All the concrete examples in this post refer to companies trying to prolong the problem they benefit from, but the summary at the top says "For example, the Shirky principle means that a government agency that's meant to address a certain societal issue..." They took a bunch of examples about companies and used them to imagine a problem of government.
Kelly does the same in his blog post, where he opines, without citation, that unions "inadvertently perpetuate the continuation of the problem (management) they are the solution to because as long as unions exists, companies feel they need management to offset them". Which to me is very amusing, but it's written in a style that encourages you to take it completely seriously.
Even the use of "institutions", which at least to me implies government more than it does the private sector, is not technically wrong, but I would argue is subtly misleading.
One example I've seen in government/non-business settings is needing to spend all budgeted money in order to avoid budget cuts. It's an incentive to look for problems in order to keep their funding as the solution.
Yes but the challenge is that the article is rhetorically lax because it doesn't provide a domain specific case example of the Shirky principle playing out in government yet submits the hypothesis that the principle supports backwards government behavior. It’s a fair point and it’s why people are presenting (the somewhat obvious but missing) government examples.
That's because we as humans like predictability. And hence, stock market rewards predictability. So, a large company's finance department allocates, say, travel budget, to all divisions based on their past year's travel spend +/- some margin. So, now, if you are division head, you are going to make sure your travel spend for the current period is at least as high as last cycle to ensure your travel budget for next cycle doesn't shrink. This means you may encourage your employees to use that travel budget by traveling even if such travel wasn't absolutely necessary. This happens all the time with all sorts of budgets in all sorts of organizations.
In businesses that is kept in check via competition. Startups can beat old companies that gathered too much such bloat, the same is not true for governments since they don't get competed out. Even in democracies most of the government bureaucracy stays even when the opposite party gets elected, you need a total revolution to flush that out and those happens very rarely.
No, but we already do. Huge amounts of public money is spent by government on consulting firms, private contractors and industry grants/incentives.
Yet the public doesn't generally consider these firms to be publicly funded organizations, despite taxpayer money being the primary revenue source for many of them.
The government switches external firms as soon as another firm seems to be able to do it better, that isn't true for the governments own parts. That makes the two fundamentally different, one can accumulate bloat forever the other will get renewed from time to time. Private profit seeking adds overhead though so which one is better depends on the domain we are talking about, in some cases private are better in other government are better.
We certainly do have to, at least for certain values of “we”. An example in the US is the current legal obligation to procure private health insurance. (There are exceptions to this obligation, generally lack of means, and in turn may qualify one to procure private insurance with tax subsidies.)
I had to refresh my memory, so I looked it up. What I see now is that the mandate is technically still law, but the tax penalty was eliminated. Not that it’s a meaningful distinction, just an odd legal artifact.
In some cases it doesn't even require creating "problems", the budget just needs to be spent to justify keeping it for the next round. I believe the military excels at this practice.
Incentives drive behavior and it would be wonderful to find incentives to minimize budgets reasonably and to ensure they can be properly increased when justified.
This is one of those things that seems amazingly dumb to me in business and in government.
If I run a department in a company that is responsible for say, customer service, there are a million ways I could improve customer service by doing things like increasing efficiency in "back of house" areas and the reallocating those funds to customer facing areas.
Problem is... I can't do that, because if I drive efficiency in the BOH area I don't get to keep the surplus resources I just created, it gets gobbled back up by the organisation at the next budget cycle... So there's literally a NEGATIVE incentive for me to optimise.
Now, I understand why the organisation feels the need to capture that surplus, there might be other areas of the business that leadership thinks needs those resources more. But what they're failing to understand is they're actually hurting both the team making the efficiency AND the team who needs the extra resources because now everything is just going to remain exactly the way it was.
This seems like a ridiculously easy problem to solve though... Just allow teams that drive efficiency dividends to retain say half of the benefit they generate.
The company still gets a chunk of resources back to redistribute the way they see fit, AND the team generating the efficiency are able to implement the rebalancing of resources WITHIN the team that incentives them to make the changes in the first place.
I would bet serious money that the NET divided returned to the central pool would actually be HIGHER even though they only get half of each block of surplus, because you would be providing SO MUCH more incentive to individual teams to find and implement these efficiency gains now.
> Just allow teams that drive efficiency dividends to retain say half of the benefit they generate.
I think that's a good start but like in the article, could somehow create perverse incentives (for example, if they keep the savings where does it actually go)?
The whole issue of incentives is fascinating to me and I think it would be wonderful to have a "Department of Game Theory" that could model and verify these behavioral assumptions.
> I think that's a good start but like in the article, could somehow create perverse incentives (for example, if they keep the savings where does it actually go)?
Is that really a problem, though? The other half of the savings still gets returned to the rest of the business to allocate as they see fit. Even if the half retained by the money-saving team gets lit on fire, that's still a net positive, overall.
You are right. Not only do you lose the resources you saved but you are now less resilient against changeable circumstances as you approach a natural maximum efficiency based on resources and circumstances. A fat inefficient department can pluck low hanging fruit at need a lean efficient one may fail under pressure even if more resources are provided late in the game because it may not be able to efficiently turn money into productivity without a significant ramp up in terms of recruiting and training.
> now everything is just going to remain exactly the way it was.
Consider it’s not dumb. Then what is it? Perhaps management knows full well everything you say but they’re also subject to the same incentives.
My hypothesis is the status quo makes the system more predictable all the way to the top, which in turn enables them to confidently pull the levers they want to pull without surprises.
If that hypothesis holds, it seems entirely rational to let support be.
no such corrective structure can exist, since the organization will cease to exist if the problem is fixed for eternity.
For example, homelessness. There's hundreds of different programs, all trying to "fix" homelessness, using different methods. Ultimately though, they do not make progress - not deliberately, but as an aggregate.
At least some governments have put in controls to stop end of year spending at least. Only part of the issue though. Centralization of common services has aided in this too.
It's a predictable outcome though. Budgets, by implication, imply that resources are limited. Someone, somewhere is deciding winners and losers.
A good budgeter will ask for input to determine the next budget. They will treat savings will delight, and not penalise those who created them. They'll find out if the saving is permanently, or temporary. They might ask for suggestions with how the budget might be allocated.
As the org gets bigger and bigger though it becomes impossible to do this on a individual-level basis. So next years budget is formed with incomplete data from this year.
Some savings are because on lack-of-need, some are because not everything happens every year, some are because of incompetence. But the bigger the organisation the less likely this individual variance can be taken into account.
“I promise to feed you as long as you eat all of it.”
