Public Sector Work Quotes

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She was never going to seek gainful employment again, that was for certain. She'd remain outside the public sector. She'd be an anarchist, she'd travel with jaguars. She was going to train herself to be totally irrational. She'd fall in love with a totally inappropriate person. She'd really work on it, but abandon would be involved as well. She'd have different names, a.k.a. Snake, a.k.a. Snow - no that was juvenile. She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter.
Joy Williams
For the left, the flashpoint is up the class ladder (between the very top and the rest); for the right, it is down between the middle class and the poor. For the left, the flashpoint is centered in the private sector; for the right, in the public sector. Ironically, both call for an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work.
Arlie Russell Hochschild (Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right)
The State cannot and should not bow down easily to interest groups who approach it to seek handouts, rents and unnecessary privileges like tax cuts. It should seek instead for those interest groups to work dynamically with it in its search for growth and technological change.
Mariana Mazzucato (The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths)
Take democracy. According to the common-sense meaning, a society is democratic to the extent that people can participate in a meaningful way in managing their affairs. But the doctrinal meaning of democracy is different—it refers to a system in which decisions are made by sectors of the business community and related elites. The public are to be only “spectators of action,” not “participants,” as leading democratic theorists (in this case, Walter Lippmann) have explained. They are permitted to ratify the decisions of their betters and to lend their support to one or another of them, but not to interfere with matters—like public policy—that are none of their business.
Noam Chomsky (How the World Works)
The petite bourgeoise and small property in general represent a precious zone of autonomy and freedom in state systems increasingly dominated by large public and private bureaucracies.
James C. Scott (Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity and Meaningful Work and Play)
As one man explains, "A lot of us have done okay, but we don't want to lose what we've got, see it given away." When I ask him what he saw as being "given away," it was not public waters given to dumpers, or clean air give to smoke stacks. It was not health or years of life. It was not lost public sector jobs. What he felt was being given away was tax money to support non-working people and non-deserving people--and not just tax money, but honor too.
Arlie Russell Hochschild (Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right)
In the United States I saw how the market liberates the individual and allows people to be free to make personal choices. But the biggest drawback was that the market always pushes things to the side of the powerful. I thought the poor should be able to take advantage of the system in order to improve their lot. Grameen is a private-sector self-help bank, and as its members gain personal wealth they acquire water-pumps, latrines, housing, education, access to health care, and so on. Another way to achieve this is to let abusiness earn profit that is then txed by the government, and the tax can be used to provide services to the poor. But in practice it never works that way. In real life, taxes only pay for a government bureaucracy that collects the tax and provides little or nothing to the poor. And since most government bureaucracies are not profit motivated, they have little incentive to increase their efficiency. In fact, they have a disincentive: governments often cannot cut social services without a public outcry, so the behemoth continues, blind and inefficient, year after year.
Muhammad Yunus (Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty)
I have discovered that some groups and castes are offered little to no opportunity to work in the public sector in Nepal.
Santosh Kalwar (Why Nepal Fails)
Perhaps the most powerful effect flow theory could have in the public sector is in providing a blueprint for how institutions may be reformed so as to make them more conducive to optimal experience.
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Flow: The Classic Work On How To Achieve Happiness: The Psychology of Happiness)
Pastors do not know enough about every vocational field to know how the gospel influences work in that sector. Clergy and laypeople [must] sit down as equals—each with some knowledge the other does not have—to plan for Christian witness in public life.
Timothy J. Keller (How to Reach the West Again: Six Essential Elements of a Missionary Encounter)
It’s not easy to feel good about yourself when you are constantly being told you’re rubbish and/or part of the problem. That’s often the situation for people working in the public sector, whether these be nurses, civil servants or teachers. The static metrics used to measure the contribution of the public sector, and the influence of Public Choice theory on making governments more ‘efficient’, has convinced many civil-sector workers they are second-best. It’s enough to depress any bureaucrat and induce him or her to get up, leave and join the private sector, where there is often more money to be made. So public actors are forced to emulate private ones, with their almost exclusive interest in projects with fast paybacks. After all, price determines value. You, the civil servant, won’t dare to propose that your agency could take charge, bring a helpful long-term perspective to a problem, consider all sides of an issue (not just profitability), spend the necessary funds (borrow if required) and – whisper it softly – add public value. You leave the big ideas to the private sector which you are told to simply ‘facilitate’ and enable. And when Apple or whichever private company makes billions of dollars for shareholders and many millions for top executives, you probably won’t think that these gains actually come largely from leveraging the work done by others – whether these be government agencies, not-for-profit institutions, or achievements fought for by civil society organizations including trade unions that have been critical for fighting for workers’ training programmes.
Mariana Mazzucato (The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy)
During a recent visit to the United States, French President François Mitterrand stopped to tour California’s Silicon Valley, where he hoped to learn more about the ingenuity and entrepreneurial drive that gave birth to so many companies there. Over lunch, Mitterrand listened as Thomas Perkins, a partner in the venture capital fund that started Genentech Inc., extolled the virtues of the risk-taking investors who finance the entrepreneurs. Perkins was cut off by Stanford University Professor Paul Berg, who won a Nobel Prize for work in genetic engineering. He asked, ‘Where were you guys in the ’50s and ’60s when all the funding had to be done in the basic science? Most of the discoveries that have fuelled [the industry] were created back then.’ Henderson and Schrage, in the Washington Post (1984)
Mariana Mazzucato (The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths)
D.C. area colleges being among the most reliable feeders of swamp talent (government is not really an Ivy League profession). Most government and political organizations are not run, for better or worse, by MBAs, but by young people distinguished only by their earnestness and public sector idealism and ambition. (It is an anomaly of Republican politics that young people motivated to work in the public sector find themselves working to limit the public sector.) Careers advance by how well you learn on the job and how well you get along with the rest of the swamp and play its game.
Michael Wolff (Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House)
It is ironic that some left intellectuals should deem class struggle to be largely irrelevant at the very time class power is becoming increasingly transparent, at the very time corporate concentration and profit accumulation is more rapacious than ever, and the tax system has become more regressive and oppressive, the upward transfer of income and wealth has accelerated, public sector assets are being privatized, corporate money exercises an increasing control over the political process, people at home and abroad are working harder for less, and throughout the world poverty is growing at a faster rate than overall population.
Michael Parenti (Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism)
Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the "tertiary sector," the service sector, is growing while the "secondary sector" (industry) stagnates and the "primary sector" (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public order. Anything is better than nothing. That's why you can't go home just because you finish early. They want your *time*
Bob Black (The Abolition of Work)
The topics round the table narrowed to a single issue – targets. Everyone approved. A policy working group had just completed a paper. If Labour came to power, the public sector was to be made efficient and humane by being set clearly defined outcomes. Fear of failure would raise performance. Fulfilling targets would lift morale. The public interest would be met. To be targeted and increased: breast screenings, apprenticeships, ethnic minorities visiting national parks, kids from disadvantaged backgrounds at universities, literacy levels at ages seven, ten and fourteen, crimes solved, rapists tried and imprisoned, people moved out of unemployment. To be targeted and reduced: numbers of homeless, suicides, schizophrenics, air pollution, Accident and Emergency
Ian McEwan (Lessons)
Today, as cities and suburbs reinvent themselves, and as cynics claim that government has nothing good to contribute to that process, it's important that institutions like libraries get the recognition they deserve. After all, the root of the word "library," liber; means both "book" and "free." Libraries stand for and exemplify something that needs defending: the public institutions that -- even in an age of atomization and inequality -- serve as bedrocks of civil society. Libraries are the kinds of places where ordinary people with different backgrounds, passions, and interests can take part in a living democratic culture. They are the kinds of places where the public, private, and philanthropic sectors can work together to reach for something higher than the bottom line.
Eric Klinenberg (Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life)
More than half of the Danish adult population—as much as two-thirds, according to some estimates—either works in the public sector or is financially supported by it in the form of benefit payments. The idea, then, of the Danes voting for a reduction in the size of the public sector funded by tax cuts seems about as likely as the turkeys voting for Thanksgiving. The majority will always vote for the status quo because their livelihood depends on it.
Michael Booth (The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia)
The presumption is that, with rare exception, will know everything their political officials are doing, which is why they are called public servants, working in the public sector, in public service, for public agencies. Conversely, the presumption is that the government, with rare exception, will not know anything that law-abiding citizens are doing. That is why we are called private individuals, functioning in our private capacity. Transparency is for those who carry out public duties and exercise public power. Privacy is for everyone else.
Glenn Greenwald
Fraud in the insurance industry is calculated to be $100 billion to $300 billion a year, a cost that gets passed directly to consumers in the form of higher premiums. All told, combined public- and private-sector fraud costs every household in the United States probably around $5,000 a year—or roughly the equivalent of working four months at a minimum-wage job. A hunter-gatherer community that lost four months’ worth of food would face a serious threat to its survival, and its retribution against the people who caused that hardship would be immediate and probably very violent. Westerners
Sebastian Junger (Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging)
We are now more Socialist in many ways than any other developed country outside the Communist bloc—in the size of the public sector, the range of controls and the telescoping of net income. And what is the result? Compare our position today with that of our neighbours in north west Europe—Germany, Sweden, Holland, France. They are no more talented than we are. Yet, compared with them, we have the longest working hours, the lowest pay and the lowest production per head. We have the highest taxes and the lowest investment. We have the least prosperity, the most poor and the lowest pensions. We have the largest nationalized sector and the worst labour troubles.
