@Alon @ddayen totally with you! consultants, ranging from the openly predatory McKinsey types to the crunchy NGO types are a plague on state capacity. a state requires in-house expertise and institutional memory to retain it. Noah, in contradistinction to say Matt and Ezra, has been good on emphasizing in-house capacity. but the everything-bagel story mostly focuses on labor costs, direct and indirect. apparently it’s commentators as well as managers everyone hates.