“Ok sure, I’ll eat all the food all the time.”
“If I don’t eat all the food they’re going to feed me less, that isn’t an option”
What exactly do you propose? All companies are micro-utopias? Maybe it drives you crazy because you haven’t tried to see the other point of view. I imagine if you do try, it will make sense, for loose definitions of “sense”.
I’d also like to note that I agree, it is wasteful.
Which is odd because every government program torn down in the last 50 years has almost immediately resulted in a resurrection of the bad behavior by private corporations it was meant to stop.
Doesn't imply the opposite isn't true either. Spending on "fixing" the homelessness crisis in SF has ballooned as expected and a lot of nonprofits and agencies well positioned to take advantage have benefited from the unhoused bull market
The fault here lies with the SF electorate, who collectively wants their housing investment to be protected and homelessness to be fixed.
Actually, I would argue that this isn't even a conflict, because SF homeowners probably do not want a durable solution to the homelessness crisis. That would require bulldozing the suburbs. They instead want SF to sweep the homeless under some proverbial rug so that their presence does not tarnish the value of their homes. House them, but house them somewhere else. This isn't even an instance of the Shirky principle, it's just people using words in confusing ways.
However public toilets have multiple objectives. The more accessible they are, the less likely you are to smell or step in excrement, which also makes being in a city a nicer experience.
That wasn’t my experience in Europe, where pay toilets are common. First, they’re not all attended. Second, the nastiest toilet I’ve ever seen was a pay toilet at a train station in Norway.
Although I prefer the floor-to-ceiling stalls of Europe, I find it much easier to find a usable bathroom in the US.
To be fair, there's something about the Scandinavian diet that makes any kind of toilet you encounter literally the most disgusting experience possible.
Yeah, considering it would be most coveted job and best of the best in town would be falling over each other to be a toilet attendant. It naturally would lead to some of the finest toilet experience one can have.
It is extremely common that in most of Mexico, the pay toilets have such bad plumbing that everyone knows to not flush any toilet paper at all, it all goes in the bin no matter how dirty it is.
I’ve been in Europe a lot recently, and the running joke has been how much worse the toilets in Europe are than in the US. Even worse, the pay toilets seem to be of consistently worse quality than the free toilets in Europe!
This is also the perfect example of survivorship bias: all the institutions which effectively solved a problem don't exist any more today, as they were shut down or repurposed and renamed.
Neither were an example of the shirky effect though. Both were examples of misaligned incentives, or if you like the law of unintended consequences.
The lesson though is clear and useful. Be careful what you -measure- because people will optimize to improve the measure. When the measurement is a proxy for what you actually want, you won't necessarily get the outcomes you were hoping for.
For example what makes a good driver? I'd suggest patience and consideration. How many driving incidents are fueled by impatience or inconsiderate? Yet those are impossible to test for, so despite passing the driving test (operate the machine, know the rules) we end up with roads full of terrible drivers.
But neither are examples of the theorem the article is about. They were simply misleading.
I don't actually doubt that the problem exists in government... But why not provide any actual examples of it? Just endlessly re-hashed stories from a hundred years ago?
There are most certainly some papers out there which look into the issue.
The OP though, opened with a point on the rhetorics of the piece. As is usual, such conversations are tricky, evidence by this sub threads where we are discussing govt.
These examples are based around the idea of profit motive and these examples show a profit motive is rarely able to achieve the desired effect—these examples in no way speak to government agencies.
It does bug me when I see less than precise language, though I’m sure somewhere in this comment I’ll be less than precise and someone will point it out.
If you look up the definition, the spirit of the word is definitely not to convey companies or businesses.
In fact, sometimes the word is used to denote an especially popular or longstanding restaurant with a strong, devout customer base, “this hot dog joint had become a New York institution”. Stuff like that is usually said in jest and/or as hyperbole.
It’s possible for some companies to actually become institutions I think, but I can’t think of one off the top of my head. I don’t think size or date of founding matter, as I certainly wouldn’t call companies like Apple, Google, Walmart, or US Steel institutions.
Funny enough, though, sometimes you can use it to describe something, such as institutional knowledge.
Anyway, the article didn’t give off a pretentious vibe that some do with pseudo rigorous language etc, so it didn’t cause me any indigestion, lol.
> Which to me is very amusing, but it's written in a style that encourages you to take it completely seriously.
Because you expect me to take you seriously but instead of making a valuable assessment you instead resort to saying you find it amusing, as if the reason you find it amusing is obvious and implied. It isn't.
Fair point. To be specific, I find the idea that management only exists to combat the influence of unions ridiculous. A claim so surprising really begs for at least a fig-leaf of justification.
huh, yeah it implies that without unions companies wouldn't need any of that pesky management, just like without traffic lights cars wouldn't need brakes.
Perhaps it’s easier to study isolated corporations and draw generalizations than it is to study a large interconnected bureaucratic blob? I don’t generally see why problems of human nature wouldn’t present similarly across the public and private sector. If anything, finding a problem in supposedly efficient environments would imply the problem exists in less efficient environments.
I'm sure it is. But surely there would be some examples that could have been cited?
I'd suggest that in government, it's not so much human nature that's different as incentive structures.
I don't mean to argue that government is all sunshine, roses and enlightened altruism. Just that even if Shirky's theorem is just as true of governments, this article doesn't support that conclusion, despite being written as if it does.
I get what you’re saying and it’s a fair point (ack that it’d be nice to have a gov’t example) but I am just saying that I don’t think lack of citing a domain-specific case study implies a problem is irrelevant in a given domain. It’s rather strong of a statement to say that this article does not support the conclusion that government institutions or systems or entities are susceptible to the Shirky principle when it presents supporting evidence that is reasonably applicable to all types of institutions, systems, and entities.
My original post wasn't so much to suggest that the problem is irrelevant to government. I was just pointing out the interesting ideological maneuver: show evidence of a problem in companies, then ask the reader to imagine a problem in government. Kelly's post struck me similarly.
> supporting evidence that is reasonably applicable to all types of institutions, systems, and entities
I don't agree, but this verges into my own opinion lacking any supporting evidence. It just seems clear to me that publically funded institutions must have very different incentives in some areas than privately funded market institutions.
Again, I'm not saying this effect doesn't exist in governments. But it does need demonstrating, if one wants to actually argue that.
> supposedly efficient environments would imply the problem exists in less efficient environments.
Efficient at what? At making money.
Private enterprise wants to sells you a product that causes you to need more of their product. They all want to be drug dealers - that's the perfect business model.
