Why Don't IT Contractors Fail?

Just finished reading The Confidence Game,--anyone who enjoyed The Sting and the David Mamet film House of Games (which inspired the book) will enjoy it.  The author views con artists running con games as employing human traits, the desire to believe, the desire for meaning, the reluctance to cut one's losses, etc.we all share. With that perspective, I was struck by the question in my title.

How did I get there?  It's true, I believe, that most massive IT projects, possibly especially those in government, fail; the success rate is maybe 30 percent.  With that sort of track record, why do we in government keep creating and funding the projects and why can IT contractors get contracts to run them?  Surely if Elon Musk's space venture only got into orbit 30 percent of the time, he'd fail to attract venture capital.  But as far as I can tell (not very far), no big IT contractor has gone out of business because they can't get any more contracts.  So why?

Maybe they're running a con game?  After all that in the beginning there's lots of enthusiasm, enough to sweep agency employees, agency officials, even OMB and Congress into supporting the project.  A big project may paradoxically be easier to sell than a small one: a big project has meaning, it offers to change many things, to solve lots of problems, etc. etc. For IT projects it's likely that management and Congress don't really understand the nuts and bolts; they just know that people who should know, who seem to know, claim it can work, can succeed.   In the early stages it's easy to use the project focus to find more improvements to make, problems to solve, things to be folded into the project scope.  And once you're committed to a project, your reputation is involved, there's money been spent, meetings have been held, promises made.  And the problems surely are fixable, no need to abandon hope, just spend a little more money here, work some more hours there, move the schedule back just a little.

Finally there's a loss of confidence by those who should know, an increasing desperation, and Congress and management cut their losses, a process made much easier because there's been turnover in both areas so they aren't killing their own baby, it's some else's bastard child.  That can in turn make it easier for those who know (who haven't retired or moved to higher paying private jobs) to blame the big shots for not keeping the faith.

Meanwhile the IT contractors can move on to run another con.

Note: I don't necessarily think IT contractors are knowingly con artists; they may be conning themselves as much as their customers and they do have the occasional success.

Can See Remote Planets But Not Milky Way

Kevin Drum writes he's never seen the Milky Way.  Meanwhile two scientists are revisiting the Drake Equation (a way to think about the probability of other intelligent life in the universe) based on the discovery of thousands of planets.

Bring Back Manufacturing Farm Jobs?

There's lots of (bipartisan) angst over the loss of manufacturing jobs.  Trump talks about Carrier moving from Indiana to Mexico (it also closed its Syracuse operation years ago),.  The idea is these jobs were good ones, ones which high school grads could do and which would support a family, perhaps even a single-earner family.  Liberals point to the loss of union jobs, the UMW, the UAW, the steelworkers unions are all shadows of their former (circa 1970) selves.

What neither Trump nor liberals mourn is the loss of farm jobs.  (That's not totally true--the food movement often talks about the need for more farmers, but that's somewhat different than farm jobs.)

My own feelings are represented by this piece from Modern Farmer, a person who remembers the farm life fondly, but doesn't want it for herself.

When The Right Was Wrong

Remember when the hot issue in American politics was Jimmy Carter's Panama Canal treaty, where we agreed to turn over the Canal to Panama over 20 years?  If I recall correctly, Ronald Reagan rode to the presidency by ranting about the issue, mostly to please Jesse Helms so he could win the primary in North Carolina.

Carter got the treaty approved in the Senate, just barely, to a chorus of Republican predictions of doom.  Bottom line: the Panamanians were incapable of managing the canal and it was indispensable to American security.

Move forward some years and Panama hired the Chinese firm Hutchison-Whampoa to manage port facilities in the area.  Again Republican uproar.  This was the Chinese sneaking their Oriental tentacles into a strategic area. Some Republicans wanted to discard the treaty.  But time wounds all heels.

Today the canal is operating well and Panama has just finished expanding it.

The Myth of Justice

Just listening to the book "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Harari, who discusses the key role of "myths" (defined as things which have no physical existence) in our history.  He spreads his discussion widely, including religions, nations, corporations, etc. as myths.   I think he mentioned "justice" as one myth, though just in passing.

Got me to thinking about the two judges making the news: Judge Curiel, attacked by Trump as biased, and Judge Persky, attacked by millions as biased in sentencing the Stanford student convicted of sexual assault.  It seems to me the two go together, because the controversies are about justice.  No one would say that judges who graduate from Stanford should never sit in judgment on Stanford graduates, just as no one except Trump would say that a person whose parents immigrated from Mexico should never sit in judgment on Hispanic immigrants, or someone who disparages Hispanic immigrants. 