Keith Joseph
The firm’s fourth partner, Jeff Nussbaum, had carved out a niche writing jokes for public figures. It was he who taught me about the delicate balance all public-sector humorists hope to strike. Writing something funny for a politician, I learned, is like designing something stunning for Marlon Brando past his prime. The qualifier is everything. At first I didn’t understand this. In June, President Obama’s speechwriters asked Jeff to pitch jokes for an upcoming appearance at the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner. I sent him a few ideas, including one about the president and First Lady’s recent trip to see a Broadway show: “My critics are upset it cost taxpayer dollars to fly me and Michelle to New York for date night. But let me be clear. That wasn’t spending. It was stimulus.” Unsurprisingly, my line about stimulating America’s first couple didn’t make it into the script. But others did. The morning after the speech, I watched on YouTube as President Obama turned to NBC reporter Chuck Todd. “Chuck embodies the best of both worlds: he has the rapid-fire style of a television correspondent, and the facial hair of a radio correspondent.” That was my joke! I grabbed the scroll bar and watched again. The line wasn’t genius. The applause was largely polite. Still, I was dumbfounded. A thought entered my brain, and then, just a few days later, exited the mouth of the president of the United States. This was magic. Still, even then, I had no illusions of becoming a presidential speechwriter. When friends asked if I hoped to work in the White House, I told them Obama had more than enough writers already. I meant it.
David Litt (Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years)
It was not only that the Bolshevik bureaucracy subjectively saw itself as the exponent of socialism and that it cultivated, in its own manner, the tradition of proletarian revolution. Objectively, too, by the force of circumstances, it had to work as the chief agent and promoter of the country's development towards collectivism. What ultimately governed the behaviour and the policies of the bureaucracy was the fact that it was in charge of the publicly owned industrial resources of the Soviet Union. It represented the interests of the 'socialist sector' of the economy against those of the 'private sector', rather than the specific interests of any social class; and only to the extent to which the general interest of the 'socialist sector' coincided with the general or 'historic' interest of the working class could the Bolshevik bureaucracy claim to act on behalf of that class.
Isaac Deutscher (The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929)
The current crisis has led to renewed discussions about a universal basic income, whereby all citizens receive an equal regular payment from the government, regardless of whether they work. The idea behind this policy is a good one, but the narrative would be problematic. Since a universal basic income is seen as a handout, it perpetuates the false notion that the private sector is the sole creator, not a co-creator, of wealth in the economy and that the public sector is merely a toll collector, siphoning off profits and distributing them as charity. A better alternative is a citizen’s dividend. Under this policy, the government takes a percentage of the wealth created with government investments, puts that money in a fund, and then shares the proceeds with the people. The idea is to directly reward citizens with a share of the wealth they have created. Alaska, for example, has distributed oil revenues to residents through an annual dividend from its Permanent Fund since 1982.
Mariana Mazzucato
George Romney’s private-sector experience typified the business world of his time. His executive career took place within a single company, American Motors Corporation, where his success rested on the dogged (and prescient) pursuit of more fuel-efficient cars.41 Rooted in a particular locale, the industrial Midwest, AMC was built on a philosophy of civic engagement. Romney dismissed the “rugged individualism” touted by conservatives as “nothing but a political banner to cover up greed.”42 Nor was this dismissal just cheap talk: He once returned a substantial bonus that he regarded as excessive.43 Prosperity was not an individual product, in Romney’s view; it was generated through bargaining and compromises among stakeholders (managers, workers, public officials, and the local community) as well as through individual initiative. When George Romney turned to politics, he carried this understanding with him. Romney exemplified the moderate perspective characteristic of many high-profile Republicans of his day. He stressed the importance of private initiative and decentralized governance, and worried about the power of unions. Yet he also believed that government had a vital role to play in securing prosperity for all. He once famously called UAW head Walter Reuther “the most dangerous man in Detroit,” but then, characteristically, developed a good working relationship with him.44 Elected governor in 1962 after working to update Michigan’s constitution, he broke with conservatives in his own party and worked across party lines to raise the minimum wage, enact an income tax, double state education expenditures during his first five years in office, and introduce more generous programs for the poor and unemployed.45 He signed into law a bill giving teachers collective bargaining rights.46 At a time when conservatives were turning to the antigovernment individualism of Barry Goldwater, Romney called on the GOP to make the insurance of equal opportunity a top priority. As
Jacob S. Hacker (American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper)
By the end of the 1970s, a clear majority of the employed population of Britain, Germany, France, the Benelux countries, Scandinavia and the Alpine countries worked in the service sector—communications, transport, banking, public administration and the like. Italy, Spain and Ireland were very close behind. In Communist Eastern Europe, by contrast, the overwhelming majority of former peasants were directed into labour-intensive and technologically retarded mining and industrial manufacture; in Czechoslovakia, employment in the tertiary, service sector actually declined during the course of the 1950s. Just as the output of coal and iron-ore was tailing off in mid-1950s Belgium, France, West Germany and the UK, so it continued to increase in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the GDR. The Communists’ dogmatic emphasis on raw material extraction and primary goods production did generate rapid initial growth in gross output and per capita GDP. In the short run the industrial emphasis of the Communist command economies thus appeared impressive (not least to many Western observers). But it boded ill for the region’s future.
Tony Judt (Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945)
opportunities inherent in the logic of the system. The American system of government has never separated money from political power, and in the two decades before Trump’s election, the role of money in American politics had grown manifold. Elections are decided by money: unlike in many other democracies, where electoral campaigns last from several weeks to a few months, are financed by government grants and/or subjected to strict spending limits—in the United States, it is contributions from the private sector that allow campaigns to exist in the first place. National and state party machines reinforce this system by apportioning access to public debates on the basis of the amount of money a candidate has secured. Access to media, which is to say, access to voters, also costs money: where in many democracies media are bound by obligations to provide airtime to candidates, in America the primary vehicle for addressing voters is through paid advertisements. No one in the political mainstream seemed to think anything was wrong with the marriage of money and politics. Former elected officials went to work as lobbyists. Using campaign contributions and lobbying to create (or kill) laws was normal. Power begat more money, and money begat more power. We could call the system that preceded and precipitated Trump’s rise an oligarchy, and we would be right.
Masha Gessen (Surviving Autocracy)
The state, too, is in decline, though perhaps less obviously than the idea of the national community. The reason is simply that the global community of capitalists will not let the Western state reverse its post-1970s policies of retrenchment, which is the only way for it to adequately address all the crises that are currently ripping society apart. If any state—unimaginably—made truly substantive moves to restore and expand programs of social welfare, or to vastly expand and improve public education, or to initiate programs like Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration or Tennessee Valley Authority (but on a necessarily broader scale than in the 1930s), or to restore organized labor to its power in the 1960s and thereby raise effective demand, or to promulgate any other such anti-capitalist measure, investors would flee it and its sources of funds would dry up. It couldn’t carry out such policies anyway, given the massive resistance they would provoke among all sectors and levels of the business community. Fiscal austerity is, on the whole, good for profits (in the short term), since it squeezes the population and diverts money to the ruling class. In large part because of capital’s high mobility and consequent wealth and power over both states and populations, the West’s contemporary political paradigm of austerity and government retrenchment is effectively irreversible for the foreseeable future.
Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
So you could say that one alternative to the free market system is the one we already have, because we often don’t rely on the market where powerful interests would be damaged. Our actual economic policy is a mixture of protectionist, interventionist, free-market and liberal measures. And it’s directed primarily to the needs of those who implement social policy, who are mostly the wealthy and the powerful. For example, the US has always had an active state industrial policy, just like every other industrial country. It’s been understood that a system of private enterprise can survive only if there is extensive government intervention. It’s needed to regulate disorderly markets and protect private capital from the destructive effects of the market system, and to organize a public subsidy for targeting advanced sectors of industry, etc. But nobody called it industrial policy, because for half a century it has been masked within the Pentagon system. Internationally, the Pentagon was an intervention force, but domestically it was a method by which the government could coordinate the private economy, provide welfare to major corporations, subsidize them, arrange the flow of taxpayer money to research and development, provide a state-guaranteed market for excess production, target advanced industries for development, etc. Just about every successful and flourishing aspect of the US economy has relied on this kind of government involvement.
Noam Chomsky (How the World Works)
Many aspects of the modern financial system are designed to give an impression of overwhelming urgency: the endless ‘news’ feeds, the constantly changing screens of traders, the office lights blazing late into the night, the young analysts who find themselves required to work thirty hours at a stretch. But very little that happens in the finance sector has genuine need for this constant appearance of excitement and activity. Only its most boring part—the payments system—is an essential utility on whose continuous functioning the modern economy depends. No terrible consequence would follow if the stock market closed for a week (as it did in the wake of 9/11)—or longer, or if a merger were delayed or large investment project postponed for a few weeks, or if an initial public offering happened next month rather than this. The millisecond improvement in data transmission between New York and Chicago has no significance whatever outside the absurd world of computers trading with each other. The tight coupling is simply unnecessary: the perpetual flow of ‘information’ part of a game that traders play which has no wider relevance, the excessive hours worked by many employees a tournament in which individuals compete to display their alpha qualities in return for large prizes. The traditional bank manager’s culture of long lunches and afternoons on the golf course may have yielded more useful information about business than the Bloomberg terminal. Lehman
John Kay (Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance)
The various ways of creating a culture of innovation that we’ve talked about so far are greatly influenced by the leaders at the top. Leaders can’t dictate culture, but they can nurture it. They can generate the right conditions for creativity and innovation. Metaphorically, they can provide the heat and light and moisture and nutrients for a creative culture to blossom and grow. They can focus the best efforts of talented individuals to build innovative, successful groups. In our work at IDEO, we have been lucky enough to meet frequently with CEOs and visionary leaders from both the private and public sectors. Each has his or her own unique style, of course, but the best all have an ability to identify and activate the capabilities of people on their teams. This trait goes far beyond mere charisma or even intelligence. Certain leaders have a knack for nurturing people around them in a way that enables them to be at their best. One way to describe those leaders is to say they are “multipliers,” a term we picked up from talking to author and executive advisor Liz Wiseman. Drawing on a background in organizational behavior and years of experience as a global human resources executive at Oracle Corporation, Liz interviewed more than 150 leaders on four continents to research her book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. Liz observes that all leaders lie somewhere on a continuum between diminishers, who exercise tight control in a way that underutilizes their team’s creative talents, and multipliers, who set challenging goals and then help employees achieve the kind of extraordinary results that they themselves may not have known they were capable of.
