Jennifer Pahlka: recommendation

Transcript context

…I grew up in New Jersey right across the river. They call you into New York City. “We’ll do whatever you tell us.” What do you tell them to do? I have a great answer for this because we just wrote a paper. If you want your government to be able to achieve its goals — and I think New York’s got some good goals that they’re not achieving — you need to be able to hire the right people and fire the wrong ones, so you’ve got to look at that civil service system. New York in particular has a very bad way of hiring. They still are stuck in these artifacts from the Moses era, where you do these civil service exams, and they only happen at certain times of the year. All this stuff that just makes hiring really, really hard. You’ve got to fix that. Second, reduce procedural bloat. That’s sort of my favorite one these days. These go together. The procedural bloat is what creates that ineffective hiring system. The third thing is you have to invest in digital infrastructure. Lots to say about that. Then the fourth thing is that you have to close that feedback loop between policy and implementation. What that would look like in New York City — I guess it’s the same that it would look like a lot of different places — is that your relationship between law- and policymakers and those that implement those laws has to change. You’ve got to stop firing and forgetting as you make policy, and figure out how to build the affordances for that ongoing iterative feedback. To close, tell us about your work with Niskanen.…

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