# Government Waste vs Market Inefficiencies **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 6, 2010, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719 "2010-07-06T15:05:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![CannyDan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cannydan/32/548_2.png) [@CannyDan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CannyDan)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2010, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/81 "2010-07-08T14:31:13Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > Even if having the five trucks work the same area is an inefficiency, how much of an inefficiency is it? How does the additional energy and cost of this compare to the overall costs of the system? What other efficiencies might the private market bring that compensate for this? > > And again, you don’t know that the five-truck method is less efficient, because you don’t know all the details about how they work. If five trucks means that each can come back 95% full, while the government system sends them back 70% full, and the additional neighborhood drive only adds 20% of the miles driven, then using the five trucks and bringing each one back full is more efficient. Or there could be a whole bunch of unseen factors here that drove this model the way it is. Or, it could really be very inefficient. The point is, the mere observation of their behavior near one person’s house doesn’t give us enough information to know. You seem to be making an ideological argument, not an actual one. Yes, we all must agree that we do not _know_ the full and complete circumstances here, and so we can’t produce a perfectly correct microanalysis of the efficiencies, blah, blah, blah…. But it appears we know enough to draw some reasonable conclusions. Thus we can say with pretty fair assurance that having 5 or 6 trucks/companies driving the same routes must be less efficient than having some smaller number doing the same service. You in fact need to construct some rather esoteric circumstances and some pretty specific assumptions to show that the observed system could be, maybe, if all these special conditions apply, as efficient as fewer companies/trucks (or even a governmental alternative) providing the same service. This suits your philosophical bent, but doesn’t comport well with the actual circumstance here. > [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > \Take the last recession. Private industry laid off a lot of jobs. The government? Almost none. Government can pick up the slack with tax dollars. Private companies live or die based on their balance sheets. It keeps them leaner and fitter. Are you kidding? My local government has curtailed all sorts of services and reduced personnel by more than 25% over the last two years. > [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > This is just a variation on the old argument that state monopoly is better than the free market because it avoids all that duplication of service. Coke vs Pepsi, Ford vs GM. It seems so wasteful. But it’s not. If monopoly was better than competition, you’d see government monopolies everywhere, and the places that have them would have better economies. The comparison with retail choice is misplaced. Coke versus Pepsi is “duplication” only if the product is “something to drink”. If that were the case, then it would indeed be more efficient to serve the need for drink with a single, globally acceptable substance, say Coepsi. But in the real market this is not duplication because Coke and Pepsi strive to differentiate themselves as separate products, serving different needs—a need for Coke versus a need for Pepsi. Same for Ford versus GM. Any reasonable analysis would conclude that, if the yardstick were simply “a passenger automobile”, then a generic, interchangeable, plain vanilla blend vehicle that could be produced in FoGMrd factories without branding and independent of planned model year obsolescence would be more _efficient_ than the present system. But keeping the separate competing companies in business requires them to produce choices for the consumer. That’s pretty much definitional of a free enterprise system. And see in the case in point, exactly the same posturing, with the competing companies all seeking to market their services by offering “different” service options (bin size, color, special pickups, etc.). But in this case, for most people, this is a distinction without a difference. For most people, the criterion of importance is **Garbage picked up? Yes/No**. And for this, duplication of vehicles on the same street cannot possibly be _more efficient_ than the alternative. > [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > This is a form of Ceteris Paribus fallacy: The assumption of “All else being equal”. Hell, the private market is using five trucks! If we just replace them with one, then all else being equal we’ll be more efficient!" Except all else isn’t equal. The incentives are different, the organization structures are different, the rules are different. Uh huh. And they will stay different as long as the companies work to keep them different. Like Coke, Pepsi, Ford and GM. But soon any one of the companies will realize that it can pick up the trash next door