Call it what you want, the Ministry of something or another was calling all the shots. Tehre is a reason they called it Japan inc. There was a coordinated business strategy at the national level.
I think everyone can agree that the “zombie firms” created by serial bailouts were a drag on the economy but most people ALSO agree that letting all the japanese abnks fail at once was probably not a good idea either.
Some economists believe that the massive stimulus was the onlything that kept the Japanese economy from actually tanking.
Japan has (proportionally) much larger debt and deficits than we do and they are not turning into Greece. Why is that?
None of these things were the technocratic “mistake” The technocratic "mistake was not regulating the banks tightly enough and letting the bailouts go on for too long. it should have been obvious much earlier in the process that the bailouts were a hospice program and not a recovery program. The banks were going to fail and the bailouts could only spread out the failures enough so that the market could absorb the impact.
Well, if mixed econmies work so well, then why do people keep saying that unfettered markets are the way to go?
Sam, there will be duplication of miles traveled if five companies are covering the same area. When one company does it, they plan their routes for efficiency. They know that if they send Truck 1 down Apple, Birch, and Cypress Streets, it will be full. They then plan to send Truck 2 down Dogwood, Elm, and Fig Streets. Sending Truck 2 to follow Truck 1 until Truck 1 is full is grossly inefficient as Truck 2 will have to drive all six streets when you know it should only have to drive three. Any waste hauler, from the smallest city to the biggest private company does this planning.
If you have five companies, each of them will have to send a truck down each street they have customers on. As a result, Company A sends Truck 1 down all six streets. So do Companies B through E, totaling 30 streets covered (5 companies * 6 streets) as opposed to the efficient monopoly covering 6 streets. The monopoly also makes 2 trips to the landfill (Truck 1 and Truck 2), whereas the 5 company CF makes 5 trips.
It was mentioned in post 10 that the government waste haulers could be hauling the waste to a distant landfill. In my experience, this is unlikely. The county landfill will almost always be closer than the private ones.
I think waste hauling is a poor subject for a public vs private debate. As I mentioned already, the waste hauling contract is usually a limited monopoly, granted by the local government for a limited time, with contracted rates. Frequently, the county trucks aren’t owned or operated by the county but by private contractors. I do, however, think that one entity hauling the waste in a given area is inherently more efficient than several companies hauling the waste.
I think a real question here is why don’t the individual companies essentially trade routes to avoid duplication. I.e. subcontract out to one another for a particular neghborhood. Now some might say that is collusion, but as long as they are not colluding on price I don’t think it is illegal. And as long as they are not saying “You stay away from marketing to customers in Neghborhood Y and we’ll stay out of Z” it should be fine.
Another option is why doesn’t a private company offer a discount if say a critical mass of folks in a particular neighborhood pick them as a service provider. That might be difficult to actually do, but not impossible.
I think an even better question is, if private waste hauling is inherently less efficient, how come there’s a trend towards private waste hauling, and how come cities are seeing savings of 20-40% on average from privatizing?
I will agree that public/private ‘partnerships’ like waste hauling are not true free markets. If the government is granting a monopoly to a private entity, it’s not freeing a market. It’s just offloading the work of managing a monopoly to another entity.
Less efficient than what exactly? Less efficient than the city, less efficient use of collective assets, or less efficient use of a single commodity (fuel or labor)? If all the trucks are full then route overlap and labor inefficiencies resemble every other competitive service industry.
Think about it in reverse: Imagine any other neighbourhood where the government either collects garbage or contracts it out. Picture watching a truck pull past your house to get your neighbour’s garbage, then later another truck comes by to get yours, then later another truck comes and gets the guy on the other side of you. There is no way you could call that efficient.
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.
In other words, imagine your outrage if you found out your city had 5 times as many trucks as they needed. 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.
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.
In this scenario, we’d have 5 carriers delivering the same paper, to different houses on the same street. Would you consider that efficient?
Each company is operating at their individual best efficiency. You’ll notice that there aren’t 25 trucks–no company is sending 5 trucks.
