Utterly utterly depressing. Hardly the point but I found strange comfort from this bit:
"When you’re stressed, panicked, and up against the clock—we didn’t know how long the thief would stay put—working through an automated phone tree with poor voice recognition is a rare form of torture. (“Which police force are you trying to reach?” / “Sussex Police” / “Did you mean … Suffolk Police” / “No, Sussex Police” / “I’m sorry… I didn’t quite get that. Could you try again?”, and so on). Twenty minutes later, after several tries and round upon round of interminable menu options, I reached an actual person at Sussex Police."
I've always best myself up on this for not making the effort to develop a 'British accent' after a couple of decades living here (in my own home I stand out alone on this) and put any struggles with automated systems down to that. Turns out the systems are equal opportunity rubbish to everyone.
I think you captured most of the reasons, but it’s how they lay upon each other that’s the underlying issue. Take the NHS. Austerity reduced the spend in real terms but that delivered cuts at ward, and services level. These cuts removed, reduced, altered and affected how services were delivered, trained and the staff led. Let’s pick one - headcount of staff, cuts were not to just to headcount’s but types of staff. Mostly the reduction in qualified nurses being replaced by healthcare assistants. Same number of bodies but fewer qualified staff as a ratio. Fast forward and the impact on morale, job satisfaction, managing a pandemic, training, training future qualified nurse and then a growing giant recruitment crisis, you arrive at the NHS of today. Where most wards - especially in mental health wards - are run by a single qualified nurse. Most care being given by professionally unqualified staff. We replaced ward based standards and professional leadership and innovation with increasing compliance to regulation and a culture of checking…. Just a snippet of a myriad of issues that affect the whole service. But impacts are multifaceted and damage systems very subtlety and then all at once. Austerity was intended to reduce the state in size. It did we just tried to make the rump of it keep working. The crises that followed just made a state that was hollowed out worse.
That's fascinating-- and mirrors a lot of the dynamic in policing. People tend to think of the issue with austerity as being the cuts (and thus more spending being an easy fix), but the unproductive ways services have been reshaped often matters more
Poor Oreo! Relieved to hear he’s back with his family, but shocked at the total state failure to help you. And an excellent piece - the ballooning of the meaning of statutory requirements with no regard to actual budgets is just astonishing.
Writing from Canada, so a different experience, but with some parallels. I think what you're missing is that one way in that the state *is* like a machine is that damage can be lasting and difficult to repair.
Increasing budgets doesn't bring back the loss of institutional knowledge. Underperformance in education and corrections can have decades of repercussions on the public order or mental health sides of the equation.
I think a lot of states and organizations* have simply been running at the ragged edge of capacity for so long, that when COVID hit, the stresses placed on organizations have done long-term damage to their capabilities, and I suspect in many cases, leadership and institutional culture.
The only way out might be sustained surplus of resources so that organizations are able to actually meet the demands and still have excess capacity to address organizational issues. Given budgetary constraints, while it'd be nice to do so by committing more/enough money, realistically it will take a reduction in the scope of organizational responsibilities.
*This seems to be an issue for health care everywhere
Agreed-- and interesting, was just hearing resonances of some of this in Europe as well. Suspect there's a broader global story of fiscally-constrained public sector getting walloped by Covid and never really quite recovering. Trouble is that all this stuff is hard enough to measure even in the single-country context (hence my reliance on polling, individual proxies like ambulance times), let alone comparatively across countries...
And on the running a surplus to make space to recover workign patterns, in the UK context, the NHS may get something just generous enough for a bit of that "double-tracking", but little chance of that for the rest of the public sector. Feels like a critical public-services question is how to do a version of austerity that targets specific cost centres to free up capacity elsewhere, vs salami-slicing everything, as seems to have been the outcome of the 2010-15 attempt in hindsight
I think this is something that is missed by the effects of civil society/domestic labour - they are, fiscally 'free'. As in, it might not be as productive and also missed by measures of economic activity, but grandparents taking care of grandchildren or adult children caring for elderly parents are shouldering some of the burden that would otherwise be paid for from public spending on things like subsidized child care or care homes.
China's hesitation to change things like retirement ages or ratchet up some forms of social spending out of concern for second-order effects can be viewed as the result of second-mover advantage of having a better idea of some of the side-effects of those policies that don't show up until decades later.
I'd add that the government services are also badly hurt by the Baumol effect. There are limits to how much more productive police officers or medical staff can be, and I think there's a tendency for any productivity gains from technology to be rolled back into increased overhead/risk mitigation.
IT speeding up paperwork resulting in more paperwork instead of more patients seen/treated, more crimes investigated, more court cases successfully resolved, etc. Meanwhile, the productivity and pay for diligent, motivated, capable people only goes up in the private sector. The job security of the 'iron rice bowl' goes a long way, but there are limits, especially if the work or work environment themselves are unpleasant, either by nature, or because of current conditions or both.
The UK of course, also has to deal with stronger wage compression effects, so your labour forces might be substituting out of longer work hours to make up the gap. It's not unknown here for ambitious staff in services that allow overtime/mandate a minimum level of service to rack up massive paydays working frightening levels of overtime.
There's something to be said too for bureaucratic unresponsiveness/budgetary games to keep leaning on excessive overtime instead of increasing base wages/number of staff positions (this has been a point raised by a friend who works in our customs agency - their payroll expenses are disproportionately large because of continual substitution of overtime instead of increasing base pay to improve recruitment/retention).