to an existing account _for free_ (less ‘tipping cost’ at the dump, plus some tiny increment of ‘fullness’ on a truck that probably holds 40 cubic yards, more if it’s a crusher) and offers them a package deal way below whatever they’re paying now. Then the dominoes will begin to fall. I’ll bet that, if we revisit this in a year or two, the number of companies servicing the OP’s neighborhood will be dramatically reduced, by simple competitive attrition. Or even – oh no! – a government contract to a single operator for a defined time period, let at competitive bid and renewed by bid at the end of the time period. ---
**Author:** ![gonzomax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e8c25b/32.png) [@gonzomax](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gonzomax)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2010, 3:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/82 "2010-07-08T15:33:15Z")
The military, the political field, and in corporations they are all flawed by kingdom building. If you can get your department to grow, get a bigger budget and hire more employees, you become more powerful and make more money. ---
**Author:** ![HookerChemical](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/278dde/32.png) [@HookerChemical](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HookerChemical)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2010, 4:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/83 "2010-07-08T16:55:40Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > Let me give you an example of just one thing that you are completely ignoring, and which could make all the difference: What is the capacity factor of those trucks? What if the city trucks tend to head back to the landfill when only 70% full, but the private trucks are 90% full? How does that affect your analysis? > > This can easily happen. If the city parcels out its trash collection into zones and sets up rigid barriers between them (i.e. driver A is assigned to truck B, and they are assigned to zone C, and this relationship is fixed), then what happens on a light trash day for that neighborhood? Does the truck come back half empty? What if in another area there was unusually heavy trash, and the truck fills up - with three houses left to do? What happens then? Does another truck have to drive out for just those three houses? Or are they flexible enough to re-route someone else? Will union rules allow them to do it? Will they have to pay drivers overtime? > > Perhaps their solution to this is to size the trucks and zones such that they typically come back 70% full, so they can handle any overages without requiring a second trip. > > Perhaps the private companies are more flexible, and have managed to engineer their processes so that their trucks are 20% more full. Speculate much? Your argument distills down to “If we assume government is inefficient, we can prove government is inefficient, therefore government is inefficient.” Take government out. As I’ve said before, this is a lousy topic for arguing for government vs privatization. Assume it’s a single private waste hauler. This can be due to government contracting, natural monopoly, or anything else. Second, the truck load is why any waste hauler plans out their routes. Everybody is going to design the routes so the trucks are almost full. You’re speculating that the government is inflexible and can’t vary the haul much, but that’s pure speculation. I can speculate that the teamsters can hold Waste Management’s feet to the fire as well. My speculation is as speculative as yours. You have to compare apples to apples. > [@](#): > > We don’t even know how much of the overall vehicle miles traveled is increased by the neighborhood overlap you described. Depending on how densely packed the neighborhood is and how far away the landfill is, it could be a trivial amount in the first place. While it is true that we don’t know how much the local haul distance compares to total haul, we have to compare apples to apples to get a fair picture. The local routes could be a trivial distance/time, but we have to make some assumptions. The most fair is that long haul distances are equal. If we don’t assume that, we have five companies hauling waste different distances. In that case, four are wasting time and fuel traveling to any landfill but the closest. > [@](#): > > There are no doubt hundreds of factors. I’ve been involved in BPR analysis, and you can spend days just sifting through all the potential factors trying to figure out what the top 20 are in terms of impact. Perhaps the terminus side of the pickup at the landfill is horribly inefficient, with trucks idling in lines for long periods of time waiting to dump their garbage. Maybe the city has under-invested in infrastructure and their trucks are old and inefficient, or union rules have prevented them from automating certain operations. > > Here’s another one - maybe the private agencies have a better handle on exactly who their customers are, and can size their trucks accordingly, so that they can send smaller, more fuel efficient trucks into neighborhoods with fewer customers. Maybe they’ve developed technology for interim deposit of trash into larger vehicles for hauling to the distant landfill. Again, you’re making lots