Tom Kelley (Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All)
His great concern had to do with the fact that private fortunes were significantly outpacing investments in public services like schools, parks, and safety net programs. The process tends to begin gradually before accelerating under its own momentum. As people accumulate more money, they become less dependent on public goods and, in turn, less interested in supporting them. If they get their way, through tax breaks and other means, personal fortunes grow while public goods are allowed to deteriorate. As public housing, public education, and public transportation become poorer, they become increasingly, then almost exclusively, used only by the poor themselves.[6] People then begin to denigrate the public sector altogether, as if it were rotten at the root and not something the rich had found it in their interest to destroy. The rich and the poor soon unite in their animosity toward public goods—the rich because they are made to pay for things they don’t need and the poor because what they need has become shabby and broken. Things collectively shared, especially if they are shared across class and racial divides, come to be seen as lesser. In America, a clear marker of poverty is one’s reliance on public services, and a clear marker of affluence is one’s degree of distance from them. Enough money brings “financial independence,” which tellingly does not signal independence from work but from the public sector. There was a time when Americans wished to be free of bosses. Now we wish to be free of bus drivers. We wish for the freedom to withdraw from the wider community and sequester ourselves in a more exclusive one, pulling further and further away from the poor until the world they inhabit becomes utterly unrecognizable to us.[7]
Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
A confidential report delivered in June 1965 by Abel Aganbegyan, director of the Novobirsk Institute of Economics, highlighted the difficulties. Aganbegyan noted that the growth rate of the Soviet economy was beginning to decline, just as the rival US economy seemed particularly buoyant; at the same time, some sectors of the Soviet economy - housing, agriculture, services, retail trade - remained very backward, and were failing to develop at an adequate rate. The root causes of this poor performance he saw in the enormous commitment of resources to defense (in human terms, 30-40 million people out of a working population of 100 million, he reckoned), and the 'extreme centralism and lack of democracy in economic matters' which had survived from the past. In a complex modern society, he argued, not everything could be planned, since it was impossible to foresee all possible contingencies and their potential effects. So the plan amounted to central command, and even that could not be properly implemented for lack of information and of modern data-processing equipment. 'The Central Statistical Administration ... does not have a single computer, and is not planning to acquire any,' he commented acidly. Economic administration was also impeded by excessive secrecy: 'We obtain many figures... from American journals sooner than they are released by the Central Statistical Administration.' Hence the economy suffered from inbuilt distortions: the hoarding of goods and labour to provide for unforeseen contingencies, the production of shoddy goods to fulfill planning targets expressed in crude quantitative terms, the accumulation of unused money by a public reluctant to buy substandard products, with resultant inflation and a flourishing black market.
Geoffrey Hosking (The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within)
The Seventh Central Pay Commission was appointed in February 2014 by the Government of India (Ministry of Finance) under the Chairmanship of Justice Ashok Kumar Mathur. The Commission has been given 18 months to make its recommendations. The terms of reference of the Commission are as follows:  1. To examine, review, evolve and recommend changes that are desirable and feasible regarding the principles that should govern the emoluments structure including pay, allowances and other facilities/benefits, in cash or kind, having regard to rationalisation and simplification therein as well as the specialised needs of various departments, agencies and services, in respect of the following categories of employees:-  (i) Central Government employees—industrial and non-industrial; (ii) Personnel belonging to the All India Services; (iii) Personnel of the Union Territories; (iv) Officers and employees of the Indian Audit and Accounts Department; (v) Members of the regulatory bodies (excluding the RBI) set up under the Acts of Parliament; and (vi) Officers and employees of the Supreme Court.   2. To examine, review, evolve and recommend changes that are desirable and feasible regarding the principles that should govern the emoluments structure, concessions and facilities/benefits, in cash or kind, as well as the retirement benefits of the personnel belonging to the Defence Forces, having regard to the historical and traditional parties, with due emphasis on the aspects unique to these personnel.   3. To work out the framework for an emoluments structure linked with the need to attract the most suitable talent to government service, promote efficiency, accountability and responsibility in the work culture, and foster excellence in the public governance system to respond to the complex challenges of modern administration and the rapid political, social, economic and technological changes, with due regard to expectations of stakeholders, and to recommend appropriate training and capacity building through a competency based framework.   4. To examine the existing schemes of payment of bonus, keeping in view, inter-alia, its bearing upon performance and productivity and make recommendations on the general principles, financial parameters and conditions for an appropriate incentive scheme to reward excellence in productivity, performance and integrity.   5. To review the variety of existing allowances presently available to employees in addition to pay and suggest their rationalisation and simplification with a view to ensuring that the pay structure is so designed as to take these into account.   6. To examine the principles which should govern the structure of pension and other retirement benefits, including revision of pension in the case of employees who have retired prior to the date of effect of these recommendations, keeping in view that retirement benefits of all Central Government employees appointed on and after 01.01.2004 are covered by the New Pension Scheme (NPS).   7. To make recommendations on the above, keeping in view:  (i) the economic conditions in the country and the need for fiscal prudence; (ii) the need to ensure that adequate resources are available for developmental expenditures and welfare measures; (iii) the likely impact of the recommendations on the finances of the state governments, which usually adopt the recommendations with some modifications; (iv) the prevailing emolument structure and retirement benefits available to employees of Central Public Sector Undertakings; and (v) the best global practices and their adaptability and relevance in Indian conditions.   8. To recommend the date of effect of its recommendations on all the above.
M. Laxmikanth (Governance in India)
The lessons of big data apply as much to the public sector as to commercial entities: government data’s value is latent and requires innovative analysis to unleash. But despite their special position in capturing information, governments have often been ineffective at using it. Recently the idea has gained prominence that the best way to extract the value of government data is to give the private sector and society in general access to try. There is a principle behind this as well. When the state gathers data, it does so on behalf of its citizens, and thus it ought to provide access to society (except in a limited number of cases, such as when doing so might harm national security or the privacy rights of others).
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think)
SCANDALS AND MISMANAGEMENT If Secretary Clinton’s political career had ended with her defeat for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, her skills as a manager would have been judged by her disorganized and drama-filled campaign for the presidency and her disastrous Health Care Task Force as First Lady. President Obama, who defeated her calamitously run campaign, should have been wary of nominating Clinton to a post that was responsible for tens of thousands of federal employees throughout the world. While her tenure in Foggy Bottom didn’t have the highly publicized backstabbing element that tarnished her presidential campaign, Secretary Clinton’s deficiencies as a manager were no less evident. There was one department within State that Secretary Clinton oversaw with great care: the Global Partnerships Initiative (GPI), which was run by long-time Clinton family aide Kris Balderston. Balderston was known in political circles for creating a “hit list” that ranked members of Congress based on loyalty to the Clintons during the 2008 presidential primaries.[434] Balderston was brought to Foggy Bottom to “keep the Clinton political network humming at State.”[435] He focused his efforts on connecting CEOs and business interests—all potential Clinton 2016 donors—to State Department public/private partnerships. Balderston worked alongside Clinton’s long-time aide Huma Abedin, who was given a “special government employee” waiver, allowing her to work both as Secretary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, and for other private sector clients. With the arrangement, Abedin would serve as a consultant to the top Clinton allied firm, Teneo, in a role in which, as the New York Times reported, “the lines were blurred between Ms. Abedin’s work in the high echelons of one of the government’s most sensitive executive departments and her role as a Clinton family insider.”[436] Secretary Clinton and her allies have placed great emphasis on the secretary of state’s historic role in promoting American business interests overseas, dubbing the effort “economic statecraft.”[437] The efforts of the GPI, Abedin, and Balderston ensured that Secretary Clinton’s “economic statecraft” agenda would be rife with the potential for conflicts of interest reminiscent of the favor-trading scandals that emanated from her husband’s White House. While the political office and donor maintenance program was managed with extreme meticulousness, Secretary Clinton ignored her role as manager of the rest of the sprawling government agency.[438] When it came to these more mundane tasks, Secretary Clinton was not on top of what was really going on in the department she ran. While Secretary Clinton was preoccupied with being filmed and photographed all around the world, the State Department was plagued by chronic management problems and scandals, from visa programs to security contractors. And when Secretary Clinton did weigh in on management issues, it was almost always after a raft of bad press forced her to, and not from any proactive steps she took. In fact, she and her department’s first reaction in certain instances was to silence critics or intimidate whistleblowers, rather than get to the bottom of what was actually going on. The events that unfolded in Benghazi were the worst example of Secretary Clinton neglecting her managerial responsibilities. This pattern of behavior, which led to the tragedy, was characteristic of her management style throughout her four years at Foggy Bottom. “Economic Statecraft” A big part of Secretary Clinton’s record-breaking travel—112 countries visited—was her work as a salesperson for select U.S. business interests.[439] Today, her supporters would have us believe her “economic statecraft” agenda was a major accomplishment.[440] Yet, as always seems to be the case with the Clintons, there was one family that benefited more than any other from all this economic statecraft—the Clinton family.
