tolerance for mistakes were made excuses, and which lacks any mechanism to self-correct.

A social model that doesn't understand the meaning of monozukiri. Or responsibility.