of speculation. We have to compare apples to apples. Perhaps the private landfill lacks the necessary infrastructure to handle all the trucks. Based on my experience, landfills regularly approach their permitted daily/weekly/annual waste acceptance limits. In fact, many private waste haul contracts specify a backup landfill if the primary site is unavailable for any reason. You’re speculating that Waste Management has a better idea of who their customers are and what their needs are. Do you think that a WM (or any other **national** solid waste company) has a better grasp of what the people of Podunk want than the Podunk City Council or County Board? Again, you’re making wild speculation with little or no basis. You have to compare apples to apples. > [@](#): > > Do the private companies charge by the bag? Did the city? If they do, that acts as an inventive for people to not throw out as much garbage. Maybe they’ve reduced the entire amount of garbage by 10% through pricing, and have lower costs of collection and landfill storage. > > There could be hundreds of factors that you can’t see until you dig deep into the operations of a company. Your observation is just one piece of data that would be used to determine where efficiency could be improved. Earlier, I gave you a counterexample of a situation much like that which is unquestionably more efficient - splitting up package delivery between multiple vendors. > > Now, it’s entirely possible that in this case having five contractors is less efficient. All I’m saying is that your observations do not come close to proving the case. The OP is looking at a small picture and examining the potential for inefficiency due to competition. Having five different garbage trucks drive down the same street to pick up the same trash is an inefficiency that is usually resolved by limiting the waste collection to one hauler. That single hauler can be private or tied to a local government, which makes this a particularly poor subject for a public vs private debate. Still, the identified overlap is both real and inefficient when apples are compared to apples. As you discuss, there are differences outside the scope we’re looking at, but those are not relevant to the discussion. I can make equally wild speculation about how waste is collected to support an unsupportable position, but apples to apples is the only way to compare the problem as defined in the scope of the OP. > [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > I think you said what I said. I meant they EACH travel the same distance as the one paper boy. BTW why is it easier to explain with 4 paper boys instead of 6? My apologies if I misunderstood you. I used four paperboys because I’d rather deal with a street that’s one mile and broken into distances of 0.2 than 6 paperboys and distances of 0.14285… ---
**Author:** ![Beware\_of\_Doug](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/278dde/32.png) [@Beware\_of\_Doug](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Beware_of_Doug)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2010, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/84 "2010-07-08T17:00:04Z")
> [@gonzomax](#): > > The military, the political field, and in corporations they are all flawed by kingdom building. If you can get your department to grow, get a bigger budget and hire more employees, you become more powerful and make more money. And at the end of the day, power is even more important than money. If you can consolidate power by fucking up your organization and have even a chance of getting out clean, you do it. It’s Macchiavelli plus Hobbes: a power struggle of all against all. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2010, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/85 "2010-07-08T17:12:04Z")
> [@HookerChemical](#): > > Speculate much? Your argument distills down to “If we assume government is inefficient, we can prove government is inefficient, therefore government is inefficient.” \ You’re missing my entire point. I’m not trying to claim that the businesses ARE more efficient. I’m disputing the claim that the OPs observations about the truck movements in his neighborhood are proof that they ARE more inefficient than a single city monopoly. The burden of proof is not on me, because I’m not the one making the claim. I was simply trying to point out that there are a hell of a lot of factors that go into overall efficiency. Its’ not ‘speculation’ to say, “Here’s an example of the kinds of things which could affect overall efficiency which you haven’t considered.” There are a lot of business models which appear to be inefficient on the surface when looked at simplistically but which turn out to be more efficient in practice. I’ve heard arguments against free trade that go, “Obviously it’s more efficient to build things at home rather than build them across the ocean and ship them here.” And that seems intuitively obvious to some. What’s more efficient - building a car in the U.S., or building one in Japan and having to ship it to the U.S.? It’s not until you dig down into the details that you discover that modern shipping is remarkably inexpensive, and that other factors like automation and tiny improvements in process resulted in the Japanese being able to make better, cheaper cars AND pay for their shipping and still be cheaper than American cars. Hub-and-spoke airline travel is another good example. Or Fed Ex’s hub system. If I send a package from Edmonton to Vancouver by Fed Ex, chances are it’s going from Edmonton to Memphis, then from Memphis to Vancouver - probably five times the distance it ‘needs’ to go. How inefficient! Except that it’s not, but you won’t see the efficiency until you dig deep into the process and understand the optimizations Fed Ex has made. Having five trash deliverers serve the same neighborhood instead of one may result in overall less efficient trash pickup - or it may not be. I wouldn’t be willing to say until I looked at the entire system. That’s my only point. ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2010, 5:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/86 "2010-07-08T17:26:21Z")
> [@villa](#): > > Also, if you increase the number of trucks, you increase the externalities. More fuel pollution; more noise pollution, more damage to roads. These costs are born by the customer, not the producer. Not necessarllly. Just because the poster sees X trucks does not mean that every address sees X trucks. Or maybe the trucks are smaller and so more fuel efficient. Maybe offloading at the dump or other facility is better with these trucks. Maybe A complany with small trucks needs less capital to get started, and can offer innovative services not apparent to the lay eye. Or can offer services in smaller places that wouldn’t otherwise have service. Or a zillion other things. The question is, when describing “inefficiencies”, you have to state what it is you want top optimize, and persuade why that is the right measure. In this case, the need for landfill space hasn’t changed. Maybe there are more trucks. But maybe there are more jobs too, and that is something the local system wants or is OK with. I see no de facto reason to see that #trucks is (no pun intended) the driving factor for “economic efficiency”, or even that “efficiency of the neighborhood trash collection economy” is significant in the bigger scheme of things, even in the broader trash collection community. ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2010, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/87 "2010-07-08T17:34:46Z")
> [@emacknight](#): > > Imagine for a second what it would look like if USPS split up the mail for our area into 5 piles based on our waste service contract. Would anyone in their right mind call that an efficient system? Sure - I see multiple visits by USPS a day, and UPS and FedEx and other delivery trucks too, and I am in a residential area in BFE. Why not consolidate? Instead of assuming you see inefficiencies, turn the question around - given what you see, what are the efficiencies to be gained if the service to _me_ appears to be the same? > [@](#): > > So what I am providing is a case where the free market has established a system that is 5 times more wasteful than it needs to be, without any discernible benefit to the consumer. Maybe you don’t get any benefits, but someone does. If by no benefits, you mean you pay no more than you did before, then of what concern is it to you? > [@](#): > > \*As a minor comparison, but not entirely relevant, recycling is tax funded and contracted to one of the 5 companies. It is done using one truck for the entire area. It’s not a real apples to oranges comparison, but I find it interesting that the two are happening at the same time. \* Right! It is possible to put forth the resources - equipment, people, capital, in innovative ways to create new services, even in refuse collection! No? Then why not pick up the recyclables and dump them in the landfill like we used to? Less trucks rumbling in your neighborhood, easier scheduling for you,. what could be more efficient than that? 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2010, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/88 "2010-07-08T17:40:03Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > (and it _is_ an inefficiency-- If nothing else, those trucks are driving more miles) We don’t know that. Nor do we know the relationship between miles driven and costs. If you do, please share your model with us. ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2010, 5:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/89 "2010-07-08T17:42:45Z")
> [@emacknight](#): > > Each of those trucks are running the best possible route they can, but it still means 5 different trucks go down my street, stopping at different houses. With a degree primarily in optimization algorithms, this really catches my eye. How do you know the trucks are running the “best” routes based on your observation of a specific block? ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2010, 5:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/90 "2010-07-08T17:47:55Z")
