I'm on record here as a Noah Smith hater, so I will say that he's totally right about this and that's a good post in general. His description of the NEPA process is wrong, though.
to improve contact tracing -- an approach that ultimately proved futile due to hyper-infectious mutations
I thought it was futile from the start in countries like the US because no one was going to commit to doing anything in reaction to the results. Later it became futile because vaccination and prior infection meant infections became more acceptable, so again why bother. But for the small number of isolated (literally) situations where it seemed important to commit to reducing spread, seems like contact tracing actually worked.
I am on the record as a Noah Smith disliker (hatred seems excessive), and my disapproval of his work is again justified by his misinterpretation of Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Smith describes Deirdre Beaubeirdre as "an IRS auditor who hounds the immigrant protagonists mercilessly." But this isn't true at all! Deirdre is exactly the sort of bureaucrat that Smith thinks we need more of: conscientious, and willing to go the extra mile to cut some slack to the careless -- even somewhat crooked -- operators of a laundromat.
So Smith is part of the problem. He buys into the unfavorable stereotypes of government bureaucrats that make "limited government" sound appealing. (Walter Peck was also a conscientious bureaucrat!)
I wonder about the bureaucracy that makes awards that look like butt plugs.
That's every award, if you're adventurous.
hatred seems excessive
Fair enough. I wouldn't say my negative opinion of him is strong enough to qualify as sincere hatred.
But this isn't true at all! Deirdre is exactly the sort of bureaucrat that Smith thinks we need more of: conscientious, and willing to go the extra mile to cut some slack to the careless -- even somewhat crooked -- operators of a laundromat.
True.
so I will say that he's totally right about this and that's a good post in general
I was curious what you would think. Do you agree with Noah Smith that government has done too much outsourcing to non-profits and would be better off bringing some of those functions back in-house?
Do you agree with Noah Smith that government has done too much outsourcing to non-profits and would be better off bringing some of those functions back in-house?
Yeah, I think he's totally right about that point. San Francisco is probably an outlier in this respect so it's a little weird to focus so much on it as an example, but the general point about accountability and perverse incentives is correct and applies everywhere.
He's totally wrong about NEPA, though, which is one of the functions that is still done by the government and already has an army of bureaucrats working on it. The NIMBY lawsuit problem is very real but it comes from the fact that complaints about whether the government's NEPA analysis was sufficient are judicially reviewable. There's not an easy solution to this.
Understaffed government is a big reason California high-speed rail has Xtupled in cost. (In the first several years they outsourced almost all of the design to a contractor which specializes in justifying overruns and suing governments who complain.) There was a recent study about transit construction costs versus staffing, which confirmed my belief on this.
11: Yeah, that's one of the big examples Smith uses in the piece. That type of infrastructure development is not my area but the argument seems very plausible.
Is it better to never build the train because they overinflated costs, or build the train at inflated prices and then find out they couldn't correctly measure how far apart the fucking rails should be?
This was also a good read. BART is responsible for 50 urban rail stations with about 4,000 employees (not sure where the author got 5,000) and runs long delays when a leaf falls on the tracks. Kyiv Metro has 52 stations, 8,000 employees, and kept running trains every 2-3 minutes on peak and 6-7 minutes off-peak when the city was under siege.
(Yes, part of it is just the personnel required to run that many more trains. Still.)
Oh, the study I was thinking of is in the piece too.
I have him muted on twitter but can't remember why, so let me go on the record stating my noöpinion must be that he's generally not worth reading.
The bad guys cried so much about 87,000 IRS agents, though, that I'm fully convinced more government is always the right thing to do.
Definitely need more bureaucrats. This is the solution to nimby suits under NEPA as well: well done documents are going to stand up on review, and well staffed courts are going to be able to make faster rulings.
I'm skeptical that would actually fix the problem, but it certainly couldn't hurt.
I think the solution to NEPA suits is to drastically restrict who has standing to bring them, but that's because I do defense for the government and you work for plaintiffs.
I don't litigate these cases, but the Forest Service keeps losing NEPA cases here because they keep not looking at issues identified by the courts the last time they tried to have a big timber sale. Limiting standing would take care of that, sure, but isn't the correct answer to try to do the analysis right?
(There's a particular issue I have in mind. When you're deciding what kind of impact you're going to have on bears, you look at how many miles of forest roads you have and are adding, where they are, etc. A whole bunch of forest roads have been closed -- they were built for timber sales that are long over. You could assume that none of the closed roads are being used. Or, you could look at the videos of daily use of the closed roads by people using various motor vehicles, helpfully supplied by various environmental organizations, and maybe think you should figure on some additional road use. The Forest Service is bound and determined to go with total denial. I know they've lost on this at least twice in federal court, and suspect maybe a couple more.)
