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Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

economist.com

191–200 of 609 posts

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#191
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cutting corners and costs e.g. shutting ticket offices, doing just enough to barely offer the service. It's not like your passengers have any sensible alternative. If that doesn't do it then you can also load the company up with debt and pay yourself a nice dividend until rates rise.

> shutting ticket offices Why should I pay higher prices/taxes to keep ticket offices 90% of the country and increasing don't use open? International Airlines finished moving to e-ticketing 15 years ago

Why should I pay to maintain a road I’m not using now, or a fire service I haven’t used yet?

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do government unions not try to maximize their profits from the public or am I missing something?

Employees of private companies.. can also join unions! Gasp!

Yes, and? Unions of both sectors try to maximize their profits. Which do not?

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#193
post #179
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that the whole point of privatisation? By introducing a profit maximisation goal you (supposedly) create a more efficient operation. I've worked in both the public and the private sector and can definitely understand the argument. In my government job it was way easier to slack off and no-one really cared about the results. There was no actual pressure from above to hit targets. You had your budget and it didn'…

I've also seen many public places where people are efficient, and also stressed because of the amount of work to do. I feel like your experience is not very applicable to all situations. What's more, a private company which has monopoly does not really have special incentive to respect deadlines and everything: it is the only choice, so customers won't deal with any competitor and are stuck with this private company.

Absolutely. My experience is completely anecdotal, and even if it's true that you get less bang for the buck in the public sector I still think it's ideologically sound and worth it. My country has a huge public sector but I think it's good.

What's normally the driving motivator in public companies to be efficient?

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You look at these crappy companies and the problem you see is unionised staff? Have you seen the dividends and bonuses at Thames Water, or read the article posted here?

Thames Water's CEO has a $1.5 million pay package which is lower than CEOs of corporations of the same size. The funding for public unions in the UK is $233 billion. Great comparison there.

CEOs of corporations of the same size quite often have to find and retain customers in competitive markets - which is hardly the case with Thames Water?

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#195
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience of American railways as a tourist is having to show my passport to book a ticket from Davis to Sacramento (I assume I also did that on other trips like to SFO but don't remember), and it being expensive. My experience in the UK and Germany is show up, pay, go, and it being cheaper.

US consumer rail way is a quasi public corporation (Amtrak) that has lost money for decades and is still funded to the tune of over $1 billion per year. You are confusing that with private US rails.

If you're going to insist on focusing on that, I think you'd already missed the point of what you were replying to in your comment that I replied to.

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those in the unions are the public.

> Those in the unions are the public This is a nonsense delineation in systems thinking. That railroad shareholders are also the public doesn't justify ripping them off. Unions are beholden to the same impulses towards monopoly and rent-seeking as corporations. Swap members ( i.e. sellers of labour) for shareholders ( i.e. sellers of capital) and employers ( i.e. buyers of labour) for customers ( i.e. buyers of goods…

"That railroad shareholders are also the public"

They are the public, just not the UK public!

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And you don't extract profits from a rail line by offering the best service." So how do you extract profits then?

1.) Force other competitors to go belly-up or buy them to create a Monopoy or if the authorities don‘t let you do that, try to end up in a duopoly situation where you and your competitor come to some silent agreement to not overly compete. 2.) Raise the regulatory bar to prevent startups from entering your field. Milk whatever half dead infrastructure you have and people depend on. Oh and raise prices every odd year…

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Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#198
post #41
post #14

Is this surprising? People have been crying out about the effects of privatisation for years. When basic services mandatory for modern human life like water, ISPs and energy are privatised you end up with funds that could end up going towards investment or towards funding other public services are instead funnelled out towards shareholders. The generational wealth the UK had in the form of North Sea oil passed off to…

ISPs are not mandatory for human life.

They will be before long, in the seemingly inevitable cashless society with nearly all retail done online

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#199
Look, the shareholders in water companies need to be wiped out.

They have allowed the balance sheets to become untenable, now they lose their capital. PE has sold to the next fool - but more fool them.

The debt holders are going to have to take a haircut as well, again this is a hard but fair lesson from the pages of capitalism.

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#200

I am a deep believer in free markets as the most efficient mechanism for distributing goods and services, creating better offerings and lower prices through competition and encapsulating risk in innovation. Unfortunately, none of these apply to the privatization of inherently public commodities that run on top of an underlying network infrastructure. This can be streets, railway tracks or water pipes - whenever there…

This sounds simple, but it isn't. In reality there are complicating factors. For instance, the introduction of New Public Management ideas can complicate things immensely. You fragment an organization into multiple smaller organizations, each responsible for some part of the business. Then you require each of them to be profitable. This also provides an opportunity to privatize by then having the resulting companies having to compete for contracts.

This sounds sensible the first time you hear about it. The reality is pretty awful.

This happened to the national railway company in Norway (NSB). The result was lack of investment, poor service, and a bureaucracy where nobody seems to be responsible for anything. Which means that rather than concerns being addressed, they get ignored. Because when, for most things, you can blame someone else, nothing gets fixed because nobody is really in charge anymore. As a consumer you do not really deal with one company anymore - you have to deal perhaps half a dozen companies that do not work well together.

NSB went from a somewhat poorly run public sector organization to an entirely dysfunctional failed NPM experiment. The reasoning behind this was about as sane as suggesting we terraform Mars rather than try to not screw up the Earth.

I have seen this in the private sector as well. I worked for a telco for a decade, and they are very similar to how New Public Management works in the public sector. (Which isn't too odd since a lot of them are former state monopolies, so they will be prone to the same sort of defective reasoning you see when NPM is applied in the public sector).

You fragment, outsource and then pulverize accountability. Telcos are usually fragmented from the outset. The restrictions on ownership models, a large telco will typically have separate companies with entirely separate cultures, technology stacks and business processes for every country they operate in. Yet within those countries they will fragment further - ensuring that you have siloed organizations working at cross purposes. Usually due to very localized prioritization to achieve goals that affect bonuses, ignoring the large picture.

One thing that is very striking in telcos is that it is really, really hard to find people who actually understand telecoms technology within them. And they rarely have much control over the technology. Which most of the time has exorbitant operating costs and extremely slow evolution when compared to large internet companies.

In the telco sector it tends to lead to an inability to make sensible use of capital to act on opportunities and evolve the business. You have companies that make a lot of money, but because of how leaders are incentivized and promoted, nobody wants to take risks and evolve new business areas because that might affect short term profitability or personal compensation for leaders. And even if you have leaders who want to, they will typically have very little manouvering space and anything that doesn't have a quick payoff will typically be sabotaged and then axed.

The way you "solve" problems in the telco sector is typically through mergers and acquisitions. The latter often having a very low chance of realizing much value. I've also seen a lot of examples of companies just selling their operations when, due to failure to respond to how markets develop, just have to give up and find new markets where their outdated strategy still works. (One way to look at this is to see what happens when a market reaches various saturation milestones).

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