> [@emacknight](#): > > Okay, you agree that’s stupid. You know what would be worse? If there were 6 separate high speed rail lines, all going between the same two places, under capacity, using identical trains, with an identical schedule. > > Would you agree that would be 6 times worse than what you were describing? Well, that’s what the market has created here. Are the trucks in your area under capacity? do they have reasonable expectations of growth to fill capacity as a business model, even if it is to roll up the competition? At which point you will come here and pine for the days when competition made garbage pick up more reliable or when there wasn’t one giant-ass noisy smelly truck on your small street, but a bunch of smaller cleaner ones, right? ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2010, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/91 "2010-07-08T18:09:22Z")
> [@emacknight](#): > > There is no way you could call that efficient. I could - but then I want to college to learn precisely how to build mathematical models of efficiencies and how to solve them. Bottom line is you are not presenting near enough information to create such a model, unless in the unlikely case that your street is the only street these trucks serve. > [@](#): > > Or better yet, imagine if the truck came around to your house 5 times, repeatedly emptying the same can. Or for those that put out multiple cans, you’d expect the truck to collect all of them at one time right? You wouldn’t expect the driver to get one, drive around, come back and get other, later come back for the last. Is that happening? If so, why haven’t you mentioned it until now? > [@](#): > > In other words, imagine your outrage if you found out your city had 5 times as many trucks as they needed. I sense your outrage, sure, but I am waiting on even the scantest evidence that there are 5x trucks as needed. You haven’t even described the trucks, their resource usage (fuel, labor, maintenance, capital) or the capacity of the trucks, the amount and distribution of the trash, the nauter of the road network and the operation of the landfill, all of which are important to know to creat a model to perhaps come tot he conclusion you are stating as fact and getting outraged about. Sorry, not buying it. > [@](#): > > And that those trucks each had the most efficient route planned, but then divided out the houses on each street such that they drove around under capacity. And then just for fun had one truck just idling some where. > > Most people would rightly be pissed, it’s the sort of shit that most people refer to when they talk about government waste and inefficiency. It’s the classic three guys digging a whole, with two guys standing by watching. No, it is the classic “people no understanding complex systems” but acting as they do. At best, you are presenting a hypothesis, not a conclusion. Where are the experiments, which are possible to do via modeling, that support your conclusion? > [@](#): > > This isn’t a complex problem, we’re all innately aware of how to efficiently make pickups/deliveries. I was a paper carrier at age 12 and knew to deliver to all the houses in order, I didn’t deliver alphabetically, or by colour. I went down one side, crossed and came back up the other side. Actually, I interviewed once for a division of UPS that models their deliveries, and this was in the mid-80s when FedEx was just ascending. You can not believe how complex it is to optimize trucking routes like that. In fact, now that I mention FedEx, their entire innovation was that it would be more efficient, even though counterintuitive, and wildly profitable, to pick up packages from across the country every day, ship every one of them to Memphis, and then immediately ship it to its destination, and promise to get it there the next morning. No way the average Joe understands that level of innovation or modeling, even though they encounter it, even interact with it every day. It is actually a beautiful thing when it works like that, that everyone thinks it is so simple anyone can do it. In this scenario, we’d have 5 carriers delivering the same paper, to different houses on the same street. Would you consider that efficient? But when it comes down to it, people are _not_ generally cognitively capable of thinking like that, nor are they trained to. > [@](#): > > Just like mentioned above, if two companies merged they wouldn’t keep sending both trucks. True - but that is why you have to look at what is actually being optimized. I agree in time the situation you describe was ripe for a rollup, which means it is a game of capital and return on investment. But that doesn’t mean you will ever end up with just one provider, or, absent any modeling, you can say what number of providers is optimum in any sense at all. > [@](#): > > So if my city provided socialized trash collection, they could easily save 80%. Even the most grossly incompetent, and mismanaged city council could still pull off 50%. If you think there is so much profit there, it would behoove you to get into the trash hauling business, huh? Bid 25% of what the City invests now, underbid everyone, and live happily ever after. ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2010, 6:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/92 "2010-07-08T18:21:28Z")
