Jennifer Pahlka: belief

Transcript context

…But any institution, you can say that. “Well, if the people were doing their job properly . . .” But you need to design the institutions for the fact that they’ll pursue their own self-interest. We’re in a university. There’s university administration. Some things they do well, not well, but it’s never an answer to a problem to say they should do their job properly. That’s fair. I don’t know enough about unions to know how they would work if they were working properly. Philip Howard’s made a bunch of points about this that I’ve warmed to over the years. There is a different set of circumstances for public-sector unions than those in the private sector. I think that’s part of the problem, that it’s been directly translated into the public sector. Philip Howard’s much more articulate on this than I am, but I would, maybe slightly counter to Philip, say that there is a higher need to protect civil servants from firing for a certain set of reasons. We do want an independent civil service that can say, “Actually, the science says X.” Now, an administration may choose not to follow that science, but you want to retain that person and their, say, scientific expertise or their bureaucratic expertise, and not create a situation in which the entire civil service gets wiped out every time you get a new administration. That seems to be where we’re headed. I don’t necessarily see public-sector unions succeeding in protecting against that, but to the extent that they exist to do that, I do value that. I do think we need independence. If we think about the United Kingdom — the country, their government — it seems quite stuck. Do you have an interpretation of how that’s happened? They haven’t had productivity growth since the great financial crisis. They have a big fiscal problem. It’s hard to see signs of progress. The government appears paralyzed. They’ve had many different prime ministers. What are they doing wrong?…

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