Let’s say you live in a small and fairly isolated town. So small, in fact, that there’s only one plumber. Which means that except for minor problems, you have to call this guy. Only he’s completely incompetent, hard to track down, and he charges you up the wazoo. Too bad, right? If the alternative is a big mess (literally), you tolerate the ineptitude and just pray he doesn’t charge you an arm AND a leg.
Now let’s take another small isolated town. Only this town has three or four plumbers, of which one is as bad as the guy in the first town. At first, the bungler might get a few odd jobs from folks who randomly pick his name of out of the Yellow Pages. But after a while, people realize he’s an idiot and they take their business elsewhere. The other, more competent plumbers get your business, and the poor-performing plumber doesn’t have a living anymore.
I share this hypothetical situation because in our public management class today we talked about personnel management systems. A yawner, right? Perhaps, if you don’t dig this kind of stuff (and perhaps even if you do). But I found the discussion and material quite interesting, because I happen to believe that unless your business is all about heavy machinery or intellectual property, how you manage your human resources determines how successful you’ll be.
Anyway, civil service reform is afoot, with the reformers pushing some sort of “pay for performance” system and finding resistance from a number of places. In the private sector, you wouldn’t have this argument; just let companies do what they want, and whoever does better will get more business and grow, and whoever does worse will get less business and die.
But the public sector has a monopoly in most of what it does for its taxpayers. In fact, much of what the public sector does that it has private sector competition for has been outsourced to the private sector itself: waste collection, public education, and even space exploration. But a lot of what governments do still do is stuff that is much harder to have private sector competition for, like homeland security and economic policy and criminal justice.
So when you have a monopoly on what you do, you can be like the plumber in the first town. There is no incentive to be competent, accessible, or cost-effective. Now granted, there are plumbers who have monopolies on geographic areas that are quite effective, just as there are government agencies who have monopolies on their tasks that do quite well. But when the market mechanisms aren’t in place to reward effectiveness and punish incompetence, it is hard to guarantee effectiveness and easy to permit incompetence.
So back to civil service reform. Again, in the private sector, you leave this alone and see who does better. In the public sector, however, you have debates and discussions and papers and politicking. And what? Keep your eye out, and let’s see what happens next.
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