> [@emacknight](#): > > Right. Wrong. You bitched about using retail as ana example, hten chose another poor example as analogy. First off, newspapers f the sort you describe do not have the pratice market as trash pickup does, in fact their market is shrinking. There are few new entrants at scale. And the delivery of papers has not historically been a business unto itself - the papers have generally been vertically integrated and handled their own delivery. Now, as papers fell away in a market, often down to two, they would often, in a desperate bid to find efficiencies in order to focus on their core mission or reporting, would de-integrate somewhat and create joint operations in production and delivery (probably subject to anti-trust issues, but no matter, it happened). Then you have one truck delivering both papers, but still not to a captive market. If every house in every city in the market was buying papers, then in this era, I bet you would have seen newspaper delivery companies do the actual delivery, picking up at the plant, delivering, maybe adding some services such as subscription management and bundling options. But that didn’t happen. It did happen in the internet though - you buy your information delivery system quite separately from the information itself. Like I said, if you want to make a claim about the trash trucks in your city, instead of using analogies to other industries which upon close inspection are structured in a materially different way, why not simply create a solid model of the thinking you are actually interested in? ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2010, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/93 "2010-07-08T18:32:23Z")
> [@emacknight](#): > > I’m not observing them pass. I am observing them pick up trash on my street. Do you realize that? You have yet again failed to understand the situation. I’m not suggesting it’s inefficient that they drive down my street. It’s inefficient that they STOP and make PICKUPS on my street. Do you realize that is what we are talking about? Of course he does. He does it for a living, and so do I in a different context than **Sam Stone**. Would you arguem medicine with your doctor as vehemently as you are arguing this? Maybe you didn’t know there are professionals who do this, and it isn’t hocus-pocus but advanced engineering? If you didn’t realize it before but do now, does that cause you to step back and reassess if you have all the information as I suggested? > [@](#): > > As I said before, each company is individually as efficient as they can be. Sure you said that, but presented no evidence. You still haven’t said how you define efficiency or why that is the appropriate measure, let alone how you came to your conclusions. > [@](#): > > Each hired a super smart guy like you to evaluate their process and show them the be routes. But it doesn’t change the fact that there are 5 companies providing the same service. Each company is efficient, but having 5 companies is stupid. Maybe that is the rub - each supersmart guy knows there are 4 others. And they also know proprietary information regarding costs, capacity, not only now, but in the future, but also what the broader goals of the company is. You don’t seem to have any of this info, but you seem to make conclusions as though you (and all of us) do. **Sam Stone** appears to be one of those “smart guys”. Why not accept his word that the problem is more complex than you assert? > [@](#): > > What if the private trucks drive over children ever day but the government only drives over 1? You were better off rejecting things that don’t fit your ideology. That’s a good way to demonstrate you have a handle on the actual modeling of the process you are asserting has certain features.:rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2010, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/94 "2010-07-08T18:42:55Z")
> [@waterj2](#): > > I’m no expert on trash collection, but it seems to me that there are efficiency gains to managing things on a larger scale, as well as better accounting for externalities such as backed up traffic behind the trucks. Nor I, truth be told, this thread is the first I have heard of individual pickups. But, it may be that, if in fact we can assume that in time the companies will roll up, then the city is in fact getting multiple trials about sizes and variations of services now that it can specify as desirable later when contracts come up again. Maybe some size bins are not wanted or needed. Think if it as a giant beta test of lots of options. And their is certainly efficiency in knowing the results instead of speculating on what the best services for that area would be, perhaps much greater to do this now than have a contract with all the wrong services later. ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2010, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/95 "2010-07-08T18:46:48Z")
> [@ralph124c](#): > > You mentioned busing children to school, and that works in this example. Imagine if instead of a horribly inefficient government run system, the city gave up and said, “from now on each parent can contract with a licensed bus company.” Each morning, 5 separate buses would come to your neighbourhood, each stopping at a different house, to take kids to the same school. > > Notice how that’s set up. 5 kids, at 5 houses, all on a single block are going to the same school. Should you send one bus or 5? If my city gave up the bus contract to private competing companies, I would have 5 buses makings stops on my street. > No, my point is, bussing to achieve racial “equality” is a failed idea. Kids should go to schools in their neighborhoods 9they can walk)..instead of being shipped off to a school on the other side of town. That’s not a bad idea. It could lead to innovations, such as teachers on buses that have kids going a long way - help with homework or whatever. Maybe the busses could be split by grade to help with this. That would be a powerful selling point, and it other parents chose a different company, so what? That’s what I want for my kid - it sucks they have to be on a bus, but if it is a rolling classroom extending their education? Some would pay for that! ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2010, 6:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/96 "2010-07-08T18:51:55Z")
