Public Administration in Today's World of Organizations and Markets Simon 2000

I love Herbert Simon. A recent paper by Simon, one year before he died. His focus has changed and become broader, the new direction he has gone is the focus on group identity and its role in confounding traditional perspectives on organizations. Going along with this is his attack on applying uncompromised straight economics to actual decisions, which has many angles that i haven't heard before and ought to look into, including the argument from Say's law.

Since my interest is so much on thing that he did 50 years ago, I can't help but think that I won't be ready for this stuff for another decade. In particular, I have a nagging feeling that the perspectives in this article will have something to influence to my currently contradictory understanding of consensus and the speed of decisions. By a straight naive network/degree interpretation, consensus should be slower at making decsions and changing, but it is actually much faster than some majority system. I think this is because of Nader's harmony ideology, but it could be for more flattering reasons, though with this I would have to find what disadvantages would serve as corrolaries to the argument (since no view of a decisionmaking system that doesn't come with both pros and cons is to be trusted).

He argues that, in a market, something like Consumer Reports is necessary wehre products are similar but not identical, where, by context, Consumer Reports is code for "organizations".

quotes

• "Adam Smith took a dim view of large organizations where management became separated from teh direct oversight of the manager. Looking around for examples of such organizations, he found mainly universities, like Cambrdgige and Oxford, which he described and inept, inefficient and corrupt."
• "Once installed in the organization, the employee is surrounded by information ind influences quite different from those that would sorround him or her in another setting, inducing the the empolyee a strong identification, not only motivational but also cognitive, with the organziation and its goals. It is this mechanism of organizational identification that Adam Smith missed when he concluded that large organizations with hired managers could not be efficient."
  • This argument is different in a very subtle way from Coase's transaction costs, and it includes stigmergy. I can't get my head around it. This is why I feel like I am ten years behind. More:
• Organization identification does not depend on profit motives; it can work within governmental and university organizations as powerfully as within profit-making busniesses. Such studies as have been made (not as numerous as one would like) show that, on average, profit-making and governmental organanizations that produce the same products, both operating in markets, attain about the same levels of efficiency–the profit motive appears to give no visible competitive edge to private business. So the increasing tendency in recent decades for government agencies to contract out many of their activities evidently is not driven by considerations of efficiency–or, if it is, there is little solid empirical evidence for this preference."
  • More hints, still have to understand implications for the private-public counter argument.
• "More precisely, money's value is a collection of states of mind of all the people who use it. "
  • What is the influence of this on the number of possible states of the group of people who use money. Or the influence of this by the number of possible states? And even more important, how are these questions influenced by group identity.
• Look into Says' Law as an argument against whichever assumptions of economic theory.
• He dismisses public choice easily (the application of econ principles as a theory of voter behavior. Policy as an idea market at market equilibrium.