If the government took over, but continued with the current process people would be pissed. Just like mentioned above, if two companies merged they wouldn’t keep sending both trucks.
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%.
Some times the free market isn’t the best way to go.
From what i have seen, this state of affairs doesn’t last very long. You don’t see 5 trash companies sericing the same subdivision very long before one of them gets the bright idea that they can pick up the nieghbor’s garbage for less than they are paying right now.
My paperboy delivers about 6 different papers to my neighborhood and he isn’t a boy and he drives around in a jeep delivering different papers to different houses. If each paper had had its own delivery boy, they would all cover approximately the same ground to deliver the same amount of paper, of course there are economies of scale, its silly to try and twist the fact pattern around to lookk for ways taht econmies of scale might not be applicable.
You’re confusing efficient with competitive. Imagine a town with only 1 retail store and 1 grocery store. It is certainly more efficient to have one large store.
I’ve never been outraged at competition. I’ve questioned companies deliberately overloading a market to wipe the other out(think drug stores).
Nobody is standing around watching. They’re all collecting garbage. 6 small companies versus 1 large company. If the trucks are full at the end of the day then hard assets are fully utilized. The end result is a large pie that is cut into 6 slices.
When I was a kid there was great overlap in paper route deliveries among the paperboys. Over time there was a tendency to gain more people on your block as new people moved.
Again, you’re confusing competition with efficiency. Market forces will determine efficiency.
It’s the best way to go for the consumer as long as market forces don’t jeopardize a utility. My gas is produced by one company (by state charter) and sold through independent marketers. Any of the marketers can go out of business but my house will always stay connected because of the PUCO.
I don’t know. It took me about the same time to renew my license, including an eyetest and a new picture, as it took to pick up a pizza from Papa Murphy’s the other night.
Garbage collection is a natural monopoly, and my city has it contracted out to a private company. I used to live in a very small town in NJ. Because of our size, collection took only a day, and city workers did it, and did other stuff the rest of the week. They seemed rather more with it than the usual trash collector and we got more services without an extra charge. They also did stuff like pick up all our leaves from piles at the curb, instead of what can fit in our green can like now. (If I had as many leaves here as I did there I’d be putting them out at Christmas.)
I think your attitude comes from selectively ignoring good things governments do and bad and incompetent things private enterprise does.
Here’s an example. I’m going to change from six papers to four papers and use a mile long street for easy math.
In the worst case, all four paper boys travel the street to deliver the paper. The total distance traveled is four one-way miles, plus four times the distance from their starting location to the street.
In an “average” case, the deliveries will be spaced evenly, say at 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, and 0.8 miles along the road. You’d still have a total distance of 2 one-way miles traveled, plus four times the distance from the start to the street.
If only one delivery boy were doing the deliveries, he would travel the street once, covering a single one-way mile plus the distance from the start to street once.
Also, to address another issue raised upthread, one delivery boy (garbage truck) working a street only has the overhead of one bike and worker. The four worker scenario has four times the overhead (bike, worker pay).
I’m not sure you read what I wrote, because your response wasn’t in any way related. I didn’t confuse efficient with competitive. The rest of what you wrote was equally nonsensical. I think that’s the second time someone confused garbage collection with retail shopping, they aren’t related, it’s not a valid comparison.
Consider back to the newspaper scenario. A town has two papers, so naturally there would be two delivery trucks, one delivers for the Herald, the other for the Post. Each day the two drivers go down the same road delivering papers to their subscribers, passing each other as they go.
This is a normal, straight forward operation. Each paper provides a service, and will optimize their routes as much as needed, competition will ultimately determine success. There is nothing inefficient here because it is two different newspapers.
Now, imagine the Herald buys the Post creating the Herald Post, and prints only one paper each day, and not two. Would you expect them to keep both delivery drivers, or eliminate the redundancy?
That analogy doesn’t make sense. You’re comparing 2 combined products with a competing service industry. The paper routes (a service) still overlap from carrier to carrier. It’s an apples to oranges situation. The pure allocation of resources cannot occur outside of a monopoly so efficiency within a non-monopoly is dictated by market forces.