Goldman Sachs analysts have asked whether curing patients is a sustainable business model.
Tobacco companies, management consultants, Apple creating 'ecosystems' of products that only work with each other, walled gardens, planned obsolescence. It's all kind of the same thing.
how does this translate into work of an average government department? I am sure you could make some parallels with clandestine activities by CIA, but outside of that - for transport, or healthcare?
And what are government bureaucracies efficient at? Manipulating the political system to get sweetheart collective bargaining agreements that minimize the accountability their members face while maximizing their compensation?
I think consumerism is orthogonal (but a fair subtopic to explore nonetheless). Not all corporate institutions are producers of consumer goods. Not are all consumer products designed (insidiously or not) for a recurring revenue stream. Furthermore efficiency usually refers to the cost required to achieve a desired outcome. Corporations are notoriously good and finding local cost minima in providing goods and services in ways that bureaucratic system aren’t. This isn’t controversial.
a) agree
b) Reads like chatgpt wrote it. Something about needing some stilted conjunction every other sentence.
c) If the lab leak theory for covid is true, that'd be a good government example. The whole anthrax thing was weird as hell too.
edit - actually I guess it's fuzzy. Where's the line between prolonging a problem and inventing a problem
A lot of examples in the comments are NOT the Shirky Principle.
The Shirky Principle is about how an organization wants to self-perpetuate.
The comments are just blaming any government program that might be miss-managed, or under-performing, for any number of reasons, regardless of any relation to Shirky. Shirky != Government.
Any organization can underperform for many reasons.
There can just be multiple groups with conflicting incentives.
None of the examples in the article actually support the hypothesis described, that "institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution".
The very first one is about how tax-filing companies don't want the government to make filing taxes easier, but that's because tax-filing companies aren't non-profits dedicated to making taxes easier to file -- they're corporations dedicated to making a profit.
The same with the bus company wanting to eliminate competition. The story about the cobras is a tangent about unintended consequences that has nothing to do with the supposed Shirky principle (it's actually an example of perverse incentives [1]), and so forth.
If you peel the layers back, you realize that this is essentially just the age-old conservative ideology that government intervention is bad because it never solves the problem but just makes government bigger.
And then you realize that counterexamples abound. Did the history of vaccines in the 20th century just wind up sustaining the ravages of smallpox and polio? Of course not. Does investment in a military lead people to attack you? Of course not. Do incentives for solar power actually play a role in preserving fossil fuel usage that otherwise could have been eliminated? Don't be ridiculous.
And guess what? The IRS is currently piloting programs to make filing taxes simpler. Despite the lobbying efforts of tax-filing companies.
The "Shirky principle" is something that sounds really clever, and it's so cynical you almost think it must be true... but that doesn't mean it is true. The evidence that seems to support it doesn't, and the massive evidence against it seems to be ignored.
The unrwa is an example of this. An agency created to help Palestinians ends up perpetuating the conflict by generating ever increasing numbers of refugees who can't work in their country of birth (Lebanon, Syria, etc) because they are denied citizenship.
It's actually quite the opposite. There's a great recent analysis in the Economist that disagrees [1] -- it claims the problem isn't with the UNRWA at all (as Israel has been claiming), but rather with neighbor states actively blocking solutions that would therefore allow the UNRWA to disband. Key quotes:
> Some Israeli officials have wanted to shut down UNRWA for years, accusing the agency of helping to prolong the conflict. They have seized the moment to press their case. For its supporters, meanwhile, the agency is above reproach, a group of selfless humanitarians doing vital work. As ever, life is more complicated than a morality play. The continued existence of UNRWA is a problem—but not for the reasons its critics think...
> This is a problem—but not one of UNRWA's making. Blame instead the Arab states that have refused, for decades, to offer citizenship to the Palestinians in their midst. The 1.7m registered refugees in Gaza (or their ancestors) lived under Egyptian control for almost two decades until 1967. Instead of offering them rights, Egypt left them in squalor.
Similarly:
> In many ways, UNRWA was the government. Hamas officials have all but admitted this in interviews over the past few months. They said Hamas’s role was to build up its military capabilities, not to care for their people—they had do-gooders for that. Israel, too, relied on UNRWA to mitigate the consequences of the draconian blockade that it (along with Egypt) imposed on Gaza. Even today, as Israel tries to abolish UNRWA, it still relies on the agency to prevent mass starvation in Gaza.
It's not the UNRWA that is trying to perpetuate itself. It is the actions of several countries that force the continued status of refugee on the Palestinians, Hamas not taking over basic governmental services, and Israel not providing humanitarian services in Gaza. The UNRWA is doing its best to do necessary humanitarian work when others aren't stepping up.
The idea that UNRWA is the primary party responsible for perpetuating the situation, in order to therefore perpetuate its existence, couldn't be further from the truth.
> neighbor states actively blocking solutions that would therefore allow the UNRWA to disband
UNRWA though is what enables them to do so. If a state has 1m refugees on your soil that don't have any support mechanisms, it's this state's big problem and they'd be soon forced to find some solutions, as it routinely happened with other refugees. To be clear, not all of these solutions are very good, but at least there would be a pressure on the host country to find one. With UNRWA, it is taking care of the "refugees" - who aren't actual refugees for 2 generations already, btw - so no pressure on somebody else to do anything. In fact, it's an established policy - when one of the prominent Hamas leaders was asked, why don't you work to take care of Gaza population, he answered - it's not my business, my business is to fight Israel (he didn't use the word, of course), and UNRWA business is to take care and feed people. Without UNRWA, this wouldn't be possible - no people would tolerate a government that doesn't bother to provide even minimal care to them. But UNRWA provides this safety net that enables the perpetuation of that situation. Hamas can be 100% full time terrorists, because they know the population wouldn't revolt - they have UNRWA to supply their basic needs.
> It's not the UNRWA that is trying to perpetuate itself. It is the actions of several countries that force the continued status of refugee on the Palestinians
UNRWA certainly isn't doing anything to stop it or voice any objection at all to it, as far as I know. They never asked or acted in any way to make anybody except them to step up.
> Israel not providing humanitarian services in Gaza
Israel provided a ton of humanitarian services to Gaza. Of course that was before people from Gaza murdered over 1300 of people from Israel and kidnapped over another 200. Then the idea kinda lost its attraction for a bit. One of the most cruel parts here that many of those who were murdered were of the most active participants in providing those services, and in fact for many of them that was exactly the reason they went to live so close to Gaza - because they wanted to help.
