NP: Franz Ferdinand, Tonight: Franz Ferdinand

Ezra Klein talks to a political scientist about how we govern, in general. Aside from just liking the term "kludgeocracy," a few parts really resonate, particularly this bit on "privatization" and perverse incentives:

In most cases, “privatization” does not really mean that a function has been given back to the market. It means that we have a highly subsidized, regulated, sometimes monopolized activity in which there is private ownership but a high degree of public control.

When you do that, you often lose a lot of what is good about markets, and in fact you create very strange kinds of private actors who are in fact totally dependent on government. And that often incentivizes them to be more oriented to lobbying and influencing government than to serving their customers. And that’s where kludgeocracy is not just a complaint about “efficiency” but a complaint about the kind of governance that is generated by complexity.

The more charitable view is that this is more akin to evolution or ethology in nature, in that you can only really build on what's already there. In an existing organism, you can't exactly blow it up and start over. The less charitable view, in Teles' own words, is that "the paper wasn’t really intended to make anyone feel better."