Stephen Thompson (Failed Choices: A Critique Of The Hillary Clinton State Department)
For years, recycling programs proved unprofitable, and private institutions failed time and time again to create comprehensive programs that would dramatically reduce litter. Expensive recycling programs survived as the preferred and exclusive solution for solid-waste disposal in this country only because private corporations used their lobbying might to shift responsibility for the collection and recycling of corporate waste onto the public sector. In the end, consumers did most of the work, subsidizing (both through their labor and through taxes) the beverage industry’s packaging-reclamation system, allowing companies to expand their operations without incurring increased costs.
Bartow J. Elmore (Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism)
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At Strong Towns, we've worked to illuminate the fact that this transformation has been done at tremendous financial cost. This is not only because the construction of wider, flatter and straighter streets has been expensive, but because the auto-centric nature of the transformed public realm drives private-sector investment out of traditional neighborhoods, dislocating it to places that provide more buffering to the car.
Charles L. Marohn Jr. (Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume 1)
The United Nations and the U.S. government were also deeply involved. But early on, they had little success transferring “production technology from the industrialized temperate zones to the tropics and sub tropics.” This is why, according to Borlaug, the cooperative Mexican government–Rockefeller Foundation model “ultimately proved to be superior” to “public sector foreign technical assistance programs.... ”114 By the time the Green Revolution really took off, these national and supranational bodies had recognized the success of the foundation-pioneered model and supported it, as demonstrated by USAID’s commitment of funds to the international centers.115 The Green Revolution would not have been possible without earlier scientific breakthroughs. Dr. Borlaug estimates that fully 40 percent of the world’s current population would not be alive today were it not for the Haber-Bosch ammonia-synthesizing process.116 The spread of Mexican dwarf wheat and IR8 rice (and their continually improving offspring) would have been impossible without such breakthroughs in fertilizer technology. But that is the nature of progress. Scientific achievement is not diminished by its debt to the work of previous generations. It has been argued that the Green Revolution produced negative side effects commensurate with its benefits. Critics point out that, in some parts of the world, the greatest benefits of new seed varieties and agricultural technologies have flowed more to well-off rather than poor farmers. They also claim that the irrigation needs of high-yield agriculture drain local water resources. And fertilizer use, essential if high-yield crops are to reach their full potential, can lead to runoff that pollutes streams and rivers. Observers have also worried that, by enabling the developing world to feed more and more of its people, the Green Revolution has been a disincentive for them to get serious about population control. But population growth historically levels out in developed nations, and it is impossible to make the leap from developing to developed without an adequate supply of food.
Joel L. Fleishman (The Foundation: A Great American Secret; How Private Wealth is Changing the World)
Roughly one in five black adults works for the government, teaching school, delivering mail, driving buses, processing criminal justice and managing large staffs. They are about 30 percent more likely to have a public sector job than non-Hispanic whites, and twice as likely as Hispanics.
Anonymous
Not surprisingly, nearly all Greeks think poorly of their public administration. In a 2012 EU survey, 96 percent of polled Greeks characterized it as “bad”—the worst result in the EU. The sentiment is so pervasive that one can assume most of the public administrators share it. The poll result was similar in the years preceding the financial crisis, and therefore cannot be attributed to subsequent cuts in services. Despite Greeks’ dissatisfaction with the way their government works, public employees in the decade leading up to the crisis received very large pay raises. During that time, public sector wages per employee grew by over 100 percent, near the highest increase in the eurozone, according to a report published by the European Central Bank. By contrast, in Germany, where people were satisfied with the way the state bureaucracy functioned, public wages grew around 13 percent. (That low rate, when one factors in inflation, essentially meant a pay cut.) Greek civil servants also received an array of benefits that sweetened their jobs. Until 2013, when the Greek government put an end to it, those working in front of computers—a condition considered a hardship—received an extra six days off a year in order to provide them some relief.
James Angelos (The Full Catastrophe: Travels Among the New Greek Ruins)
The Wall Street Journal (The Wall Street Journal) - Clip This Article on Location 1055 | Added on Tuesday, May 5, 2015 5:10:24 PM OPINION Baltimore Is Not About Race Government-induced dependency is the problem—and it’s one with a long history. By William McGurn | 801 words For those who see the rioting in Baltimore as primarily about race, two broad reactions dominate. One group sees rampaging young men fouling their own neighborhoods and concludes nothing can be done because the social pathologies are so overwhelming. In some cities, this view manifests itself in the unspoken but cynical policing that effectively cedes whole neighborhoods to the thugs. The other group tut-tuts about root causes. Take your pick: inequality, poverty, injustice. Or, as President Obama intimated in an ugly aside on the rioting, a Republican Congress that will never agree to the “massive investments” (in other words, billions more in federal spending) required “if we are serious about solving this problem.” There is another view. In this view, the disaster of inner cities isn’t primarily about race at all. It’s about the consequences of 50 years of progressive misrule—which on race has proved an equal-opportunity failure. Baltimore is but the latest liberal-blue city where government has failed to do the one thing it ought—i.e., put the cops on the side of the vulnerable and law-abiding—while pursuing “solutions” that in practice enfeeble families and social institutions and local economies. These supposed solutions do this by substituting federal transfers for fathers and families. They do it by favoring community organizing and government projects over private investment. And they do it by propping up failing public-school systems that operate as jobs programs for the teachers unions instead of centers of learning. If our inner-city African-American communities suffer disproportionately from crippling social pathologies that make upward mobility difficult—and they do—it is in large part because they have disproportionately been on the receiving end of this five-decade-long progressive experiment in government beneficence. How do we know? Because when we look at a slice of white America that was showered with the same Great Society good intentions—Appalachia—we find the same dysfunctions: greater dependency, more single-parent families and the absence of the good, private-sector jobs that only a growing economy can create. Remember, in the mid-1960s when President Johnson put a face on America’s “war on poverty,” he didn’t do it from an urban ghetto. He did it from the front porch of a shack in eastern Kentucky’s Martin County, where a white family of 10 eked out a subsistence living on an income of $400 a year. In many ways, rural Martin County and urban Baltimore could not be more different. Martin County is 92% white while Baltimore is two-thirds black. Each has seen important sources of good-paying jobs dry up—Martin County in coal mining, Baltimore in manufacturing. In the last presidential election, Martin Country voted 6 to 1 for Mitt Romney while Baltimore went 9 to 1 for Barack Obama. Yet the Great Society’s legacy has been depressingly similar. In a remarkable dispatch two years ago, the Lexington Herald-Leader’s John Cheves noted that the war on poverty sent $2.1 billion to Martin County alone (pop. 12,537) through programs including “welfare, food stamps, jobless benefits, disability compensation, school subsidies, affordable housing, worker training, economic development incentives, Head Start for poor children and expanded Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.” The result? “The problem facing Appalachia today isn’t Third World poverty,” writes Mr. Cheves. “It’s dependence on government assistance.” Just one example: When Congress imposed work requirements and lifetime caps for welfare during the Clinton administration, claims of disability jumped. Mr. Cheves quotes
Anonymous
In 2005, when Congress still depended on Communist votes for a majority in Parliament, a National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) was passed, assuring any household in the countryside a hundred days labour a year at the legal minimum wage on public works, with at least a third of these jobs for women. It is work for pay, rather than a direct cash transfer scheme as in Brazil, to minimize the danger of money going to those who are not actually the poor, and so ensure it reaches only those willing to do the work. Denounced by all right-thinking opinion as debilitating charity behind a façade of make-work, it was greeted by the middle-class like ‘a wet dog at a glamorous party’, in the words of one of its architects, the Belgian-Indian economist Jean Drèze. Unlike the Bolsa Família in Brazil, the application of NREGA was left to state governments rather than the centre, so its impact has been very uneven and incomplete, wages often paid lower than the legal minimum, for days many fewer than a hundred.75 Works performed are not always durable, and as with all other social programmes in India, funds are liable to local malversation. But in scale NREGA now represents the largest entitlement programme in the world, reaching some 40 million rural households, a quarter of the total in the country. Over half of these dalit or adivasi, and 48 per cent of its beneficiaries are women – double their share of casual labour in the private sector. Such is the demand for employment by NREGA in the countryside that it far outruns supply. A National Survey Sample for 2009–2010 has revealed that 45 per cent of all rural households wanted the work it offers, of whom only 56 per cent got it.76 What NREGA has started to do, in the formulation Drèze has taken from Ambedkar, is break the dictatorship of the private employer in the countryside, helping by its example to raise wages even of non-recipients. Since inception, its annual cost has risen from $2.5 to over $8 billion, a token of its popularity. This remains less than 1 per cent of GDP, and the great majority of rural labourers in the private sector are still not paid the minimum wage due them. Conceived outside the party system, and accepted by Congress only when it had little expectation of winning the elections of 2004, the Act eventually had such popular demand behind it that the Lok Sabha adopted it nem con. Three years later, with typical dishonesty, the Manmohan regime renamed it as ‘Gandhian’ to fool the masses that Congress inspired it.