Hey - let’s call out Hamas as opposed to the people of Gaza. I get the inclination to do so, but missing a chance to call out perpetrators and organizations in favor of a broad population benefits the perpetrators.
Actually - Hamas and Netanyahu are apparently an example of the Shirky effect aren’t they? I havent followed this that deeply, so maybe there is some nuance lost here - but Netanyahu’s and his party kept Hamas alive, so that their position would be strengthened.
Sounds suss, like a "Jews created the Holocaust, actually" narrative. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but whenever someone presents their "evidence" of things like this it's invariably something like a badly shot 4 hour lecture from a "Bible scholar".
It is somewhat rare when our intuition is found wrong, however this is one of those times. The fact that a known hawk supported their ostensible enemy, is a weird situation.
> A year later, Netanyahu was further embarrassed when photos of suitcases full of cash going to Hamas became public. Liberman finally resigned in protest over Netanyahu's Hamas policy which, he said, marked "the first time Israel is funding terrorism against itself."
By the looks of it, this was going on for years.
But I am more interested in understanding if this had any impact on you? Do you still think this is BS? Are you cautiously looking for more evidence? Is the evidence sufficient to have changed your position? If so how?
These articles are quoting one of Netanyahu's fiercest opponents - the guy that right now says they need to wage campaign destabilize the government to topple him - as if these were established facts. And, btw, one of the architects of the completely failed "peace process", who let's say has a bit of an agenda to push here.
Yes, Israel had to cooperate to some measure with Hamas as the de-facto government of Gaza, absent any other and absent any desire to re-occupy Gaza. That included, yes, sending them goods and money, or allowing the money to be sent by other parties (note that Israel still is charged with making Gaza "open-air prison" simultaneously, because nothing has to make sense anymore). Because if Israel didn't do that, the whole world would cry out "Israel is blockading and starving Gaza" - there would be no way to pay the salaries of any civil servants (and not like there's much thriving business, except for contraband and drug trade, that can sustain Gaza economy) and deliver any goods. So yes, Israel was allowing money and goods to come to Gaza, and sometimes supplying them, because the only alternative was either to remove all the population there, or let them starve, or re-occupy them - and neither of these options were attractive. This is very far cry from "Netanyahu kept Hamas alive" - that's bullshit framing, Hamas was very much alive by itself, there wasn't a choice of not keeping them alive short of starving the whole population of Gaza or killing all the Hamas members. The former wasn't acceptable, and the latter is what Hamas eventually forced to happen, but Israel was hoping not to go there. Now when it's forced to go there, everybody is crying "how dare you!". Truly, damned if you do, damned if you don't.
> Do you still think this is BS?
Absolutely, it's complete and utter BS, and it's not news for me either - I know about the history of it much more than you'd ever hope to learn from occasionally reading a terribly biased article or quickly googling for a hot take. I lived there, I witnessed all the history of it happen, and I have read tons of materials about it for decades. What for you is a deep and profound revelation, for me is something that I knew for years, and unlike you, I know the full picture, I also know the context of it, the reasons for it and the consequences of it. That's why I say the idea that Netanyahu dreamed of Hamas never going away is complete and utter bullshit. Netanyahu and his policies leave a lot open to criticism, but this thing is on "doctors cause disease because that's how they get paid" level of conspiracy bullshit.
> Is the evidence sufficient to have changed your position? If so how?
There's no realistic "evidence" possible to change my position in such a question, because it goes contrary to decades of knowledge and context that I learned and witnessed. That would have to be evidence on the level that the whole Middle East history for the last 50 years has been some kind of staged conspiracy aimed at deceiving me, Truman-show style. It's on the level of proving with evidence that the Moon is actually made of Swiss cheese and you can get to it by jumping really hard, and that's actually how Swiss cheese is made - by going to the Moon and mining it there. If you can provide such evidence, go ahead, but I'm pretty sure no such evidence exists or can exist, because I don't see how it's existence is possible given what I know about the world around us. Maybe I am just crazy and we all live in simulation and anything is possible, but that's not likely. Much more likely is that some folks have read some biased bullshit - produced in part by people with very clear agenda - and decided they now know everything about the question.
Fascinating! Thank you for responding. Please know that my interest isnt in perpetuating a cycle of anger or hate, but primarily to see if we can somehow find ways to discuss difficult topics online.
Do note, I am not condemning Israel here.
I do not want to change your worldview or anything like that, nor am I litigating your lived history. This would be silly and rude.
That said, you have stated that there is no chance your position could be changed. Unfortunately expected.
So given that your position cant be changed, and I have gotten what I needed, let me help a bit by addressing a few assumptions made -
1) The Haaertz article is inaccessible to me, so I do not have any input from that individual biased against Netanyahu.
2) The second article is from CBC.ca, so I assume is also free of the dismissal causing bias. The quotes are from there.
Now when it's forced to go there, everybody is crying "how dare you!". Truly, damned if you do, damned if you don't.
This is a gross (and bizarre) distortion of why people are taking issue with the current operation in Gaza, of course. In a nutshell: no, they are very obviously not simply taking issue with the IDF "being there" in some form in response to October 7.
They are taking issue with the actions necessary to eliminate Hamas. There's no way to eliminate Hamas by hugging it out and singing Kumbaya in a drum circle. It requires war. And not a war somewhere where there's no civilians and all targets nicely marked up, but a war in real Gaza. And even now, when Israel suffered unspeakable atrocities, there are constant calls for Israel to stop and let Hamas recover and regain their strength, and ultimately just stop and go back to what was before - Hamas is attacking, Israel is suffering, UNRWA is feeding Gaza and Hamas both.
Imagine what would happen if Netanyahu started an action like this on October 6. The whole world would be sure that he's the next Hitler hellbent on committing genocide. He'd probably be declared international war criminal and Israel would be under sanctions in mere days. And everybody knew that. So Netanyahu instead did what the world demanded him to do - worked with Hamas. His mistake was (not only his personally of course, it was a widely shared delusion) that he believed it's really working and Hamas is slowly moving towards accepting Israel and becoming the real government of Gaza, and not just a terrorist group relying on UNRWA to perform essential government functions while they rob, murder and shoot rockets. But even if he weren't deluded, he's likely still have to cooperate with Hamas to some measure, because there weren't many realistic options otherwise. And that means, yes, that there would still be pictures of the boxes of money sent to Hamas, available for anybody to build their conspiracy theories on.
They are taking issue with the actions necessary to eliminate Hamas.
It's not, as you seem to be insinuating, the very idea of there being some kind of military response to October 7 that they take issue with.
