In praise of half-assedness

[nancylebov]

To listen to some leftists, you'd think there's something filthy about doing things to make a profit. After all, anything that's done for profit is going to be the worst feasible quality offered for the highest possible price.

However, when I look at much of what I buy, I see that much of what I buy is decent stuff and not terribly expensive

To listen to some libertarians and right-wingers, you'd think that government is nothing but theft and murder and power-grabbing, and all it can do is spread misery.

However, I can see that a lot of government services are at least decent and genuinely useful.

What's going on? After all, the leftists and the libertarians are pointing to some real incentives and processes.

People I've floated these ideas to have suggested that government keeps business from being as awful as it might be. Government does exert *some* pressure on price and quality (not always in the direction one would wish--see price supports), but there isn't nearly enough government to *make* companies offer stuff that's fit to buy.

I believe that what's mostly going on for both business and government is a combination of the desire to do things well (distributed through all levels of the organizations) and habit/tradition/inertia which can lead to defaults of accomodating the people one is dealing with.

If my theory is correct, you want organizations which are somewhat responisive to incentives, but complete responiveness to simple incentives is *not* what you want. See this article about Walmart--they keep squeezing their suppliers till some of the suppliers lower quality or go out of business.

Here's my prediction about Walmart (I was wrong about the election, but that isn't going to stop me)--they'll keep squeezing their suppliers until Walmart becomes known as a place to buy crap, and it will gradually go under itself. Maybe they can prevent this by focusing on quality as well as price, but that would take a huge change in company culture and it's hard to imagine doing it successfully.

On the government side, you want them to care about elections, but you can't afford to have that be the only thing.

There's a bit in Gregory Bateson about how living systems never try to maximize just one thing.

Comments

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

With regard to Wal-mart, my prediction (not terribly original, but I feel it likely) is that there will be a massive effort to unionize its workers, starting this year. I am aware that Wal-mart makes an enormous effort to prevent unionization; this untapped potential pool of workers -- who deserve more than Wal-mart offers, including its alleged horrible healthcare options -- is about to become the target in a tremendous tug-of-war.

If the unions succeed to any significant degree (that is, not just in one or two stores), then Wal-mart will be forced to alter its policies, including compensation policies. Its growth will slow, if not reverse, and it may decide that because it can then no longer lowball prices as severely as it now does, that quality needs to be addressed.

Meantime, I'm still shopping at Costco and Target.

[ckd]

I think redaxe is right about the unionization push, but I don't know if it'll have enough force to counteract the "race to the bottom" quality-wise.

I also love Target (pronounced Tar-zhay, that famous French boutique!) and in fact got a Zipcar yesterday so I could get a load of stuff too heavy to carry home on the bus.