The utopia of better government

Almost everyone thinks it is extremists who are utopians whilst centrists and defenders of the existing order are hard-headed and realistic.
This is a myth. And it is exposed as such by this report from the Committee of the Better Government Initiative, which combines idle utopianism with ignorance of economics.
The report starts from the perspective that:

The combined output of the Executive and Parliament contains too many disappointments and failures; policies that are not practicable or do not achieve their aims, legislation that is not operationally necessary, and projects...that go...wrong.

It gives 50 recommendations for improving on this.  I've got five beefs with it:
1. An ignorance of incentives. The report calls for parliament to scrutinize government better, for whips to be less powerful, for laws to be "operationally (as opposed to presentationally) necessary, and for "pressures from the media [to] be handled consistently in a way that avoids responses...before the government is ready."
What this ignores is that governments have no incentive to follow these calls.  The pay-offs to ministers are such that they prefer to kow-tow to the junk press, showboat with legislation and keep parliament weak.
2. A blind faith in competence:

Appropriate training, in particular in the operation of large organizations, should be provided for serving or potential ministers.

But knowledge of how successful large organizations work is not necessarily transferable to government. At least two men who had successful business careers - John Davies in the Heath government and John Moore in the Thatcher one - proved to be poor ministers. The notion that individual skill can transform a huge organization for the better is a glaring example of the fundamental attribution error. As Warren Buffett said, organizations matter more than individuals:

When a management team with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.

3. An ignorance of diseconomies of scale. Could it be that large government organizations perform poorly not because individual ministers lack training, but simply because they are too big? The report doesn't even pose the thought.
4. What is the optimal boundary between the market and the state? Aside from two proposals - continue looking to outsource and allow local authorities to charge for more services - the report never considers this question, betraying an ignorance the transactions cost economics (pdf)  inspired by Ronald Coase.  And yet a comparison of the relative costs of conducting transactions in-house or through the market is the cornerstone of determining an organization's proper size.
5. Having decided that something should be done in-house, what organizational form should we use? What are the relative merits of hierarchy versus flatter management structures? Could it be that some government failure is in fact the result of inappropriate use of hierarchy? Again, the report doesn't bother asking the question.
In this sense, the report is both utopian - in its belief ministers will act against their incentives and in the belief that "training" will improve government - and economically ill-informed, in that it fails to consider economists' approach to organizational size and structure.
(For Tim).

Comments

[reason]

I don't see how the rest of your post justifies the first (grandious) statement.

I believe that evolution works better and more reliability than revolution (even though massive short term intervention may be required because of local maxima). The main reason is that revolution tends to bring with it problems independent of the solution it produces (mainly the nature of the people who ferment it), and also tends to create unreasonable expectations which inhibit future development. (e.g. The US and its holy constitution).

No one pretends that an evolved system is a perfect ideal and so fiddling around the edges to improve it step by step is accepted by all. In that light, I think it is perfectly reasonable to try to improve things. Quibbling about the details is also perfectly reasonable, and part of the solution.

[ad]

"Could it be that large government organizations perform poorly not because individual ministers lack training, but simply because they are too big?"

I don't think that those explanations are mutually contradictory.

"Almost everyone thinks it is extremists who are utopians whilst centrists and defenders of the existing order are hard-headed and realistic."

Surely some extremists must be wrong. If Leninists are right, then libertarians must be wrong. (Or vice versa.)

[reason]

Wrong? How do you define that? Extremists just have unique success criteria.

[Kevin Carson]

As I understand it, successful private organizations are usually subsidized by the government. So for government to be "successful," it has only to cut out the middleman and subsidize its own inefficiency directly from the taxpayers--quite easy. So the government is already quite "successful" by the very same standards as the state-subsidized "private" sector: so long as it has an unlimited line of taxpayer credit and can suppress competition with its "services," it never has to worry about going out of business. Of course, this is probably what the Committee is trying to avoid.