Rather - they don't buy your contention that the current operation, the way it is being conducted, is necessary for (or even helpful towards) that goal. Or even for the safe return of the hostages.
Meanwhile, by now they find themselves forced to acknowledge certain ulterior motives at play -- based on how the current operation has been conducted on the ground, all the rather abhorrent statements by government officials and public figures, all those batshit insane TikTok videos that the IDF's best and finest have proudly broadcast to the world, etc.
That's the way of the hypocrite. While I don't object to the military action in theory, as an abstract concept, but as long as any actual military action happens in reality, I would object to it and demand an immediate cessation of it. So what's the point of not objecting in theory, if you object to any instance in practice?
> they don't buy your contention that the current operation, the way it is being conducted, is necessary for (or even helpful towards) that goal.
Destroying Hamas is not helpful for the goal of destroying Hamas? That's certainly a novel take. I wonder how do you imagine a military operation with the goal of destroying Hamas looking like. Is it, in your mind, being conducted by sending them a sternly formulated emails, expressing your grave concern? Do you realize that Hamas has - or, rather, by now "had" - over 30k soldiers (that we know of), 18 years to dig in and stockpile weapons, explosives, build miles-long tunnel system, establish command points in every hospital, school and mosque that exists in Gaza, and they couldn't care less about any "international law" or war crime statutes? A war with such type of an enemy is not going to look very pretty on your screen. Fortunately, it's also not the goal of it.
> all those batshit insane TikTok videos that the IDF's best and finest have proudly broadcast to the world, etc.
I have no idea what you're talking about (I don't use Tiktok, for starters, neither I recommend it to anybody else, and I would agree that any IDF soldier that uses it at the site of military action probably should get a stern talking-to by the unit commander, but of course it's inevitable since the soldiers are people, sometimes - very young people, and would occasionally do things that aren't in the best judgement). But whatever "batshit" things you've seen on Tiktok, I don't see how it's relevant to anything.
> Meanwhile, by now they find themselves forced to acknowledge certain ulterior motives at play
Again, I have no idea what you mean - could you speak your point plainly?
Destroying Hamas is not helpful for the goal of destroying Hamas?
What's the point of not objecting in theory, if you object to any instance in practice?
Unfortunately it appears that you're either grossly misreading what I'm saying, or (intentionally or otherwise) going through a lot of weird mental gymnastics to make it look like I'm saying things that I'm plainly not. So I'll have to bow out, and let you sort this stuff out on your own.
It is interesting - though not surprising - that when asked to speak your point plainly, in case I misunderstood you - you complain I am "grossly misreading" it and refuse to do so. Of course if you refuse to speak plainly, it's easy to misunderstand - or, it's easy to say something and then when proven wrong, claim it's the opponent's fault for misreading it.
The basic point is that, while you seem to think that if people oppose Operation Iron Swords, it's because they take issue with "Israel taking necessary action to defend itself" -- when very obviously that's not what they take issue with at all.
What they object to, rather with extremely high (by all appearances intentionally so) number of civilian fatalities. Combined with numerous blatant statements by government officials and public figures in support of a complete removal of the entire population of Gaza.
What is normally called a genocide, in other words.
No, it's a well-known fact. Netanyahu has lobbied within Likud to support Hamas as a way to prevent the PA from making inroads in Gaza (which is seen by most in the West as the only way for a Palestinian state to occur, since Hamas is classified as a terrorist organization). Basically, keep the terrorists running Gaza, and no one will make a serious effort to pressure Israel into recognizing or allowing Palestinian statehood.
What this article describes is that Netanyahu treated Hamas as de-facto government of Gaza - and cooperated with them in certain things. This is, btw, exactly what Israel has been accused of not doing - e.g. not letting Gazans work, not letting them receive goods and money, etc. But in reality, Netanyahu has been doing all that - under the mistaken impression that Hamas can be, eventually, converted from purely military genocidal terrorist group to kind of hostile, but manageable government of Gaza. This wasn't done because he liked Hamas, but because there's no other option in Gaza, and the alternatives would be very costly and politically untenable - you can't blockade million-sized territory for long before "international community" cries out, and you can't re-occupy it. All that changed on Oct 7, of course, where this policy has proven to be a colossal failure - and that's what Netanyahu and others who pushed this policy will have to answer for, after the war has ended. But none of this makes the claim that Netanyahu actually preferred Hamas as a partner any of a fact - he had a choice, either cooperate with Hamas, ignore them or destroy them. All the world screamed at him "cooperate immediately!". He cooperated. This turned to be a catastrophically mistaken choice. But ironically, now everybody screams at him "how dared you to cooperate! It's all your fault now!". Not that he had much choice - if he chose anything else before Oct 7, what occurred would also probably be listed as his fault, because how dared he not to cooperate? If only he cooperated, nothing like that would happen!
> But in reality, Netanyahu has been doing all that - under the mistaken impression that Hamas can be, eventually, converted from purely military genocidal terrorist group to kind of hostile, but manageable government of Gaza.
That is literally the opposite of what Netanyahu himself said. He told Likud directly that propping up Hamas in Gaza was good for Israel because Hamas would never be accepted as a legitimate government, and that would prevent 2-state talks from ever seeing progress.
Stop making up b.s. just to excuse Israel's fault in this.
Israel's fault in what? I wonder what you mean by "Israel's fault" - i.e. what Israel should have done and didn't?
Netanyahu said a lot of things over the years - including, yes, that Hamas is not going to be accepted as legit government by the world (though I'm not sure it's true) - but in his actions, he was treating it as de-facto government, even if not legitimately accepted formally. Actual political reality is a bit more complex than one slogan. And part of this reality has been that Israeli government tolerated Hamas - and it's significant abuses - because they thought it's a manageable evil and the alternatives were worse. This is a far cry with "keeping Hamas alive" - it's "not destroying Hamas because it's too hard and politically untenable, so we should make the best of what we have". If you think that there was some way for Netanyahu to magically make Hamas go away and he didn't because he like it - that's what I'd talk "talking out your bum" - nothing of the sort was ever possible. You can see what it actually takes to do this right now - and this only became politically possible after October 7. And even now the final destruction of Hamas is not assured at all - Biden admin, for example, works very hard to somehow avoid it (without saying it publicly of course), and they may yet get their with and Hamas will be spared - to repeat the same again for another 20 years.
That's a creative way of explaining things, but if you were correct the unrwa would have long since disbanded and all the refugees handed over to the unhcr for integration into their country of birth.