Perry Anderson (The Indian Ideology)
Conservative elites first turned to populism as a political strategy thanks to Richard Nixon. His festering resentment of the Establishment’s clubby exclusivity prepared him emotionally to reach out to the “silent majority,” with whom he shared that hostility. Nixon excoriated “our leadership class, the ministers, the college professors, and other teachers… the business leadership class… they have all really let down and become soft.” He looked forward to a new party of independent conservatism resting on a defense of traditional cultural and social norms governing race and religion and the family. It would include elements of blue-collar America estranged from their customary home in the Democratic Party. Proceeding in fits and starts, this strategic experiment proved its viability during the Reagan era, just when the businessman as populist hero was first flexing his spiritual muscles. Claiming common ground with the folkways of the “good ole boy” working class fell within the comfort zone of a rising milieu of movers and shakers and their political enablers. It was a “politics of recognition”—a rediscovery of the “forgotten man”—or what might be termed identity politics from above. Soon enough, Bill Clinton perfected the art of the faux Bubba. By that time we were living in the age of the Bubba wannabe—Ross Perot as the “simple country billionaire.” The most improbable members of the “new tycoonery” by then had mastered the art of pandering to populist sentiment. Citibank’s chairman Walter Wriston, who did yeoman work to eviscerate public oversight of the financial sector, proclaimed, “Markets are voting machines; they function by taking referenda” and gave “power to the people.” His bank plastered New York City with clever broadsides linking finance to every material craving, while simultaneously implying that such seductions were unworthy of the people and that the bank knew it. Its $1 billion “Live Richly” ad campaign included folksy homilies: what was then the world’s largest bank invited us to “open a craving account” and pointed out that “money can’t buy you happiness. But it can buy you marshmallows, which are kinda the same thing.” Cuter still and brimming with down-home family values, Citibank’s ads also reminded everybody, “He who dies with the most toys is still dead,” and that “the best table in the city is still the one with your family around it.” Yale preppie George W. Bush, in real life a man with distinctly subpar instincts for the life of the daredevil businessman, was “eating pork rinds and playing horseshoes.” His friends, maverick capitalists all, drove Range Rovers and pickup trucks, donning bib overalls as a kind of political camouflage.
Steve Fraser (The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power)
United States is committed to protecting privacy. It is an element of individual dignity and an aspect of participation in democratic society. To an increasing extent, privacy protections have become critical to the information-based economy. Stronger consumer data privacy protections will buttress the trust that is necessary to promote the full economic, social, and political uses of networked technologies. The increasing quantities of personal data that these technologies subject to collection, use, and disclosure have fueled innovation and significant social benefits. We can preserve these benefits while also ensuring that our consumer data privacy policy better reflects the value that Americans place on privacy and bolsters trust in the Internet and other networked technologies. The framework set forth in the preceding pages provides a way to achieve these goals. The Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights should be the legal baseline that governs consumer data privacy in the United States. The Administration will work with Congress to bring this about, but it will also work with privatesector stakeholders to adopt the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights in the absence of legislation. To encourage adoption, the Department of Commerce will convene multistakeholder processes to encourage the development of enforceable, context-specific codes of conduct. The United States Government will engage with our international partners to increase the interoperability of our respective consumer data privacy frameworks. Federal agencies will continue to develop innovative privacy-protecting programs and guidance as well as enforce the broad array of existing Federal laws that protect consumer privacy. A cornerstone of this framework is its call for the ongoing participation of private-sector stakeholders. The views that companies, civil society, academics, and advocates provided to the Administration through written comments, public symposia, and informal discussions have been invaluable in shaping this framework. Implementing it, and making progress toward consumer data privacy protections that support a more trustworthy networked world, will require all of us to continue to work together★ 45 ★
Anonymous
The excessive greedy players of endless power play, corruption, megalomania, injustice, impunity, and kleptocracy continue to reign for how many succeeding decades? When will the country stop being corrupted by revisionism, kleptocratic political dynasties, dirty politics, Machiavellian manipulations, political patronage, destructive lies, and a lack of genuine collective memory of the past and the erosion of truth? This is a long life work-in-progress for honest public servants, marginalised sectors, and the concerned hard-working citizens with the right moral compass: How to effectively triumph against the oligarchs, kleptocrats, Machiavellian manipulators, megalomaniacs, and the unscrupulous benefactors of corruption, injustice and impunity? ~ Ana Angelica Abaya van Doorn writing as Angelica Hopes an excerpt from Onestopia Book 3, Solo la verità è bella Trilogy Genre: political, inspirationa, literary novel © 2022 Ana Angelica Abaya van Doorn
Angelica Hopes
By allocating so much public sector work to private companies, the Bush administration created a condition in which the nature and practice of government activities could be hidden under the cloak of corporate privacy. This severely limits both financial and political accountability.
Andrew Feinstein (The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade)
This longstanding bipartisan revolving door between government and business reflects the inconvenient realities of life in a capitalistic democratic republic. On the one hand, when work- ing well, this revolving door allows businesses and government to draw on talented, ethical individuals from the private and public sectors to serve the interests of both shareholders and citizens. On the other hand, this revolving door can lead to corrosive cronyism and corruption that eats away at the integrity of both business and government as narrow interests are served, to the detriment of shareholders and citizens.
Tom C.W. Lin (The Capitalist and the Activist: Corporate Social Activism and the New Business of Change)
Bork, along with economists like F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan—figures whose work I had never studied or even read until after that night in Harlem—advocated not the conservation of traditional structures but the abolition of them; they wished to eliminate all real checks on private enterprise; and they believed, in contradiction not only to all common sense but also to Gödel’s theorem, that the Market could be depended on to regulate its own aberrations and idiosyncrasies. In other words, however much Bork and others like him may have inveighed against personal liberties in the public sphere, they were positively gaga over individualism’s most wanton, unfettered forms in the private sector. Indeed, I’ve come to think that the central political paradox of our time is that the so-called conservatives of the past half century have sought to conserve almost nothing of the societies they inherited but instead have worked to remake them with a vigor reminiscent of the leftist revolutionaries they despise.
Ayad Akhtar (Homeland Elegies)
Had a frothy venture capital sector not been so obsessed with the search for eccentric and visionary founders, WeWork might still occupy only a smattering of buildings in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. If mutual funds hadn’t rushed into startups, WeWork might have never had the funds to start expanding to surf pools. If Saudi Arabia’s economy hadn’t fallen under the control of a new startup-loving prince desperate to diversify its oil wealth, Masayoshi Son might never have written Neumann a check. If bankers hadn’t been so focused on the prestige and fees from leading a big IPO, perhaps sober advice could have prevailed before a major public embarrassment. When all the forces worked together, people thought as a herd. Optimism supplanted critical thinking. Smart minds were bent so that a real estate company looked like a software company. It was the same effect that allowed mattress companies to look like tech companies. Ride-hailing firms weren’t just glorified taxi services, but were meant to compete with established retail giants. When everyone stood to get rich, everything had infinite potential.
Eliot Brown (The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion)
in order to discourage people from missing the annual communal work fest, the border to Uzbekistan is closed to everyone except foreigners. Every autumn. hundreds of thousands of doctors, teachers, nurses, bureaucrats and other public sector employees, as well as students, are called on to pick cotton - an old tradition from Soviet times that has been maintained; the only difference being that in the Soviet Union, the majority of the harvesting was done by machine, whereas now it is done by hand, as non one has troubled to maintain and repair the machines. As the flowering season is so short, the 1.4 million hectares of cotton have to be picked in the space of a few frantic weeks and many people have to sleep under the open sky or on cold, crammed floors. An impressive number of public sector employees and people from other affected groups used to take long family holidays to neighbouring countries during the cotton harvest, but a stop has been put to that now.
Erika Fatland
Today, although many such strikes continue—the Walmart strike of 2012, for example—many industrial work sites have been moved offshore to Mexico, China, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Other forms of social conflict have arisen in different theaters. One theater animates the politics of the left. It focuses on conflict in the private sector between the very richest 1 percent and the rest of America. Occupy Wall Street has such a focus. It is not between owner and worker over a higher wage or shorter hours of work. It is between haves and have-nots, the ever-more-wealthy 1 percent and the other 99 percent of Americans. What feels unfair to Occupy activists is not simply unfair recompense for work (the multi-million dollar bonuses to hedge fund managers alongside the $8.25 hourly rate for Walmart clerks) but the absence of tax policies that could help restore America as a middle-class society. For the right today, the main theater of conflict is neither the factory floor nor an Occupy protest. The theater of conflict—at the heart of the deep story—is the local welfare office and the mailbox where undeserved disability checks and SNAP stamps arrive. Government checks for the listless and idle—this seems most unfair. If unfairness in Occupy is expressed in the moral vocabulary of a “fair share” of resources and a properly proportioned society, unfairness in the right’s deep story is found in the language of “makers” and “takers.” For the left, the flashpoint is up the class ladder (between the very top and the rest); for the right, it is down between the middle class and the poor. For the left, the flashpoint is centered in the private sector; for the right, in the public sector. Ironically, both call for an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work.
Arlie Russell Hochschild (Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right)
After earning a BS in Accounting and Finance from the University of Illinois, Brad Dean of Myrtle Beach commenced his career as one of the most sought-after turnaround architects in modern industry. In public and private sectors, he works to transform organizations, leading dynamic teams and teaching them how to develop and sustain profitable relationships with valuable partners.