There definitely are cases, and that sounds like it probably is one, where agencies are actually being shady about doing the NEPA analysis and losing in court is the only way to hold them accountable. The more problematic cases, and these may be more about state-level equivalents than NEPA per se, are where bad-faith NIMBY lawsuits are being wielded as tools to block development. No amount of making the documents better can stop that, because it's not about what's actually in the documents. Opponents just oppose the projects and will use whatever tools they have available.
21 Right, well the correct answer for that is for courts to deny preliminary injunctions where the protester hasn't shown likelihood of success on the merits. Better documents ought to make that more likely, and better staffed courts too.
Even with that sort of issue -- I don't know anything about the details of it, but I can see strong institutional reasons not to formally concede that closed roads are being used. As a matter of substance, it sounds like there's no question that the agency is actually aware, so the issue is that NEPA is being used to blackmail the agency to making that concession in public, rather than actually affecting the substantive nature of the environmental review. Is that genuinely the purpose of the law? I don't think it is.
If the agency has repeatedly been told to include this in their environmental analyses and continues to refuse to do so, it sounds like they just don't want to do it. That's not a problem that increased staffing is likely to fix.
I clicked through on the link earlier today but I can't get myself to read Noah Smith now after having decided to completely avoid his opinions when on twitter. If his opinions coincide with mine occasionally, I guess that's good, but I don't think my opinions get any better for knowing Smith's.
Anyway, I have to ask about this: too much outsourcing to non-profits . Is outsourcing to non-profits really different enough in terms of the implications for state capacity to be distinguished from outsourcing in general - such as outsourcing to, uh, non-non-profits*? I assume there are significant differences in the kinds of quasi-governmental functions that non-profits are contracted to do.
*Or whatever those things are called.
Fore profits because they put money first.
Is outsourcing to non-profits really different enough in terms of the implications for state capacity to be distinguished from outsourcing in general - such as outsourcing to, uh, non-non-profits*?
Not really, and Smith presents it as part of the general problem of privatizing government functions, which I think is correct.
2: it seemed futile here because of droplet dogma. The definition of a contact was 15 minutes or more within 6 feet, and there were plenty of people who got it other ways.
It could have been super useful if paired with better support to allow people to isolate. There was a hotel here, but I think there was a lot of mistrust.
13: Oh my God, my blood has been boiling since I heard about that. There's an advocacy organization I've started looking at called Transit Matters, and their vision for rail is so amazing, but it feels like pure fantasy.
Baker the competent manager was always BS.
Over here two organisations close to my heart (the NHS and the Army) are currently showing the important difference between being understaffed (not enough people who do the thing), undercapitalised (not enough buildings and big expensive things), underresourced (not enough consumables) and undermanaged (not enough managers).
The Army is understaffed (and under-resourced) - it simply does not have enough people to run the operations it is expected to run. This is an easy sum to do because there are established minimum manning standards for formations to be considered combat effective, and the Army doesn't hit them. But given its understaffing, it isn't appreciably undermanaged.
The NHS, by contrast, is not actually understaffed. It has considerably more WTE doctors and nurses than it did before the pandemic. It is, however, colossally undermanaged (and undercapitalised) because it is run by morons who read the Daily Mail and who think, or who claim to think, that healthcare consists of throwing doctors at sick people in a muddy field or something until they get healthy. Management doesn't go away when you don't hire managers; it just becomes someone else's job. In this case, clinicians are doing it, and therefore not doing clinician stuff.
Speaking of the IRS, they're starting to actually audit rich (but not ultrafiche) people again.
but not ultrafiche
Their lack of transparency on this is disturbing.
31: In my healthsystem, we say FTE, full-time equivalent. We probably have too many managers and not enough doctors and APPs. Also, the economics of vaccination now mean that we only vaccinate kids and tell everyone else to go to the pharmacy. That's mostly fine but not great for everyone.
34: the King's Fund makes the point that the workforce of a UK private-sector organisation is generally about 15% managers and the NHS is 4.8% managers.
You should try having a considerable workforce that fills out and processes insurance claims.
In my private sector organisation, we definitely don't have enough managers. On paper, I guess, it's something around the 10-12% level, depending who you count as managers. But our work requires a lot of very careful management and the senior managers typically cover multiple roles across multiple projects so they are massively over-stretched most of the time. I'm desperately trying to recruit people that I can delegate management tasks to, but don't have a big enough team to justify (on paper, or financially) having an assistant manager, even though there's actually enough management work for two people to do.
You get the odd know-nothing developer complaining about pointy haired bosses, but they have zero clue what the senior management do most of the time, and the minute some of those managers start delegating their tasks down the chain, the people down the chain complain vociferously, because it's hard, stressful and time-consuming and much more intellectually demanding than just chunking out code.
Yeah, supervising people is horrible if you don't enjoy abuse of power.
Management is also the hardest thing to get clients to pay for, too.