That this has not happened is the clearest proof against what you wrote. Tell me: If what you said is correct, why does the unrwa even still exist as a separate entity?
The unrwa has a policy of always expanding the number of refugees, the unhcr has the opposite policy.
Yes, it's true the Arab states have not made things easy, but the unrwa is not even trying - it's simply not part of the mandate. It is however the mandate of the unhcr.
Do you think host countries want to admit refugees as citizens? They never do, but the unhcr manages to make things work. If the unrwa would try as hard they would cease to exist, which is a perfect example of this article.
"UNRWA re-opened its new inscription process in 1992. Palestine refugees who were not registered in the early fifties can now apply for registration, provided that they approach any UNRWA registration office in person and are able to produce valid documentation proving their 1948 refugee status. Since 2006, husbands and descendants of registered refugee women, known as ‘married to non-refugee’ (MNR) family members, have also become eligible to be registered to receive UNRWA services."
> There is actually no mechanism to take someone off of UNRWA membership roles! Once a member, always a member, and so are all their kids. Forever.
This is silly.
It's just registration to receive services. You don't need to "take someone off of UNRWA membership roles" -- just stop using the services.
You make it sound like an organization that's trying to sinisterly enroll everyone it can find for nefarious purposes, even their children, with no escape! It's a humanitarian aid organization for goodness sakes. If you don't want to use its services, then just don't.
I mean, if a humanitarian aid organization provided services to people but not to their children, that seems like it would be a pretty big problem, no? I'm baffled how you can think that providing services to children is a bad thing.
That's not true though, the UNRWA is the organization that holds the list of people that Palestinians demand to be allowed into Israel. Despite that those people have little connection to Israel, they were not born there, and have never been there. All they have is some ancestor who lived there a long time ago.
> I mean, if a humanitarian aid organization provided services to people but not to their children, that seems like it would be a pretty big problem, no? I'm baffled how you can think that providing services to children is a bad thing.
At the very minimum they should hold two lists: Actual refugees and poor people who might need help.
But worse, they are perpetuating permanent refugees - because it's against the UNRWA policy to pressure host countries to give citizenship to people who were born there, if those people are registered with the UNRWA. The country in turn is quite happy to let the UNRWA pay for services for them.
The easiest way to understand this is to compare to the policies of the UNHCR. There are no permanent refugees with the UNHCR.
It's so much more than that. It's a political affiliation; it's a status; it's a stigma in some circles.
We can all easily imagine wanting to distance ourselves from certain organizations. To find you cannot disentangle yourself, that anyone can look you up and draw conclusions from your affiliation, is an problem. Not 'silly'.
Can you provide a reputable source for those claims?
I can't find anything in the (extremely long) Wikipedia article that suggests anything like that, or anything from a quick Google search.
It's not a political party. It's an institution -- a UN agency -- that provides education, social services, and health care, that someone may or may not be eligible for.
If you attended a school run by them as a child, or received health care from them, I'm having an extremely difficult time trying to imagine how that becomes a "stigma" that you need to "disentangle" yourself from, or why anyone would ever describe that as an "affiliation". It's just where you went to school and got medical care. (Which, you know, is usually better than not going to school or not getting medical care.)
That has nothing to do with anything I wrote in my comment, as far as I can tell.
Unless you can explain further how the right of return is somehow a political party, or a "stigma" that people are trying to "disentangle" themselves from?
> Unless you can explain further how the right of return is somehow a political party, or a "stigma" that people are trying to "disentangle" themselves from?
I guess I assumed you had some basic knowledge of the situation there.
Explaining properly would take too long, but in short part of the reason there is no political solution to the conflict, is that the Palestinians insist on the right of return to decedents of former Palestinians into Israel proper. Israel would obviously never agree to that. (They could return to the newly created Palestine, but apparently that's not an option for them - they only want Israel.)
So that's your political party connection. And as for stigma anyone who is listed on that register is basically permanently excluded from citizenship in their country of birth.
Former Palestinians who were born in Lebanon would prefer to be Lebanese citizens and work there, but they can't, because of that registry. etc, etc, etc, for all the other Arab countries in the area (Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, etc). No one wants Palestinians, so I'm sure a ton of them would prefer to shed that label and live like other Arabs in those states, but they can't.
Thanks -- I understand what you were trying to say now.
And I do have some basic knowledge. But I still don't think what you're saying has anything to do with a "stigma" or "political party".
The whole "citizenship in their country of birth" thing is a red herring. Lots of countries don't provide citizenship to the children of immigrants who are themselves not citizens. There are jus soli countries that provide citizenship if you are born there, and jus sanguinis countries that determine citizenship based on the citizenship of your parents. Lebanon is a jus sanguinis country.
So I don't see how this has anything to do with whether someone received services from UNRWA. Lebanon isn't providing citizenship to Palestinians if their parents aren't Lebanese. They wouldn't provide citizenship to an American born in Lebanon either, if their parents weren't Lebanese.
You're using the UNRWA as some kind of stand-in for nationality, but past history with the UNRWA isn't the relevant part here.
Unless you can tell me that a Palestinian, born to Palestinian parents, on Lebanese soil, does somehow get Lebanese citizenship if their name doesn't show up on any UNRWA data? Which I don't believe is the case.
In other words, none of this has to do with some affiliation with UNRWA. It's just quite simply your citizenship period.
It's not that UNRWA creates the problem as in maintaining people in refugee status, but that in order to operate in Gaza they have effectively become part of Hamas.
Even that Economist opinion piece has this line: "That was the role of UNRWA: to preserve the status quo."
> The idea that UNRWA is the primary party responsible for perpetuating the situation, in order to therefore perpetuate its existence, couldn't be further from the truth.
The article elides much. The reason for neighboring Arab nations not really trusting Palestinians, for instance. The work of UN Watch in exposing UNWRA as being too cosy at best with Hamas, for another. "... couldn't be further from the truth" is quite a stretch.
The Shirky principle is: "institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution".
I see no evidence that UNRWA is the one trying to maintain the status quo.
Rather, other parties are trying to maintain the status quo, and UNRWA is providing humanitarian aid until things change, to alleviate misery.
I think it's quite obvious that if a peaceful solution were found in Israel and Palestine, the UNRWA would very quickly wind down its operations. With a lot of its staff possibly being hired by the local government.
The full situation over there is extremely, astonishingly complex. But the "Shirky principle" tries to posit some kind of simplistic answer. And it's just wrong.
> I see no evidence that UNRWA is the one trying to maintain the status quo.
