| The fact that President-elect Donald Trump has tapped two businessmen — Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — to lead an advisory commission focused on streamlining government operations suggests that these efficiencies will come from making the government run more like a business. In 2017, when he was a White House adviser, Jared Kushner, who now runs a private equity firm, made a similar pitch that business thinking would help to “achieve successes and efficiencies for our customerslucky 777 casino, who are the citizens.” It’s a popular idea; it’s also a terrible one. Businesses and government do fundamentally different jobs, and efforts at remaking government with an eye to cost-cutting can end in disaster. That’s because a lot of what the government does is hard to quantify and involves complicated tasks that inevitably require bureaucratic coordination and, yes, inefficiency. Businesses often run more efficiently than governments do. So it’s natural to conclude that if only businesspeople were put in charge of public administration, everything would work better — shorter lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles, fewer cost overruns at the Pentagon, service with a smile at airport security. The problem, though, is that business appears more efficient in large part because what it does is usually simpler than what the government does. Take auto glass installation, a classic example among economists because it was well studied by Edward Lazear in the 1990s. It’s a solitary and easy to evaluate activity: A single installer takes care of the job, and it quickly becomes obvious to the car’s owner if the installation is defective. It’s easy, then, to write a contract that compensates an installer based on how many windshields he takes care of each day, without worrying too much about the ill effects of the installer doing shoddy work. Contrast this with, say, the job of preventing terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Catching terrorists is a lot more complex a task than installing a windshield, of course, or even assembling a Tesla automobile. It involves cooperation among many agencies: F.B.I. field offices around the country, local law enforcement, the C.I.A. and other agencies across the Department of Justice and the intelligence community. They need to share information and deploy a range of skills, such as surveilling social media and tracking down and capturing criminals. And if everything is done just right, nothing happens at all. It’s an elaborate job that’s measured by an absence of results, which could be because enforcement authorities are great at what they do or because there wasn’t much risk of attack in the first place. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.lucky 777 casino
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