Thread by @AnthonyLeeZhang

Train headed towards 5 people, you can redirect it to one person by pulling a switch. Do you pull it?

The bureaucrat: I am not getting anywhere close to that switch. If I don't touch that switch it's someone else's problem. Touch the switch and it becomes my problem

I don't think this is necc the bureaucrats' fault, though. It's mostly incentives.

IMO the difference between a bureaucrat and, say, a CEO or product manager is that the bureaucrat doesn't have any/enough exposure to the upside from his actions

When you think of the FTC/DOJ/SEC/FDA/etc can you think of one single example where they are cast in a good light? Where an innovative policy worked out really well, magazine profiles/interviews of the ppl that built it out?

But sure enough any time they do anything someone's going to be whining about the negative effects, etc. and they bear essentially the full brunt of that

No real surprise that such an incentive system creates

- Bias towards inaction
- Bias towards "rules-based decision-making", which is more easily defensible on paper than discretion. No John McClanes here

Nobody who has the mindset of a Steve Jobs or an Elon Musk would ever want to exist within such a system! And if by some random chance one of these landed in such an institution I doubt they'd get very far

How to fix this? What's causing this problem? Some thoughts...

- A good boss says to his workers "Do this, do your best, I will take responsibility if things go wrong". Upper mgmt can effectively insure/shelter workers from a lot of the blowback. which is important

Suppose we had a system where politicians could step out with regulators and say "I am in favor of this change, if it goes badly, I will take responsibility, deflect as much of the blame as I can for you, and try to absorb the rest". Lots more freedom for regulators then

And of course suppose they actually did it..

The issue here is that politicians seem to have exactly the opposite contract. If a policy goes well they are at least somewhat involved with, they keep much of the upside. If they're good at deflecting they can avoid much downside

And the whole game seems to be become claiming as much credit as you can for upside, away from the regulators who did much of the grunt work, and deflecting as much of the downside as possible to regulators

So part of the issue here IMO is emergent culture. We could have a world in which the equilibrium involved regulators having more publicity/exposure, which would partly fix this perhaps. The fact that they don't, means they don't have the publicity training/etc

And it's not that easy to get into that equilibrium. I wonder how much organizational design could do to fix this though. Perhaps a culture of politicians coming more from regulatory/policymaking arms of govt, which to my knowledge is somewhat rare in America

Perhaps forming pretty closely designated teams of politicians who are effectively assigned upside and downside exposure to policy actions in a way that's harder to dodge, giving regulators some more insurance in a sense

Hard problem. Have some other thoughts about potential solutions but think I'll end the thread here (for now). But IMO the bureaucrats don't deserve all of the blame: at least some should go to the culture, system and incentives that they exist within

Oh, I missed all the revolving door, etc. stuff which of course is another pretty salient feature. Seems also to arguably create bias towards inaction, alongside industry bias. Ride out your term and get a 3x pay raise at a consulting firm

No real point rocking the boat in that case. There just doesn't seem much reward you personally get from making super great policy in America, compared to e.g. making a super great electric car