You are one of the rare few. UNRWA is losing funding precisely because this evidence exists and is compelling.
UNRWA could not have been ignorant of the terror tunnels beneath its HQ. UNRWA school curriculum has taught anti-Israel rhetoric to children for decades. UNRWA telegram channel promoting and celebrating terror attacks. Not to mention Hamas employees working at UNWRA.
This is all beside the main point of the number of Palestian refugees ballooning from 500K in 1948 to 5.6 million today.
> I think it's quite obvious that if a peaceful solution were found in Israel and Palestine, the UNRWA would very quickly wind down its operations.
Indeed. That + Shirky's Principle goes far to explain UNWRA's behavior.
Please don't say I'm one of the "rare few" -- that presupposes that there's some kind of broad consensus here, which there absolutely is not.
And the things you're saying have nothing whatsoever to do with "Shirky's principle", whether they are true or false.
I'm not taking any kind of political position on UNRWA.
But what I am saying is that they don't hold any kind of power to change the situation here. They're not any kind of major player in the geopolitical situation. There's not a state actor that has the power to be negotiating over the status of the Palestinians with Netanhayu.
The idea that, if it weren't for UNRWA, there would be no more refugees because they'd all have gone back home or been peacefully resettled elsewhere, is absurd. To suggest that they are the ones creating the sitution -- rather than the actions of Israel, Hamas, and the PA, together with neighboring countries and the US -- is totally at odds with all historical fact.
It's like saying that the Red Cross foments war so that it can have wartime casualties to treat. It makes no sense.
It's pretty simple: The UNRWA should refuse to provide services that the local government is obligated to provide. For example in Gaza the UNRWA has the role of government, instead of Hamas. If UNRWA refused, then Hamas would have had to do that, and they probably would drop this idea of perpetual war with Israel, because they have obligations to their citizens.
In Lebanon Lebanon refuses to give even basic services to the people who were born there, because the UNRWA does it. If Lebanon was on the hook for schooling and other basic services they would probably grant work permits to the parents.
This would eventually lead to integration with the host country.
But instead the UNRWA does it, leading to perpetual refugee status.
That's a backwards way of assigning moral responsibility.
Would you say that the Red Cross should refuse to provide services that the local military and health services you think are "obligated to provide"? Because by treating wounded soldiers and civilians, they might extend the length of fighting? In other words, that the Red Cross shouldn't exist at all either?
Your argument suggests that any and all international humanitarian aid is illegitimate in any conflict, because without it one side might "drop the idea" of making war -- or, more sinisterly, "drop the idea" of defending themselves.
I'm not taking any sides in this particular conflict. But the idea that assigning responsibility for prolonging a conflict to a humanitarian aid agency trying to help civilians seems morally absurd.
> That's a backwards way of assigning moral responsibility.
"Moral responsibility" is a non-sequitur. The discussion is whether UNRWA perpetuates the problem it purports to solve. Several of us have demonstrated that they do this.
You seem each time to reject the evidence because you find the premise itself incredible. It is indeed a bitter pill to swallow, that one of the bulwarks of civilization such as the Union of Nations would be so corrupt, but the evidence is clear.
> ecause without it one side might "drop the idea" of making war -- or, more sinisterly, "drop the idea" of defending themselves.
Well, see, you are taking sides in this conflict. Historically, Israel only attacks when it is attacked. In other words, Israel would like to be left alone. No one argued against Palestinians defending themselves, but there is no legitimate reason to attack Israel, and particularly not Israeli citizens. As we've demonstrated repeatedly in this thread, UNWRA has enabled Palestinians to maintain a perpetual war against Israel for 75 years. If UNWRA had not been doing this, it's at least arguable that Palestinians would have devoted their energies to making a legitimate state that took care of its citizens rather than the situation as it is today: Gaza ruled by a well-funded terrorist organization that literally has "destroy Israel" and "never compromise with Israel" in its charter, while legitimate government operations are left to UNRWA. Even if you believe the Palestinians have some kind of right to "resist" the "occupation" of "their land" (which is taking a side) and so commit acts of terror, it should not be the UN that funds it.
> "Moral responsibility" is a non-sequitur. The discussion is whether UNRWA perpetuates the problem it purports to solve.
This is incorrect. To determine whether an organization is perpetuating the problem it is trying to solve, one has to assign blame for that problem being perpetuated. Also known as moral responsibility. Just because a problem is being perpetuated, and some organization is trying to solve it, doesn't mean the problem is being perpetuated by the organization trying to solve it.
This is the fundamental logical mistake people are making why they try to claim that UNRWA is the one perpetuating the situation.
> You seem each time to reject the evidence because you find the premise itself incredible. It is indeed a bitter pill to swallow, that one of the bulwarks of civilization such as the Union of Nations would be so corrupt, but the evidence is clear.
Please stop trying to make these assumptions about me. And this conversation has nothing to do with whether the UNRWA is corrupt or how much. It is solely about whether it is an example of "Shirky's law".
> Well, see, you are taking sides in this conflict.
Please stop reading things I didn't say into things I actually did say. You took a totally generic sentence of mine, that I intentionally made generic, and are then somehow accusing me of taking sides. I don't know how to be clearer that I am not.
I am saying that UNRWA is not an example of Shirky's law. You're bringing all sorts of claims about the UNRWA that may be interesting in other conversations, but are irrelevant here.
And it's funny how nobody seems to want to answer my question of why, if they think UNRWA is perpetuating the conflict, the Red Cross isn't similarly perpetuating every conflict it provides services in. Because of course it's not. And logical consistency would require one to admit that therefore UNRWA isn't either.
If you want to meet our arguments, refute the specific claims we make; either that the facts are false, or that the facts do not demonstrate Shirky's law. Otherwise we're just arguing in circles.
To recap, here is a list:
UNRWA collaborates with Hamas. UNRWA schools teach anti-Israel rhetoric to children. Hamas employees work at UNWRA. UNRWA expands the definition of refugee beyond that of UNHCR to include children of refugees and those who have citizenship in other countries. UNRWA replaces the normal operations of government leaving Hamas free to use vast resources to commit terror.
To demonstrate that Shirky's Law does not apply to UNRWA, you should refute each of those specific claims.
> you should refute each of those specific claims.
Sorry, that's just not how it works.
You're making a number of highly controversial, cherry-picked statements that are being heavily debated in the news. It doesn't really matter if a handful of Hamas employees may or may have worked at UNRWA, when it has a staff of 30,000. It's irrelevant if some educational materials take a locally-biased political viewpoint, when the history curriculum in every nation takes a locally-biased political viewpoint.