> [@Gangster\_Octopus](#): > > **Sam Stone** I am not sure I nderstand the capcaity arguments you are making. resumably the amount of trash is fixed regardless of privae versus public. X amount of trash requires X amount of trucks which requires X amount of trips to the dump. Maybe I am not understanding something. Is your trash exactly the same every week? Are your neighbors? Are you sure? What he was trying to say was that a truck can’t have capacity too close to the average trash on the route, because variations on any given week might mean it can’t complete the route or needs to double back (over flow). On the other hand, if you have a truck that is way larger than average, you never overflow, but you have higher costs per week jsut to operate a bigger truck, and that is wasted. So you really gotta work at that to get it right, and since trucks are large investments, you have to predict yoru needs in advance, knowing people move, seasons change, new houses get built, you gain customers and lose customers. Plus, your sales guys won’t be happy if you are at or near 100% capacity because then they can’t sign you up! Every business has these kinds of tensions internally, regardless of competition, and that is what **Sam Stone** was getting at. ---
**Author:** ![not\_alice](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/not_alice/32/7283_2.png) [@not\_alice](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/not_alice)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2010, 7:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/97 "2010-07-08T19:03:34Z")
> [@CannyDan](#): > > You seem to be making an ideological argument, not an actual one. Yes, we all must agree that we do not _know_ the full and complete circumstances here, and so we can’t produce a perfectly correct microanalysis of the efficiencies, blah, blah, blah…. But it appears we know enough to draw some reasonable conclusions. Thus we can say with pretty fair assurance that having 5 or 6 trucks/companies driving the same routes must be less efficient than having some smaller number doing the same service. You in fact need to construct some rather esoteric circumstances and some pretty specific assumptions to show that the observed system could be, maybe, if all these special conditions apply, as efficient as fewer companies/trucks (or even a governmental alternative) providing the same service. This suits your philosophical bent, but doesn’t comport well with the actual circumstance here. Spoken like someone who has never modeled even a modestly complex system. Go ahead try it. 🙂 I will agree with **Sam Stone** - given what we know here, we can’t say anything with “fair assurance” if we want to be taken seriously as having considered the alternatives. > [@](#): > > The comparison with retail choice is misplaced. Coke versus Pepsi is “duplication” only if the product is “something to drink”. If that were the case, then it would indeed be more efficient to serve the need for drink with a single, globally acceptable substance, say Coepsi. But in the real market this is not duplication because Coke and Pepsi strive to differentiate themselves as separate products, serving different needs—a need for Coke versus a need for Pepsi. OP said this happens with the trash service too. Just ans many scoff at a difference between Coke and Pepsi, he scoffed at the difference in trash services. That’s OK, some people will just choose one at random. I prefer Pepsi, but buy what is on sale. Some people never change choice. All taken into account by marketing and service models. No problem. > [@](#): > > And see in the case in point, exactly the same posturing, with the competing companies all seeking to market their services by offering “different” service options (bin size, color, special pickups, etc.). But in this case, for most people, this is a distinction without a difference. For most people, the criterion of importance is **Garbage picked up? Yes/No**. And for this, duplication of vehicles on the same street cannot possibly be _more efficient_ than the alternative. Ah so you have some marketing studies that show the value of the different options to a vendor? And that these choices are carved in stone, and people are not subject to switching? Because that would make it pretty unique. People switch phone companies all the time, tv companies, ISPs, in the end to most they are pretty much undifferentiated except for some branding campaigns, just like coke, pepsi, or trash pickup. BTW, while we are on the subject of truck efficiency, does the scale of this compare at all to