> Whatever objective you are expected to achieve, a bigger budget makes it easier.
This should be true but I've seen bloated projects that would have had better outcomes had the team been more constrained.
And to quote Fred Brooks:
> There are many examples from other arts and crafts that lead
one to believe that discipline is good for art. Indeed, an artist's
aphorism asserts,'Form is liberating' The worst buildings are those whose budget was too great for the purposes to be served.
Bach's creative output hardly seems to have been squelched by the
necessity of producing a limited-form cantata each week. I am sure
that the Stretch computer would have had a better architecture
had it been more tightly constrained; the constraints imposed by
the System/360 Model 30's budget were in my opinion entirely
beneficial for the Model 75's architecture.
Had Mr Brooks proven this belief in a revealed preference sense, by voluntarily shrinking his budget, it would add a lot of weight to what is otherwise a nicely sounding but not very believable passage. But I doubt that anyone could be so insane as to not trust themselves with making a good use of a larger budget. One's underlings - quite possibly!
Also it's just so much easier to get the benefits of constraint without the downsides if one is in charge of the decisions. Like if you can do something with $10k and have $30k to work with, many adults manage to constrain themselves by merely moving $20k to a savings account, and those who lack the requisite executive function for this simple "out of sight out of mind" organizational schema can often function with slightly stronger artificial constraints, sometimes aided by a collaborator. People do NaNoWriMo or whatever, and while many fail, the benefit of the artificial time constraint motivates a lot of people, despite being self-imposed. In either case, this informal method of constraint is more responsive to situational changes or emergencies than an optimization valve that always wants to bring costs down and doesn't understand any of the functional constraints, as is the case for most finance and management arms of "efficiency"-driven orgs. The game theory of budget inflation is really obvious when you consider it in terms of locus of agency
> But I doubt that anyone could be so insane as to not trust themselves with making a good use of a larger budget. One's underlings - quite possibly!
If I need 4 people for a project, what am I going to do with $20M/year in budget? I can’t pay them 5M a year each. I would not trust myself to do something sensible with that money, no. Nor do I suddenly want to hire 100 instead of 4 people.
California high speed train to nowhere comes to mind. Billions and billions and billions of dollars lost to graft and waste. Indeed, as government budgets increase they become less effective.
This should be true but I've seen bloated projects that would have had better outcomes had the team been more constrained.
And to quote Fred Brooks:
> There are many examples from other arts and crafts that lead one to believe that discipline is good for art. Indeed, an artist's aphorism asserts,'Form is liberating' The worst buildings are those whose budget was too great for the purposes to be served. Bach's creative output hardly seems to have been squelched by the necessity of producing a limited-form cantata each week. I am sure that the Stretch computer would have had a better architecture had it been more tightly constrained; the constraints imposed by the System/360 Model 30's budget were in my opinion entirely beneficial for the Model 75's architecture.