But I don't have to refute any of your arguments because none of them have any relevance whatsoever to Shirky's law applying. Whereas you continue to refuse to engage with the analogy to the Red Cross, even after I've pointed that out that you aren't responding to that. So I just can't take this discussion seriously anymore, when you keep trying to divert the discussion into irrelevant tangents, and won't engage with the simple, direct comparison that reveals the foundational inconsistency in your logic.
> The idea that, if it weren't for UNRWA, there would be no more refugees because they'd all have gone back home or been peacefully resettled elsewhere, is absurd
And yet this is exactly what the UNHCR does. A refugee settles, and they are no longer a refugee.
> To suggest that they are the ones creating the sitution
You're arguing against a strawman. The Arab war on Israel in 1948 created the refugee crisis. No one argued any different.
There is evidence that UNWRA is perpetuating the situatiyon, your personal incredulity notwithstanding. This is but a single example, but it is enough to demonstrate that they intentionally exacerbated it.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/unrwa-textbooks-still-include-...
"The Nakba" was a result of the war begun by Arabs. Without that war, there would have been no "Nakba". Israel invited the local Arabs to participate in the new nation. Some Arabs took them up on the offer, and they and their descendents live as full Israeli citizens today. Some chose to flee because they listened to their leaders who did not have their best interests at heart. Some of those who fled returned and some became refugees. Those who chose to fight or were historically responsible for pograms were expelled. That is the Nakba in a nutshell. Blaming Israel for the "Nakba" is self-pitying ahistorical revanchism full stop. The Nakba was FAFO in action, a lesson that is apparently difficult for Palestinians to understand.
Overly reductive take. And whitewashes the massacres that Israel perpetrated in the civil war prior and during the war in 48. Many fled for fear of being killed by Israeli forces or were actively removed from their land.
From the conclusion of that article, emphasis mine:
> The Palestinian refugees have been forced into abject poverty by the Lebanese government's denial of their rights to remunerated employment, social security, public health care, public education and property ownership. The argument that Palestinian integration into Lebanese society would either cause them to lose their right of return or would upset Lebanon's sectarian balance is just a pretext the Lebanese government uses to discriminate against the Palestinians, whom many Lebanese blame for causing the Lebanese civil war.
Nowhere could I see how the UNRWA is "generating ever increasing numbers of refugees"? Do you have any other sources?
I replied to you in a different part of the thread.
What you are missing in that conclusion is that the UNRWA has no mandate to even try to get their members full citizenship in Lebanon. It's easy to blame Lebanon, and you should, but UNRWA is utterly complicit be encouraging this status.
The issues around the UNRWA are a lot more complex than what's presented in the article. I appreciate you bringing documentation to back up your posts when I've asked for it.
I've realised from reading most of what you've brought so far that I'm not going to be able to develop a sensible opinion on the matter. It requires a lot more background and understanding of the region than I have. With that said I'm going to let this thread go. You may be right- I'm not convinced yet, but I think I've gone as far as I care to for the sake of an HN thread.
The article isn’t as hyperbolic as you’re suggesting it is. It admits that there are cases where the benefits of solving the problem outweigh sustaining it. The existence of a generalizable pattern does not imply the wold reduces solely to the pattern. It is not conservative to say institutions try to preserve themselves nor to suggest that government institutions, systems, and entities are equally susceptible to the plight of preservation, even inadvertently. Traditional conservatives are allergic to change and the conservative mindset may be at fault for institutions behaving conservatively… but we won’t have that discussion if you write off a rather wise observation as politicized anti-government propaganda.
Or, you’re preserving the HN community by finding some absurd hyper reductionist way to turn an interesting subject into a problem. We could go on…
There are numerous and quite normal unproblematic examples of how self-preservation is unwanted and destructive. I for one am interested in learning how and why these incentives evolve and how to structurally combat them so that we never have to talk about harmful examples of the Shirky principle ever again. Concretely apropos and not one whiff of meta.
I don't think the examples were exhaustive. As I read it, the writer tries to extrapolate and generalize his principal to everything and everywhere as some sort of natural law; so it'll affect governments, unions, companies, etc...
I think that's a fair and charitable reading, that maybe they've just overgeneralised a bit, or maybe just haven't chosen the exact mix of examples they "should" have.
The ideological lean, though it may have been completely innocent or accidental, stood out to me.
I think he’s pointing out what your question is a victim of - rhetorical devices that ensure a certain point of view is reinforced.
The opening line is about institutions, while the examples are about firms. The point being that this will focus people on government behavior, while the examples are anything but.
As we can see in the comments, it is somehow effective even when we are discussing the structure of the argument.
The conversation naturally generates poles, which end up reinforcing the govt wastefulness argument - without the underlying article itself supporting those comments.
This is pointed out by people who see the device, but this counts as an indicator that they are “pro-government”.
Discussion ensues in the comments, entrenching the rhetoric, without having to resort to valid examples.
I love such constructions, like stingers that dig deeper if you try to pull them out.
I'm implying that both the author of this article, and Kevin Kelly, have an anti government bias that they're supporting using examples from the private sector.
(Unions aren't the government, but I'm lumping them together in comparison to the private sector.)
Government institutions may well do that (and I personally expect they do), but the (private sector) examples presented don't actually support that conclusion.
don't know if he is but the point stands regardless. the space around this question private v public is more than active enough for the writer to know better than skip past it and assume they are identical.
personally i think they are basically identical but it is a little dirty.
I think the broadest definition of the role of government is to regulate. With that in mind, it would mean that the government (and its agencies) would be intentionally failing to regulate well so that there is a perceived continued need to regulate?
As asinine as that sentence sounds, it actually seems to be exactly the state we're in right now. We have tons of government and tons of regulation, and yet we still see corruption and criminality everywhere, and people begging for more regulation to undermine it.
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All the concrete examples in this post refer to companies trying to prolong the problem they benefit from, but the summary at the top says "For example, the Shirky principle means that a government agency that's meant to address a certain societal issue..." They took a bunch of examples about companies and used them to imagine a problem of government.
Kelly does the same in his blog post, where he opines, without citation, that unions "inadvertently perpetuate the continuation of the problem (management) they are the solution to because as long as unions exists, companies feel they need management to offset them". Which to me is very amusing, but it's written in a style that encourages you to take it completely seriously.
Even the use of "institutions", which at least to me implies government more than it does the private sector, is not technically wrong, but I would argue is subtly misleading.
Hmmm.