(RANT) They totally understand why they need N software developers and N visual designers to build their thing, they don't understand why they can't just firehose requests at those people and endlessly change their mind (and lie** about changing their mind) about what they want, forever, with no-one in the middle saying, "Fuck off. That's not what was agreed, and if you want to change it, that'll cost $$ and you'll need to push your delivery date back by three months."*
* some clients have fully drunk the Agile Kool-Aid.
** often to themselves. "We clearly have always wanted X". Even when confronted with a document trail of emails and requirements documents clearly stating "Not X".
The people who deal directly with clients get paid more than I do. I don't mind.
They sometimes get a little short with me if I imply their job is to deliver billable hours to me.
I am deeply unhappy with the turn my gov't organization has taken in the last few years-- extra layer of bad managers, fake business language, decaying ability to deal with meaningful change, from basically copy-pasting a contractor's org chart. Potentially not a terrible idea, but with the professional personalities of the people involved, truly unfortunate. Yes I'm trying to leave, but discovering that "not young" is only helpful for managers, and I'd rather work than juggle documents, finagle, and nag.
42 Sorry, Abe. Age discrimination is absolutely epidemic in our society, and no one is really doing anything about it. Other than applauding, I guess.
Management is hard, and I hate the fact that it seems the easiest if not the only path to advancement for me. Every time I complain about my job and look for alternatives, half of what I can find is like my current job but even worse, and the other half is managing people like me.
I'm nominally the lead of a team of 3 technical writers, counting myself. Even that is enough management to get in the way of non-management tasks. Leading more meetings than average, regular and ad hoc reporting on what we do, being the point person for new tasks, etc. Managing a team of just 7 (the size of our team before pandemic-related cutbacks) seems like it would be a full-time job right there. But as bad as managing people is with the need for people skills and stuff, managing projects seems even worse. Prone to responsibility without authority, as Moby put it in a related discussion way back in the Before Time.
All that being said, I feel obligated to point out that "being a manager is hard" is probably literally the most First World Problems discussion ever.
I actually quite like being a manager. It's a much better fit for me than non-management.
It is hard, though, and definitely not a good fit for everyone, including everyone who does it.
if you want to change it, that'll cost $$ and you'll need to push your delivery date back by three months.
This exactly. Any meaningful analysis means a lot of cycles of this, with the complication that some changes that improve outcomes are easy and quick; spotting them and communicating about it requires two-way trust though. Responsibility without authority roles are common, and the easiest defense against that trap is to do very little ("let's set expectations here"). But then there's no way to deal with change because the outside world doesn't stop moving.
A hot take I've had for while: Management is mostly emotional labor, which is why women are generally better at it than men.
48: 100% agree. My own bosses claim to understand this, and have hilariously bad ideas about how that labor is conducted. (The key being that it's an individualized, personal process, and not something that arises out of "company policy" or whatever.)
My own hot take is that middlemen are always underappreciated, and managers are middlemen -- mediating among various priorities and bringing people together who have different agendas.
Since Jenna Elfman pled guilty, maybe it's time for a thread about the Trump trials?
Yes, I admit I was in Dharma & Greg, but no legal action resulted.
Sure, I've made some mistakes, but at least I was never in Dharma & Greg.
"Management is mostly emotional labor"
In the sense that it involves working with people and being interested in their feelings, yes. In the sense that it involves actual emotional labour, no.
Being interested in feelings is labor.
Obviously, less labor if it isn't your own feelings. But still labor.
I'm curious about your definition of emotional labor. Off the top of my head, in the context of management I'd say it involves: Understanding people's needs and being responsive to them, even when they have trouble articulating those needs themselves -- and especially when you can't give them what they want; facilitating cooperation between people who have different ideas about how to get a job done; accepting direct insults with equanimity; delivering bad news; accommodating physical and mental illness; mediating disputes between well-meaning people; mediating disputes between assholes; teaching.
That's what comes to mind. Would it make more sense to you if the original phrasing was "Good management is mostly emotional labor"?
58.1 is a good rundown of the sorts of things I had in mind as emotional labor in this context. It's not the entire job (there's also paperwork and so forth) but it's most of it.
Is outsourcing to non-profits really different enough in terms of the implications for state capacity to be distinguished from outsourcing in general - such as outsourcing to, uh, non-non-profits*?
To be clear, I'm reflexively against outsourcing of all kinds, but I do think there's a clear distinction between the two cases. If the government needs something done that for-profit companies do as a matter of course, and it's something the gov't doesn't need/do often enough to justify having full time staff, then it makes perfect sense to outsource--large scale capital projects are sort of the classic example, as very few levels of gov't do those often enough for it to make any sense to do in-house. Maintenance, OTOH, is something that always needs to be done, and for the most part there's no reason to contract it out (maybe there's an acute need, like a lot of landslides in one wet year).