the scale of all the delivery trucks around town to stores large and small? I still don’t get what is being optimized and why it matters in this case. > [@](#): > > I’ll bet that, if we revisit this in a year or two, the number of companies servicing the OP’s neighborhood will be dramatically reduced, by simple competitive attrition. Or even – oh no! – a government contract to a single operator for a defined time period, let at competitive bid and renewed by bid at the end of the time period. And what will have been optimized will not be truck costs or externalities, but market knowledge and use of capital. A new entrant may still try to come in, with smaller trucks like before, but the rolled up company will have the initial market share and all the proprietary info about what services worked and didn’t. That is the value of going through this period - it is an efficient use of capital, and marketing efforts, regardless of whether truck miles are minimized during this short period or not. ---
**Author:** ![emacknight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/3ec8ea/32.png) [@emacknight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/emacknight)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2010, 8:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/98 "2010-07-08T20:14:35Z")
> [@not\_alice](#): > > Of course he does. He does it for a living, and so do I in a different context than **Sam Stone**. Would you arguem medicine with your doctor as vehemently as you are arguing this? Maybe you didn’t know there are professionals who do this, and it isn’t hocus-pocus but advanced engineering? If you didn’t realize it before but do now, does that cause you to step back and reassess if you have all the information as I suggested? I studied optimization as part of my mechanical engineering degree, and I’ve worked process optimization. So, uh, now what? Should we pull out our cocks? Compare our alma maters? Rank our GPAs? > [@not\_alice](#): > > **Sam Stone** appears to be one of those “smart guys”. Why not accept his word that the problem is more complex than you assert? Unfortunately, **Sam Stone** is entirely blinded my his ideology, as he summed up in post #20 > [@Sam Stone](#): > > So basically, I reject the entire premise of the OP based on that example. Care to put your ideology aside and try again? In all your experience, and all your wisdom, would you ever recommend to a garbage company that they should have multiple trucks picking up trash from a single block of houses? How many ridiculous and extraneous conditions do you need to make to justify your statement? ---
**Author:** ![emacknight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/3ec8ea/32.png) [@emacknight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/emacknight)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2010, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/99 "2010-07-08T20:43:46Z")
> [@not\_alice](#): > > With a degree primarily in optimization algorithms, this really catches my eye. > > How do you know the trucks are running the “best” routes based on your observation of a specific block? I don’t, I was giving them each the benefit of the doubt, I could have made a ridiculous assumption like \*\*Sam Stone \*\*that each company sends trucks to the dump when 70% full. Then repeate it several times. Instead I simply assumed for sake of argument that that they wouldn’t intentionally go out of their way to waste time/money/resources. But then again, each truck is a giant rolling advertisement, maybe they save on ad costs by just driving the trucks around. > [@not\_alice](#): > > Sure - I see multiple visits by USPS a day, and UPS and FedEx and other delivery trucks too, and I am in a residential area in BFE. Why not consolidate? It’s true, there are often solutions that seem counter intuitive, such as doing deeper into the cravas. Sending everything through Memphis, routing all air traffic through Toronto. But tell me this: if a Fedex truck leaves from the sorting hub with two packages on route to my house, under what circumstances would you recommend that he deliver one, drive away, then come back later and deliver the other? This is very close to what is happening on my block, so let’s see if you know the answer to that question. Having thought about this issue since moving in last year, I think this situation represents one of those oddly counter intuitive problems. We all like to think of private industry and being more efficient than government. We’d like to think that competition will bring about cost savings, innovations, and efficiencies. This example seems counter to that, we have 5 companies overlapping and providing an identical service–there is a cost associated to that. ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [July 8, 2010, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719/100 "2010-07-08T21:05:29Z")
Last week, I ordered Papa John’s pizza and the neighbor ordered Domino’s. Can you believe the inefficiency? Two different delivery drivers sent to the same street! Why can’t the government take over the pizza delivery business so that one driver could have delivered both of our pizzas? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/government-waste-vs-market-inefficiencies/545719.md?page=6)