Brad Dean Myrtle Beach
3. Where Consulting Came From: A Brief History In July 1971, Chilean engineer and politician Fernando Flores was working for the Chilean Production Development Corporation, a public organization responsible for fostering economic development in the country. Following the election of the new government under President Salvador Allende the previous year, Flores faced a difficult task: how to manage the newly nationalized sectors of Chile’s economy. Party leaders had never been able to deliver their economic policy goals, which included economic growth and income redistribution, and, despite the ambition, the Chilean public sector simply did not have the capabilities to deliver the mandate on which it was elected. But it was also not afraid to draw on relevant expertise in the private sector. This was how British management consultant Stafford Beer
Mariana Mazzucato (The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies)
As people accumulate more money, they become less dependent on public goods and, in turn, less interested in supporting them. If they get their way, through tax breaks and other means, personal fortunes grow while public goods are allowed to deteriorate. As public housing, public education, and public transportation become poorer, they become increasingly, then almost exclusively, used only by the poor themselves.[6] People then begin to denigrate the public sector altogether, as if it were rotten at the root and not something the rich had found it in their interest to destroy. The rich and the poor soon unite in their animosity toward public goods—the rich because they are made to pay for things they don’t need and the poor because what they need has become shabby and broken. Things collectively shared, especially if they are shared across class and racial divides, come to be seen as lesser. In America, a clear marker of poverty is one’s reliance on public services, and a clear marker of affluence is one’s degree of distance from them. Enough money brings “financial independence,” which tellingly does not signal independence from work but from the public sector. There was a time when Americans wished to be free of bosses. Now we wish to be free of bus drivers. We wish for the freedom to withdraw from the wider community and sequester ourselves in a more exclusive one, pulling further and further away from the poor until the world they inhabit becomes utterly unrecognizable to us.
Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
although the security imperative and the NSS to which it gives rise provide the driving force behind transformative technology development, governed interdependence is the obverse of statism (or top-down direction of the economy); it conceptualizes the collaborative and negotiated character of public-private sector relations as NSS components seek to achieve their goals (an example being the increasing emphasis that defense programs place on developing products and services that serve both military and commercial markets). I emphasize that the governed interdependence concept applies to situations in which a government body works with or through private actors and entities to achieve its own objectives, but at the same time maintains control over the goals to be pursued and the rules of participation. This does not mean that outcomes will always yield the results desired or that there will not be spectacular failures.
Linda Weiss (America Inc.?: Innovation and Enterprise in the National Security State (Cornell Studies in Political Economy))
Finally, it’s not clear that government and the tech industry are competing for exactly the same people. The biggest bidding wars among the tech giants and startups is for technologists who work with advanced technologies like AI and machine learning. Outside of national security and defense (where such skills are very much in demand), government is rarely competing for this talent pool. The skills most needed in government are good product management and service design. The work is hard not because the tech is complicated but because the environment is. Arrogance can be an asset in startups; in government, humility is not only necessary but soon acquired if one doesn’t start out with it. While emotional intelligence matters in all jobs more than the Silicon Valley caricature allows for, it is critical in public-sector work, which is more about change and human responses to change than about technology. The same goes for ethics: a sense of responsibility to the common good and a willingness to think deeply about what harm might come from your actions are assets in any field, but if you’re not already considering these factors, working in government will bring them front and center. When entrepreneurs say that government will never do tech well because lower pay means it won’t get the best people, it’s worth asking what they mean by “best.
Jennifer Pahlka (Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better)
Before 2008, Koch’s lobbying efforts had been fragmented. There was a team of lobbyists working for Invista, one for Georgia-Pacific, and another for the oil refining division, Flint Hills Resources. This fragmentation reflected Koch’s commitment to maintain its corporate veil, organizing its various divisions under a legal structure that categorized each division as an independent business. This structure helped Koch contain its legal liabilities, but it also hobbled its corporate lobbying efforts. Because Invista and Flint Hills didn’t coordinate closely, they might be duplicating their efforts or sending mixed messages to lawmakers. In 2008, Koch Industries consolidated its lobbying operations into a single, newly formed company called Koch Companies Public Sector. Now all of Koch’s lobbyists worked side by side, sharing information and strategies as they worked toward common goals.
Christopher Leonard (Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America)
This leads to “private opulence and public squalor,” a self-reinforcing dynamic that transforms our communities in ways that pull us further apart. It’s an old problem, one documented by the Roman historian Sallust in his first monograph, Bellum Catilinae, which recounts the political turmoil that roiled Rome in 63 b.c.e., during the time of Julius Caesar.[5] But the mid-century economist John Kenneth Galbraith popularized the predicament in his 1958 book, The Affluent Society. Galbraith did not spill much ink (or any ink, really) on the issue of exploitation. His great concern had to do with the fact that private fortunes were significantly outpacing investments in public services like schools, parks, and safety net programs. The process tends to begin gradually before accelerating under its own momentum. As people accumulate more money, they become less dependent on public goods and, in turn, less interested in supporting them. If they get their way, through tax breaks and other means, personal fortunes grow while public goods are allowed to deteriorate. As public housing, public education, and public transportation become poorer, they become increasingly, then almost exclusively, used only by the poor themselves.[6] People then begin to denigrate the public sector altogether, as if it were rotten at the root and not something the rich had found it in their interest to destroy. The rich and the poor soon unite in their animosity toward public goods—the rich because they are made to pay for things they don’t need and the poor because what they need has become shabby and broken. Things collectively shared, especially if they are shared across class and racial divides, come to be seen as lesser. In America, a clear marker of poverty is one’s reliance on public services, and a clear marker of affluence is one’s degree of distance from them. Enough money brings “financial independence,” which tellingly does not signal independence from work but from the public sector. There was a time when Americans wished to be free of bosses. Now we wish to be free of bus drivers. We wish for the freedom to withdraw from the wider community and sequester ourselves in a more exclusive one, pulling further and further away from the poor until the world they inhabit becomes utterly unrecognizable to us.
Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
As the legal historian Richard Epstein memorably put it, the “ink was scarcely dry on the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” which forbade the government as well as employers from taking race into account for any reason, when policies of racial discrimination began proliferating throughout the public and private sectors. In the historical blink of an eye, colorblindness transformed from an idea whose time had finally come into a symptom of moral backwardness—from a noble principle responsible for beating slavery and Jim Crow into a marker of evil. In the half century since the victories of the civil rights movement, some of America’s most celebrated scholars have been hard at work writing a false history of colorblindness. In their view, colorblindness was not the motivating principle behind the anti-racist activism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but was instead an idea created by white racists, conservatives, and reactionaries. Kimberlé Crenshaw, for instance, has criticized the “color-blind view of civil rights” that she alleges “developed in the neoconservative ‘think tanks’ during the seventies.” George Lipsitz, a black-studies professor at the University of California, writes that colorblindness is part of a “long-standing historical whiteness protection program” associated with “Indigenous dispossession, colonial conquest, slavery, segregation, and immigrant exclusion.” According to these scholars, there is no contradiction to reconcile: colorblindness had nothing to do with abolition or the civil rights movement to begin with; colorblindness has instead always been a Trojan horse for white supremacy.
Coleman Hughes (The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America)
I’ve always passionately believed in the power of the state to improve lives. Before my career in AI, I worked in government and the nonprofit sector. I helped start a charity telephone counseling service when I was nineteen, worked for the mayor of London, and co-founded a conflict resolution firm focused on multi-stakeholder negotiation. Working with public servants—people stretched thin and bone-tired, but forever in demand and doing heroic work for those who need it—was enough to show me what a disaster it would be if the state failed. However, my experience with local government, UN negotiations, and nonprofits also gave me invaluable firsthand knowledge of their limitations. They are often chronically mismanaged, bloated, and slow to act. One project I facilitated in 2009 at the Copenhagen climate negotiations involved convening hundreds of NGOs and scientific experts to align their negotiating positions. The idea was to present a coherent position to 192 squabbling countries at the main summit. Except we couldn’t get consensus on anything. For starters, no one could agree on the science, or the reality of what was happening on the ground. Priorities were scattered. There was no consensus on what would be effective, affordable, or even practical. Could you raise $10 billion to turn the Amazon into a national park to absorb CO2? How are you going to deal with the militias and bribes? Or maybe the answer was to reforest Norway, not Brazil, or was the solution to grow giant kelp farms instead? As soon as proposals were voiced, someone spoke up to poke holes in them. Every suggestion was a problem. We ended up with maximum divergence on all possible things. It was, in other words, politics as usual. And this involved people notionally on the “same team.” We hadn’t even gotten to the main event and the real horse-trading. At the Copenhagen summit a morass of states all had their own competing positions. Now pile on the raw emotion. Negotiators were trying to make decisions with hundreds of people in the room arguing and shouting and breaking off into groups, all while the clock was ticking, on both the summit and the planet. I was there trying to help facilitate the process, perhaps the most complex, high-stakes multiparty negotiation in human history, but from the start it looked almost impossible. Observing this, I realized we weren’t going to make sufficient progress fast enough. The timeline was too tight. The issues were too complex. Our institutions for addressing massive global problems were not fit for purpose.
Mustafa Suleyman (The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma)
The wealthy can quite easily convert their cash into political influence, and politicians and bureaucrats are quite capable of turning their political influence into cash. In the UK -as in most other capitalist countries- the links between the public and private sectors have become so close that it is hard to know where one ends and the other begins. But these privileges are not available to everyone. For people like Lex Greensill, the British state appears extremely porous. He can write to politicians directly, requesting help and support, as well as hiring former civil servants -and even former prime ministers- to do his dirty work for him. But to organize like unions that lobby on behalf of workers -not to mention people trying to petition the government themselves- the British state seems impenetrable. The different versions of state power experienced by more and less powerful actors tell us something about what the state actually is. Rather than a fixed set of stable institutions, the state is a social relation, like capital itself.