Utterly utterly depressing. Hardly the point but I found strange comfort from this bit:
"When you’re stressed, panicked, and up against the clock—we didn’t know how long the thief would stay put—working through an automated phone tree with poor voice recognition is a rare form of torture. (“Which police force are you trying to reach?” / “Sussex Police” / “Did you mean … Suffolk Police” / “No, Sussex Police” / “I’m sorry… I didn’t quite get that. Could you try again?”, and so on). Twenty minutes later, after several tries and round upon round of interminable menu options, I reached an actual person at Sussex Police."
I've always best myself up on this for not making the effort to develop a 'British accent' after a couple of decades living here (in my own home I stand out alone on this) and put any struggles with automated systems down to that. Turns out the systems are equal opportunity rubbish to everyone.
I think you captured most of the reasons, but it’s how they lay upon each other that’s the underlying issue. Take the NHS. Austerity reduced the spend in real terms but that delivered cuts at ward, and services level. These cuts removed, reduced, altered and affected how services were delivered, trained and the staff led. Let’s pick one - headcount of staff, cuts were not to just to headcount’s but types of staff. Mostly the reduction in qualified nurses being replaced by healthcare assistants. Same number of bodies but fewer qualified staff as a ratio. Fast forward and the impact on morale, job satisfaction, managing a pandemic, training, training future qualified nurse and then a growing giant recruitment crisis, you arrive at the NHS of today. Where most wards - especially in mental health wards - are run by a single qualified nurse. Most care being given by professionally unqualified staff. We replaced ward based standards and professional leadership and innovation with increasing compliance to regulation and a culture of checking…. Just a snippet of a myriad of issues that affect the whole service. But impacts are multifaceted and damage systems very subtlety and then all at once. Austerity was intended to reduce the state in size. It did we just tried to make the rump of it keep working. The crises that followed just made a state that was hollowed out worse.
That's fascinating-- and mirrors a lot of the dynamic in policing. People tend to think of the issue with austerity as being the cuts (and thus more spending being an easy fix), but the unproductive ways services have been reshaped often matters more
Poor Oreo! Relieved to hear he’s back with his family, but shocked at the total state failure to help you. And an excellent piece - the ballooning of the meaning of statutory requirements with no regard to actual budgets is just astonishing.
Thank you!
Writing from Canada, so a different experience, but with some parallels. I think what you're missing is that one way in that the state *is* like a machine is that damage can be lasting and difficult to repair.
Increasing budgets doesn't bring back the loss of institutional knowledge. Underperformance in education and corrections can have decades of repercussions on the public order or mental health sides of the equation.
I think a lot of states and organizations* have simply been running at the ragged edge of capacity for so long, that when COVID hit, the stresses placed on organizations have done long-term damage to their capabilities, and I suspect in many cases, leadership and institutional culture.
The only way out might be sustained surplus of resources so that organizations are able to actually meet the demands and still have excess capacity to address organizational issues. Given budgetary constraints, while it'd be nice to do so by committing more/enough money, realistically it will take a reduction in the scope of organizational responsibilities.
*This seems to be an issue for health care everywhere
Agreed-- and interesting, was just hearing resonances of some of this in Europe as well. Suspect there's a broader global story of fiscally-constrained public sector getting walloped by Covid and never really quite recovering. Trouble is that all this stuff is hard enough to measure even in the single-country context (hence my reliance on polling, individual proxies like ambulance times), let alone comparatively across countries...
And on the running a surplus to make space to recover workign patterns, in the UK context, the NHS may get something just generous enough for a bit of that "double-tracking", but little chance of that for the rest of the public sector. Feels like a critical public-services question is how to do a version of austerity that targets specific cost centres to free up capacity elsewhere, vs salami-slicing everything, as seems to have been the outcome of the 2010-15 attempt in hindsight
I think this is something that is missed by the effects of civil society/domestic labour - they are, fiscally 'free'. As in, it might not be as productive and also missed by measures of economic activity, but grandparents taking care of grandchildren or adult children caring for elderly parents are shouldering some of the burden that would otherwise be paid for from public spending on things like subsidized child care or care homes.
China's hesitation to change things like retirement ages or ratchet up some forms of social spending out of concern for second-order effects can be viewed as the result of second-mover advantage of having a better idea of some of the side-effects of those policies that don't show up until decades later.
I'd add that the government services are also badly hurt by the Baumol effect. There are limits to how much more productive police officers or medical staff can be, and I think there's a tendency for any productivity gains from technology to be rolled back into increased overhead/risk mitigation.
IT speeding up paperwork resulting in more paperwork instead of more patients seen/treated, more crimes investigated, more court cases successfully resolved, etc. Meanwhile, the productivity and pay for diligent, motivated, capable people only goes up in the private sector. The job security of the 'iron rice bowl' goes a long way, but there are limits, especially if the work or work environment themselves are unpleasant, either by nature, or because of current conditions or both.
The UK of course, also has to deal with stronger wage compression effects, so your labour forces might be substituting out of longer work hours to make up the gap. It's not unknown here for ambitious staff in services that allow overtime/mandate a minimum level of service to rack up massive paydays working frightening levels of overtime.
There's something to be said too for bureaucratic unresponsiveness/budgetary games to keep leaning on excessive overtime instead of increasing base wages/number of staff positions (this has been a point raised by a friend who works in our customs agency - their payroll expenses are disproportionately large because of continual substitution of overtime instead of increasing base pay to improve recruitment/retention).