Nonprofits, OTOH, should mostly exist to fill gaps that are essentially outside the purview of gov't. I suppose religious groups are the perfect example of that, but there's also room for causes and individual visions for doing good. But if a nonprofit is doing work such that it can contract with the gov't to do it... that just sounds like it should be a gov't program. Especially since a lot of it is sort of intermediating with various agencies*--why wouldn't that be a public employee? The need isn't going away, there's no particular reason for that expertise to reside outside the gov't, etc.
Point being, I see even less room on the nonprofit side for replacing public capacity.
*eg a social services person who helps the homeless connect to agencies & providers. Really nothing about that job suggests it shouldn't be a civil servant
You know what also ties into this? The insane maze of peanut-grants that nonprofits scramble for.
One of my good friends works with nonprofits targeting parents with babies-3 yr olds. She describes how they'll do a massive needs assessment and come up with a five year plan. But a huge number of grants get cranky if you say, "Here's our five year plan, and we'd like you to fund this bullet point." They want you to do a needs assessment just for them, and they want to be the sole solution for your problem. It's almost like the kind of dumb stroking you have to do for donors' egos, except these are neutral grants that are supposed to be facilitating the work of the nonprofit. It sounds super infuriating.
Contracting with a non-profit gets government access to the labor pool of underpaid non-profit workers.
55-58: I think the original definition of emotional labor was more like service industry stuff: baristas smiling charmingly at customers; bartenders flirting with barflies for tips; faking a particular emotional response for money. And there is an aspect of management that is kind of like that: as a manager I do a lot of (a) stifling my spontaneous emotional response to whatever demented insanity my more outré subordinates have come up with and (b) being demonstratively delighted with acceptable work product. This isn't that difficult, and it's a useful and meaningful part of my job, but it is related to the service industry-style emotional stuff.
64: I thought it originated in heterosexual marriages where the women had to manage all the social/feeling stuff.
62 and 63: The Commonwealth of MA does not allow its employees to use their personal vehicles to transport patients at state hospitals. It does however have contracts with non profits who have staff working at said hospitals who are required to use their personal vehicle to transport people.
Well, sure, why should the state accept that kind of liability when it can be fobbed off on a much smaller and less financially secure entity?
65: I think it was originally defined as a term meaning work in the paid workforce that incorporates an aspect of emotional performance, and the relationship/intrafamily use of the term was a later expansion that took off on the Internet.
We've had this discussion here before, a whole front page post IIRC. I'd dig it up but I'm withholding my emotional labor.
64: also managing the customer's emotions (airline attendant dealing with angry customers.). The expansion into "mom is the project manager of the family" sense is much later.
My recollection matches BG's -- that this entered the public lexicon as a discussion of women's uncredited work. Here's a front-page post on emotional labor.
The post links this piece.
I have no idea who the Swedish guy was. I remember the German.
The Concept Creep of 'Emotional Labor' - The Atlantic | archive
By way of being annoying, I did an NGram search to see when the term 'emotional labour' gained currency, and how it was used. Which led me to Hochschild 1983, and then from there, to the wiki article on the same topic (and I'd have myself time if I'd just gone to wiki first).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_labor
64 and 71 are correct.
I remembered that "affective labor" was a separate idea, but it seems like the concept creep has overwhelmed it a bit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affective_labor
71: nit do mych project manager for the family but husband's unpaid therapist. Expected to manage his feelings without getting the same care in return.
Helpful rubrics from 75: Psychological First Aid, Compartments and Closets, Crazy Calm, Humor, and Common Sense Too bad that tags to make these different flashing colors are not implemented.
I'm a little annoyed because both Pebbles and shiv need eyeglasses, and so they need an appointment, and so I scheduled their appointments back to back, in part because he has been in denial about his middle-aged lack of vision , and now I'm hearing that they will go to the appointment but not order the glasses because Pebbles might choose the wrong frames and couldn't I just pick out the glasses on Saturday when the entire point of this exercise in scheduling was to keep from having to do this piecemeal on the weekend.
Also she's seven, Costco has three frames that will fit her and one of them is pink. This is not a hard decision! I did not ship with factory settings enabling me to adult.
*Yes, I know about Zenni etc.
I'm going hiking tomorrow. If you read that someone gets eaten by a bear this week, it's probably me.
Maybe, after all these years, it turns out that you are the bear. Have you ever really seen yourself?
Does Moby poop in the woods? The question answers itself.
NMM to Mike Pence's [residential campaign.
How much less necessary could that utterance be to utter? None. None less necessary.
I held it until I was back at the deli.
"Update: no bears seen."
(Chuckles drily) if you saw them, major... they weren't Apache.
||
Decolonization continues.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/russia-proposed-oil-supplies-azerbaijan-via-baku-tikhoretsk-pipeline-2023-10-13/
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