Grace Blakeley (Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom)
Estimates suggest that $7.6 trillion of wealth is hidden in tax havens all over the world. The international finance sector acts as a 'circulation system for criminal money acquired through drug trafficking, terrorism, piracy, human trafficking, proliferation and tax evasion.' When we look at the international financial system, we don't find a free-market paradise. Instead, we find incredibly powerful institutions in both the public and private sector shaping the conditions faced by everyone else. Financial institutions 'dress themselves up in liberal trappings of the market, yet capture the old sovereignty of the state all the better to squeeze the social body to feed their own profits.' Yet all this power is held without any democratic accountability. Politicians, technocrats, and financiers work together to decide everything from the interest rates we pay on our loans to who gets what when a state files for bankruptcy. If everyone had a say in determining how these rules were made and enforced, rather than just a privileged few, we'd live in a very different world.
Grace Blakeley (Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom)
But as Bill Gates said to us when Mark and I met with him in his Seattle-area office, “People invest in high-probability scenarios: the markets that are there. And these low-probability things that maybe you should buy an insurance policy for by investing in capacity up front, don’t get done. Society allocates resources primarily in this capitalistic way. The irony is that there’s really no reward for being the one who anticipates the challenge.” Every time there is a new, serious viral outbreak, such as Ebola in 2012 and Zika in 2016, there is a public outcry, a demand to know why a vaccine wasn’t available to combat this latest threat. Next a public health official predicts a vaccine will be available in x number of months. These predictions almost always turn out to be wrong. And even if they’re right, there are problems in getting the vaccine production scaled up to meet the size and location of the threat, or the virus has receded to where it came from and there is no longer a demand for prevention or treatment. Here is Bill Gates again: Unfortunately, the message from the private sector has been quite negative, like H1N1 [the 2009 epidemic influenza strain]: A lot of vaccine was procured because people thought it would spread. Then, after it was all over, they sort of persecuted the WHO people and claimed GSK [GlaxoSmithKline] sold this stuff and they should have known the thing would end and it was a waste of money. That was bad. Even with Ebola, these guys—Merck, GSK, and J & J [Johnson & Johnson]—all spent a bunch of money and it’s not clear they won’t have wasted their money. They’re not break-even at this stage for the things they went and did, even though at the time everyone was saying, “Of course you’ll get paid. Just go and do all this stuff.” So it does attenuate the responsiveness. This model will never work or serve our worldwide needs. Yet if we don’t change the model, the outcome will not change, either.
Michael T. Osterholm (Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs)
the unpaid care they also provide at home.34 Why does it matter that this core economy should be visible in economics? Because the household provision of care is essential for human well-being, and productivity in the paid economy depends directly upon it. It matters because when—in the name of austerity and public sector savings—governments cut budgets for children’s daycare centres, community services, parental leave and youth clubs, the need for care-giving doesn’t disappear: it just gets pushed back into the home. The pressure, particularly on women’s time, can force them out of work and increase social stress and vulnerability. That undermines both well-being and women’s empowerment, with multiple knock-on effects for society and the economy alike. In short, including the household economy in the new diagram of the macroeconomy is the first step in recognising its centrality, and in reducing and redistributing women’s unpaid work.
Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
arm’s length. By the end of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure of office in 1990, the nature of government and of public debate and the division between public and private sectors had changed significantly. Political parties were forced to work on the basis of a new political agenda. Her successor as Conservative
Philip Norton (British Polity, The, CourseSmart eTextbook)
A lot of us have done okay, but we don’t want to lose what we’ve got, see it given away.” When I ask him what he saw as being “given away,” it was not public waters given to dumpers, or clean air given to smoke stacks. It was not health or years of life. It was not lost public sector jobs. What he felt was being given away was tax money to non-working, non-deserving people—and not just tax money, but honor too. If that tax money could come back to citizens—as a sort of “raise” in the midst of a three-decade-long national economic lull, why not?
Arlie Russell Hochschild (Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right)
Stephen goldsmith reviewed Leading in Chaos: Insights to Lead through the Storms: Understanding Race in Public Sector Employment: Even those who think they understand the complexities of race and gender in the public sector work place will greatly benefit from IJ Neal's insights. She lived leading not just in chaos but in work places clouded by both overt and implicit bias. A very worthwhile read.
I J Neal (Leading in Chaos: Insights to Lead through the Storms)
.. while there is some truth to the claims (..) that the prison plays an important function in containing the contradictions that have emerged in the contemporary phase of capitalist development, this should not be viewed simply as a response to growing social cleavages. Rather, as part of the gendered social ontology of capitalism, the law is itself constitutive of historically specific relations of production and social reproduction. Thus, the restructuring of the neoliberal state in ways that limit its ability to regulate the movement of capital across borders, on-going forms of primitive accumulation that enclose and police formerly public spaces and the criminalization and incarceration of particular sectors of the poor and working-class population are all manifestations of the neoliberal project
Adrienne Roberts (Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare: Feminist Political Economy, Primitive Accumulation and the Law (RIPE Series in Global Political Economy))
Intricately connected to the restructuring of relations of production, neoliberalism has also entailed the restructuring of social reproduction in ways that have rendered it increasingly insecure for particular sectors of the population. In the US, Canada and the UK, the move from welfare to ‘workfare’ states is particularly relevant, though other cutbacks to government services, the hollowing out of public housing, the restructuring of pension plans in ways that render them increasingly dependent on global financial markets and the imposition of austerity measures (especially in Europe) post-2008 are all key moves that have contributed to the ‘reprivatization of social reproduction’. The latter refers to the ways in which the decline in social forms of provisioning in most OECD countries over the past several decades has resulted in an increase in the amount of work done by families, particularly by women, and/or the private sector.
Adrienne Roberts (Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare: Feminist Political Economy, Primitive Accumulation and the Law (RIPE Series in Global Political Economy))
18. The Political Left/Right Cycle. Capitalists (i.e., those of the right) and socialists (i.e., those of the left) don’t just have different self-interests—they have different deep-seated ideological beliefs that they are willing to fight for. The typical perspective of the rightist/capitalist is that self-sufficiency, hard work, productivity, limited government interference, allowing people to keep what they make, and individual choice are morally good and good for society. They also believe that the private sector works better than the public sector, that capitalism works best for most people, and that self-made billionaires are the biggest contributors to society. Capitalists are typically driven crazy by financial supports for people who lack productivity and profitability. To them, making money = being productive = getting what one deserves. They don’t pay much attention to whether the economic machine is producing opportunity and prosperity for most people. They can also overlook the fact that their form of profit making is suboptimal when it comes to achieving the goals of most people. For example, in a purely capitalist system, the provision of excellent public education—which is clearly a leading cause of higher productivity and greater wealth across a society—is not a high priority. The typical perspective of the leftist/socialist is that helping each other, having the government support people, and sharing wealth and opportunity are morally good and good for society. They believe that the private sector is by and large run by capitalists who are greedy, while common workers, such as teachers, firefighters, and laborers, contribute more to society. Socialists and communists tend to focus on dividing the pie well and typically aren’t very good at increasing its size. They favor more government intervention, believing those in government will be fairer than capitalists, who are simply trying to exploit people to make more money. I’ve had exposure to all kinds of economic systems all over the world and have seen why the ability to make money, save it, and put it into capital (i.e., capitalism) is an effective motivator of people and allocator of resources that raises people’s living standards. But capitalism is also a source of wealth and opportunity gaps that are unfair, can be counterproductive, are highly cyclical, and can be destabilizing. In my opinion, the greatest challenge for policy makers is to engineer a capitalist economic system that raises productivity and living standards without worsening inequities and instabilities. 21.
Ray Dalio (Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail)
But they do highlight the need to resurrect ambition and vision in our everyday policymaking. This cannot just be about bold statements. We have to believe in the public sector and invest in its core capabilities, including the ability to interact with other value creators in society, and design contracts that work in the public interest. We must create more effective interfaces with innovations across the whole of society; rethink how policies are designed; change how intellectual property regimes are governed; and use R&D to distribute intelligence across academia, government, business and civil society. This means restoring public purpose in policies so that they are aimed at creating tangible benefits for citizens and setting goals that matter to people – driven by public-interest considerations rather than profit.5
Mariana Mazzucato (Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism)
This is only the beginning of a huge “Copernican revolution” (to borrow a phrase from Matthew Taylor, one of Tony Blair’s advisers) that is putting the user at the center of the public-sector universe. The current centralized state has been shaped by the idea that information is in short supply: It derives its power from the fact that it knows lots of things that ordinary people do not. But information is now one of the world’s most abundant resources: available in huge quantities and accessible to anyone with a computer or a smart phone. As Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, and Jared Cohen, who worked for Hillary Clinton, point out in The New Digital Age, this changes the nature of the relationship between individuals and authority. The top-down state may become more like a network that can mobilize the energies and abilities of thousands or even millions of well-informed citizens—or “prosumers,” as one cyberguru, Don Tapscott, has called them.
