Patrick McKenzie: evaluation

Transcript context

…Let’s go back to the object level here. Instead of different people calling different pharmacies and asking whether they have the vaccine, people who have not read your article would assume that either some company or the government would build a platform like this. You explained why the government didn't do it. The pharmacies might build a platform like this. I want to meditate on the incentives that prevented random big tech companies or Walgreens from building this themselves. Can you explain that? With the federal government and the state government, the American governmental system is quite complex. There were multiple distinct supply chains, with multiple distinct technological systems, tracking where these vials were headed all over the country. There were many attempts at various levels of the government to say, "hey, can we commission a consultancy to build a magical IT solution that will get these databases to talk to each other?" Those largely failed for the usual reasons that government software procurement projects fail. Why didn't tech build it? I'm constrained on what I can say and cannot say. I know a little more than this answer. I will give you part of the answer. The tech industry — both at the level of AppAmaGooFaSoft, which is my funny sardonic way to refer to some of the most powerful institutions in the world, and many other places that hire many smart engineers who can build the world's least impressive inventory tracking system — felt political pressure in the wake of the January 6th events in the United States. This is another thing that's gone down the rabbit hole. In the immediate wake of the January 6th events, people in positions of authority very clearly tried to lay that at the feet of the tech companies. Internally, the tech companies have policy teams, the teams that are supposed to make the company legible to the government and avoid government yanking permission to do business. Those teams, their communications teams, PR departments, they told everyone in the company, "mission number one right now, do not get in the newspaper for any reason. We are putting our heads down. " A thing that might not be obvious to most people in the world is that AppAmaGooBookSoft literally have teams of people whose job is public health because they are the operating system of the world right now. The operating system of the world needs public health care. Those teams said, "hey, we've got this thing" and other people in the company might have overruled them and said, "it would be really bad right now to have the tech industry saying we're better at the government's job than the government is. So shut that down." That's so insane.…

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