“This is the new model, where you work in these plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here,” U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick says.
One of my statistics professors at college (this was real statistics, not teaching psych majors how to abuse SPSS) had been a Soviet planner. Along with the problem of fiefdoms (which is common to any large enterprise), there was a problem of measurement. As business-school dweeb will tell you, any metric that becomes an objective ceases to be useful as a metric, since it’ll be gamed.
Now try collecting 10,000 metrics used as goals. Everybody’s lying to the boss in order to look good. Everyone’s got a side hustle because they’re barely paid enough to survive. And the penalties for non-compliance with orders from on high are brutally severe but spottily enforced. Anyone who’s worked under a micromanager will know what this is like. Now imagine when the state is itself a micromanager. From an information-theoretic point of view, the effort to collect and validate the data needed is many times greater than the effort to do the job itself. So it doesn’t get done and quality and resiliency of the production system suffer.
One of my statistics professors at college (this was real statistics, not teaching psych majors how to abuse SPSS) had been a Soviet planner. Along with the problem of fiefdoms (which is common to any large enterprise), there was a problem of measurement. As business-school dweeb will tell you, any metric that becomes an objective ceases to be useful as a metric, since it’ll be gamed.
Now try collecting 10,000 metrics used as goals. Everybody’s lying to the boss in order to look good. Everyone’s got a side hustle because they’re barely paid enough to survive. And the penalties for non-compliance with orders from on high are brutally severe but spottily enforced. Anyone who’s worked under a micromanager will know what this is like. Now imagine when the state is itself a micromanager. From an information-theoretic point of view, the effort to collect and validate the data needed is many times greater than the effort to do the job itself. So it doesn’t get done and quality and resiliency of the production system suffer.