Page 6 RAIN June 1978 to get the larger subsidy? Guess who would likely win? Subsidies seem •to require performance standards, which seem inevitably to be based on engi'neering 'efficiency rather-than cost effectiveness, which pushes things back into the hands of the corporations. Subsidy can provide encouragement, but there are other ways, such as putting solar collectors on the White. House and a garden out back. . : I ,·.·~::·. •• .... ·- .':> :-· -~ . . ~ • - ~~~~ t Then there's what's called the Sucked-In Hazard. It's what happened to environmentalists dtfring Carter's campaign. All the major environmentalists were let know that they were being considered for an Important Job in the new administration. Didn't hear much criticism of Carter's nuclear position from any of them, did you? The government's big enough that it could give every critic an Important and Well Paying Job without making a dent in the government, but effectively absorbing and neutralizing any momentum for change. Sounds like any big operation. Yep. · ~~-n 't ~~e government do anything effectively? .....:::-c~~ ;,S-~re. It's. real good at growing. It can do some.things well. But :• past experience says it doesn't very often. (Remember the 2 percent success rate on a.t. money so far?) It can also do certain things•better than 9thers. It's kind of like a steamrollerbig, powerful, slow to get going, hard to change direction, unresponsive to loc2.! situations, but good ~hen you're trying to get things done alike everywhere. Because of the scale of its effects, it hesitates (hopefully) to act until overcertain, while a more local action (like the Oregon_Bottle Bill) can 1 get out of the theoretical realm and find out whether something really works or not. -~~~::~;~~ ;:;:;:;rwe got the right people in to run the government What other hazards are there to gouernment assistance to a.t.? Organizational effectiveness, for one. People like Barry Stein, in Size, Efficiency and Community Enterprise, have shown • the great diseconomies of scale that exist in large organizations which make them less effective and desirable than smaller ones. These "dis.economies" are not limited to dollars alone. 'fhe larger scale of federal programs results in a focus on , "fiscal accountability"- whether the money was actually spent, not on its results or on possible more effective alternative expenditures. It results in focus on management skills rather ,than ability to understand and respond to local realities. The scale of programs results in too much information to be digested by, decisio.n-makers-they can't keep up with the details necessary for successful programs. The scale of operation forces decision-makers to design program,s, not select effective people. Spending deadlines, fiscal years, and refunding demands lead to strangely aberrant behaviors- such as putting any program together to get rid of end-of-year funds, overrevving programs to get "results" quick enough to get refunded, etc. Goals, programs, budgets, personnel,·and operations all too.frequently become pawns in power plays among managerial staffs of the bureaucracies. They'd probably do some good, but probably be destroyed in the process. The amount of power and opportunity to do good (or bad) in any centralized operation makes almost everyone who gets the chance work themselves to death. It's called the executive syndrome. Marriages fall apart. People' start to smoke cigarettes again. They get old fast. Egos get big enough thft they star;t to bump into things. T,hings get out of balance. It's not a fair thing to do to people. We've seen it happen to enough friends to know, and it's _hard enough to slow down our own lives to a good balance! We need to break that opportunity down into small enough hunks that a person can do good with it and still be able to stay human. Besides operational effectiveness, what other drawba-cks are there to Federal activities? ' I i:-here are a lot of thi,ngs government can't do or isn't supposed to do. It can't give good evaluation of government programs or recommend one product or group, etc., as better or worse than others unless it really covers its own tail. It's not supposed to lobby. It has great difficulty taking risks or opposing governmental domination of relationships. Govern- ,ments, like ·any large organization, bave an inherent affinity to other systems of similar scale and organization. It's e_asier
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