The phrase "perverse incentive" is often used in economics to describe an incentive structure with undesirable results, particularly when those effects are unexpected and contrary to the intentions of its designers.[1] The results of a perverse incentive scheme are also sometimes called cobra effects, where people are incentivized to make a problem worse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

Seeing Like a State, Seeing Like a Network (Network Enlightenment).... (perception <-> model) (more)

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Veterans Affairs; their HealthCare arm is the VHA for Veterans Healthcare Administration http://www.va.gov

ramsay's regional policy nightmares (slight return). I find myself once more thinking about my regular bugbears in economic geography, and particularly about “scatterplot agglomerationism”, the belief that the single factor which accounts for economic productivity is either size, population density or some gerrymandered version of adjusted population density which takes into account transport times. (2024-09-20-DaviesMeVersusTheScatterplots) (more)

Dan Davies: every accounting system is a mental prison. A few weeks ago, it was announced that a British government Department was going to be forbidden by the Treasury from undertaking any capital expenditure without prior permission (more)

Dan Davies: made up numbers are just pretend. Once more they awarded a Nobel Prize (in Economics, but still) at least partly for something I consider to be actually embarrassing. In this case, the practice of carrying out econometrics using an “index” of “institutions” on the left hand side. (more)

Dan Davies: seeing like a screwdriver. I, somewhat foolishly, got into an argument on social media last week with someone over the slogan “POSIWID” (more)

Dan Davies: last chapters and how to avoid them. “Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better” by Jennifer Palkha. Strong positive recommend. (more)

Dan Davies: gordon ramsay's policy nightmares. In the Kitchen Nightmares model, a key stage is the gathering together of all the stakeholders to build a consensus that there is a specific problem which needs to be solved, and agreement that this is going to be the priority. (more)

Gregory Barber: The Cloud Is a Prison. Can the Local-First Software Movement Set Us Free? The phrase—“local-first software”— had an artisanal, farm-to-table sort of ring, at once familiar and flicking at something new. Perhaps some engineers dismissed it as merely a marketing term. But others whittling away their workday afternoons seemed to see it as the solution to a problem they had long sensed: The software they were writing was broken. (more)

like a Personal Server/hosted server, but made up of mesh of functions running in various parts of the cloud. cf serverless (more)

Web Server that runs on your local machine (DeskTop, Lap Top, Mobile/PDA) (more)

aka Mercantilism (more)

Kevin Carson champions Mutualism - I can't figure out whether he's Anarcho Capitalist, Libertarian Socialist, or something else... (more)

The conservative push for “school choice” has had its most successful year ever. For decades, activists on the right have pushed to steer state money toward alternatives to the public school system. (more)

those darn little plastic bricks (more)

the process of taking an industry or assets into government ownership by a national government or state.[1] Nationalization usually refers to private assets, but may also mean assets owned by lower levels of government, such as municipalities, being transferred to the public sector to be operated by or owned by the state. The opposite of nationalization is usually privatization or de-nationalization, but may also be municipalization. (more)

the extreme version of outsourcing from government "employees" to private corporations

Neoliberalism or neo-liberalism[1] is the 20th-century resurgence of 19th-century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism and free market capitalism.[2]:7[3] Those ideas include economic liberalization policies such as privatization, austerity, deregulation, free trade[4] (globalization) and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society.[12] These market-based ideas and the policies they inspired constitute a paradigm shift away from the post-war Keynesian consensus which lasted from 1945 to 1980. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism (more)