@Alon @ddayen i think we all agree with this. but overpaid, 50-first-date consultants aren’t what the everything-bagel progressivists critique. somehow it’s not the actors who have, in real life, successfully grabbed the surplus and eviscerated public-sector state capacity who are the problem. it’s anything that might hinder a race-to-the-bottom in wages and working conditions? 1/
@Alon @ddayen you know better than i do the degree to which, eg featherbedding by public sector unions harms the economics of transit in the US. you read egregious stories about unnecessary hang-alongs in NYC subway construction, and if those are right, they are, well, egregious. we absolutely need an efficient public sector, and efficiency in the private-sector actors that we subsidize. 2/
@Alon @ddayen but it’s worth distinguishing between efficiency and exploitation. featherbedding is inefficient: someone is “working” and being paid a nice union salary, for useless or unnecessary activities. the social cost is not the money, but the opportunity cost of the wasted labor. that is a real inefficiency, and the public sector should be merciless about eliminating that. (easier said than done, i know.) 3/
@Alon @ddayen i think @ddayen’s deep point is that over anything but a very immediate term, financial pseudoefficiency that really means transferring wealth from workers to other stakeholders (including consultants, shareholders, potentially but i think rarely the fisc) undermines the distributed democratic power that state capacity and a consensus to build as a public rely upon. /fin