John Micklethwait (The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State)
Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Pharmacy The Institute is approved by AICTE & Pharmacy Council of India and is affiliated to Pt. B.D. Sharma University of Health Sciences, Rohtak. Courses Offered: Bachelor in Pharmacy A Bachelor of Pharmacy (Abbreviated B Pharma) is a graduate education degree in the field of pharmacy. The degree is the basic condition for practicing in many countries as a pharmacist and it is about developing necessary skills for counseling patients about understanding and using the properties of medicines. Bachelor of Pharmacy (B.Pharm) is an undergraduate degree course in the field of Pharmacy education. The students those are interested in the medical field (except to become a doctor) can choose this course after the completion of class 12th. After the completion of this degree, the students can practice as a Pharmacist. Pharmacists can work in a range of industries related to the prescription, manufacture & provision of medicines. The duration of this course is 4 years. The B.Pharm is one of the popular job oriented course among the science students after class 12th. In this course the students study about the drugs and medicines, Pharmaceutical Engineering, Medicinal Chemistry etc. This course provides a large no. of job opportunities in both the public and private sector. There are various career options available for the science students after the completion of B.Pharm degree. The students can go for higher studies in the Pharmacy i.e. Master of Pharmacy (M.Pharm). This field is one of the evergreen fields in the medical sector, with the increasing demand of Pharma professional every year. B.Pharm programme covers the syllabus including biochemical science & health care. The Pharmacy Courses are approved by the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) & Pharmacy Council of India (PCI). B.Pharma – Bachelor in Pharmacy Program Mode Regular Duration 4 Years No. of Seats 60 Eligibility Passed 10+2 examination with Physics and Chemistry as compulsory subjects along with any one of the Mathematics/ Biotechnology/ Biology. Obtained at least 47% marks in the above subjects taken together. Lateral Entry to Second Year: Candidate must have passed Diploma in Pharmacy course of a minimum duration of 2 years or more from Haryana Board of Technical Education or its equivalent with at least 50% marks in aggregate of all semesters/ years.
swamidevidyal
In a 2016 book widely publicized in the US, Stern claimed that 58 per cent of all jobs would be automated eventually, driven by the ethos of shareholder value. He told the American media group Bloomberg, ‘It’s not like the fall of the auto and steel industries. That hit just a sector of the country. This will be widespread. People will realize that we don’t have a storm anymore; we have a tsunami.’16 Nevertheless, there are reasons to be sceptical about the prospect of a jobless or even workless future. It is the latest version of the ‘lump of labour fallacy’, the idea that there is only a certain amount of labour and work to be done, so that if more of it can be automated or done by intelligent robots, human workers will be rendered redundant. In any case, very few jobs can be automated in their entirety. The suggestion in a much-cited study17 that nearly half of all US jobs are vulnerable to automation has been challenged by, among others, the OECD, which puts the figure of jobs ‘at risk’ at 9 per cent for industrialized countries.18
Guy Standing (Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen)
Men guard the few remaining public sector jobs with hyper-vigilance, using weapons of sexism and homophobia to police the boundaries of their professions. White people draw moral boundaries against blacks for laziness and moral disorder. Black informants draw even stronger boundaries against other blacks who cannot navigate the perils of a racist society on their own; echoing Simon, “If you wear baggy jeans and talk like an asshole, you are not gonna get ahead. It’s not racism, it’s you. I hate black people who say it is racism.” Ultimately, young working-class men and women believe that if they have to battle through life alone, then everyone else should, too.
Jennifer M. Silva (Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty)
The rapid rise of communication and collaboration technologies has transformed many other formerly local markets into a similarly universal bazaar. The small company looking for a computer programmer or public relations consultant now has access to an international marketplace of talent in the same way that the advent of the record store allowed the small-town music fan to bypass local musicians to buy albums from the world’s best bands. The superstar effect, in other words, has a broader application today than Rosen could have predicted thirty years ago. An increasing number of individuals in our economy are now competing with the rock stars of their sectors.
Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
When elites solve public problems privately, they can do so in ways that contribute to democracy, and they can do so in ways that disrupt it. The former occurs when elite help “contributes to and enlarges the public goods provided by the state, and attends to interests not readily provided for by the state.” But the same elite help, backed by the same noble intentions, can instead “disrupt” democracy when it “replaces the public sphere with all manner of private initiatives for special public purposes.” These latter works don’t simply do what government cannot do. They “crowd out the public sector, further reducing both its legitimacy and its efficacy, and replace civic goals with narrower concerns about efficiency and markets.
Anand Giridharadas (Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World)
The dealers chosen in the initial years all performed well. However, after some years, with changes in the ministry, the Maruti management and board came under a lot of pressure to accommodate unsuitable persons as dealers. Maruti dealerships were very profitable in those days as there was virtually no competition. The dealer did not have to employ any working capital, and the vehicles commanded a premium. The role of the dealer was virtually that of being a distributor. Naturally, getting a dealership was considered to be a very safe way of making money, and hence became an object of political patronage. While senior ministers like N.D. Tiwari and the late J. Vengal Rao kept away from making recommendations for dealerships, their junior ministers did not exercise the same self-restraint. The common perception was that public sector companies were controlled by the ministry, and ministers therefore had the right to give directions to the management on various matters. A minister probably felt that he would lose face if he were to tell a political supporter that he was unable to direct the management of a public sector firm to do a small thing like award a dealership. Unfortunately, most of the recommendations made were for people who were totally unable to meet the minimum requirements for a dealership. One person who came with a strong recommendation was a ‘social worker’ with no assets and no declared source of income. The inability to award a dealership to him made one minister of state very unhappy. Somehow Vengal Rao heard about this matter. He called me and said that under no circumstances was a dealership to be awarded to this person, as it was not a clean case. Some months later, after Vengal Rao had quit his post, the minister of state ordered an enquiry against me in the Kandla transportation case and the extension of my term as managing director was delayed.
R.C. Bhargava (The Maruti Story)
Public servants along with payment also get power, they should beat any private sector employee, any social work volunteer at providing good public service.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
The Ballad of John Axon was the first of a series created by MacColl, Seeger and BBC producer Charles Parker that shone the microphone like a searchlight into obscure or overlooked sectors of British society: fishermen, teenagers, motorway builders, miners, polio sufferers, even the nomadic travelling community. Gathered on the spot, their oral histories were reworked as intelligent and dynamic folk anthropology, attuned to their era’s nuanced tug-of-war between conservatism and progress. The eight programmes, broadcast by the BBC between 1958–64, were experiments conducted on the wireless, splicing spoken word, field recordings, sound effects, traditional folk song and newly composed material into audio essays that verged on the hypnotic. They were given a name that elegantly fused tradition and modernity: radio ballads. Until the mid-1950s standard BBC practice in making radio documentaries involved researchers visiting members of the public – ‘actuality characters’ – and talking to them, perhaps even recording them, then returning to headquarters and working out a script based on their testimonies. The original subjects would then be revisited and presented with the scripted version of their own words. That’s the reason such programmes sound so stilted to modern ears: members of the public are almost always speaking a scriptwriter’s distillation of their spontaneous thoughts. When MacColl and Charles Parker drove up to Stockport in the autumn of 1957 with an EMI Midget tape recorder in their weekend bags, they planned to interview Axon’s widow and his colleagues for information, then turn their findings into a dramatic reconstruction featuring actors and musicians. In fact, they stayed in the area for around a fortnight and ended up with more than forty hours of voices and location recordings. The material, they agreed, was too good to tamper with.
Rob Young (Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music)
it is an insulting delusion of many people who, like me, have cushy jobs in the public sector to imagine that workers in the private sector are driven by greed and fear. The evidence suggests that job satisfaction is actually considerably higher in the private sector; for example, people are far less likely to use illness as a reason for not going to work.
Paul Collier (The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties)
In the high-tech sector, where companies routinely flame out in pursuit of a fast buck, taking the long view is often the ticket to enduring success. “We weren’t trying to just go public and get rich,” Bill Gates once said of the early days at Microsoft. “There was no near-term thing. It always was this many-decades thing where there were no shortcuts and we’d sort of put one foot in front of the other.
Carl Honoré (The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed)
Many students come to me full of wonderful intentions hoping to change the world; they plan to spend their time helping the poor and disadvantaged. I tell them to first graduate and make a lot of money, and only then figure out how best to help those in need. Too often students can’t meaningfully help the disadvantaged now, even if it makes them feel good for trying to. I have seen so many former students in their late 30s and 40s struggling to make ends meet. They spent their time in college doing good rather than building their careers and futures. I warn students today to be careful how they use their precious time and to think carefully about when is the right time to help. It’s a well-worn cliché, but you have to help yourself before you help others. This is too often lost on idealistic students. I am often asked whether one should work in the private or public sector. I always advise working in the private sector, and wish I did this before entering politics and the public sector. The private sector teaches important skills like entrepreneurship that can then be applied to any area of work later on.
Timothy Ferriss (Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World)
By the end of the 1970s, a clear majority of the employed population of Britain, Germany, France, the Benelux countries, Scandinavia and the Alpine countries worked in the service sector—communications, transport, banking, public administration and the like. Italy, Spain and Ireland were very close behind.
Tony Judt (Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945)
The argument against affirmative action that holds the most water for me is that when affirmative action is viewed as 'enough' it can be detrimental to the fight for racial justice. We must never forget that without systemic change and without efforts to battle the myriad of ways in which systemic racism impacts people of color of all classes, backgrounds, and abilities, our efforts at ending systemic racial oppression will fail. We must refuse to be placated by measures that only serve a select few - and affirmative action does only serve a select few. We must never forget that people of color who will never want to go to college, who will never be able to go to college, who cannot work, who choose not to work, who choose to work in the public sector - they all deserve to be treated as human beings free from racial bigotry and persecution.
Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk About Race)
As many countries in Europe experience growing fiscal strains as a result of low fertility and an aging population, active family policies are likely to become more important—not just as a response to political demands, but also as an economic imperative. The key for the success of such policies in today’s world is not that they subsidize families with children—a strategy that, as noted, has met with limited success when attempted—but rather that they empower women to pursue careers without having to sacrifice family. This means spending on high-quality, full-time child care, and the creation, or subsidization, of flexible, general skills jobs in the public sector.
Torben Iversen (Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality (The Institution for Social and Policy Studies))