However, people do say that the commonalities of background between Persky and the student explain the sentence, meaning we know judges can be biased. On one side we have Trump claiming bias, on the other victim rights advocates claiming bias.  So  the myth of impartial justice is being threatened from two sides and much of the emotion in both debates is the community reinforcing the boundaries of justice.

Mormonism, Progressivism, and Utopianism

Via Marginal Revolution, I came to this plan to build "New Vista" developments in Vermont for millions of residents, based apparently on ideas of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. The son of the industrial diamond maker has the money behind the plan and is busily buying up Vermont land and making enemies of some of the locals.

The plan reminds me of a scheme I ran across when reading in Country Life literature; it probably was a proposal at one of the Country Life conferences in the 1920's.  It too was a plan for a very organized town which incorporated all the necessities: agriculture, commerce, transportation, community services, etc.   Never went anywhere much, although perhaps you can see some of the same ideas in the New Deal, in the "green" towns, like Greenbelt, MD and the Resettlement Administration's projects.

And of course pieces of this pop up everywhere in American history, from the town settlements of the early New England Puritans to the utopian schemes of New Harmony and others. More recently we see the seasteading movement of the libertarians.

Trump and Lawsuits

I'd like to know how many lawsuits Trump or his enterprises have filed, how many have been filed against them, and the won-settled-lost figures for each category

When I wrote the above sentence, I was suffering a loss of faith in the Internet: I should have known better.

"An exclusive USA TODAY analysis of legal filings across the United States finds that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and his businesses have been involved in at least 3,500 legal actions in federal and state courts during the past three decades. They range from skirmishes with casino patrons to million-dollar real estate suits to personal defamation lawsuits.

Read the whole thing.

Bureaucrats: Bulwark of the Constitution?

That's the position the prominent law professor Eric Posner seems to take in his op-ed for the Times:

"Mr. Trump’s biggest obstacle to vast power is not the separation of powers but the millions of federal employees who are supposed to work for him. Most of these employees have a strong sense of professionalism and are dedicated to the mission of their agency. They don’t take kindly to arbitrary orders from above. As President Harry Truman said ahead of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency: “He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen.”

To make things happen, Mr. Trump will need to get loyalists into leadership positions of the agencies, but to do so, he will need the cooperation of the Senate (or he will need to aggressively exploit his recess appointment powers). Moreover, the small number of politically appointed leaders enjoy only limited control of the mass of civil servants. These employees can drag their feet, leak to the press, threaten to resign and employ other tactics to undermine Mr. Trump’s initiatives if they object to them. They’re also hard to fire, thanks to Civil Service protections."

I don't think the Founding Fathers saw this role for bureaucrats, but I think Prof. Posner is right, particularly in the Federal context.  In other countries with more centralized bureaucracies, maybe a politician can topple the bureaucratic bulwark, but in the U.S.  not so.   I'd quibble a bit about the "professionalism": conflicting alliances with Congress and private interests may be as important..

When politicians, like the Republicans now, go after bureaucrats in the VA or IRS, they should remember there's a reason we have civil service rules. 

A Small Defense of Trump

I pride myself on being able to focus on nuts and bolts of implementation.  With that in mind, I'll offer a small defense of Donald Trump. The story briefly: he holds a fundraiser for vets early in the year, claims to have raised $6 million, of which $1 million came from him.  The media, notably the Post, pressed him on who and when, and yesterday he announced the details.  It turns out he didn't write his check until last week.  The mean-minded, which often includes me, take that as a sign he wouldn't have given without the media attention.

That's surely one story which fits the known facts.  But there's an alternative version of  what might have happened. Trump does the fundraiser without really planning the details of implementation. He does intend to make the donation.  What I haven't seen yet is the details of the handling of the money, whether donors wrote checks to the recipients or whether the money was routed through a checking account.  It's also not clear who determined the recipients--Trump, his aides, or the donors.  Once the media got on his case, Trump's people slapped together what was revealed at the news conference.

Bottomline: While I won't convict Trump of lying about the donations, I will say there's a strong case he and his people were inefficient bureaucrats, proving they fail at implementation.

For the bad case see TPM

Muhammad Ali RIP

Sometime I'll write about my memories of him, but today RIP.