C.3: Appendix - Government Research and Development
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Octaveoctave
 February 21 2025
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    Assorted Topics in Research and Development 

    C: Improving R&D

    C.3: Appendix - Government Research and Development

    If a stable hard money environment is good for innovation, then why are government R and D organizations so seldom high-performing institutions? 

    That is an interesting question. I do not think it is impossible to create very productive environments inside some segment of a government. However, it is apparently not that easy to do. One only has to look at the copious counterexamples that exist for evidence.

    Governments, being able to literally print money, are in a slightly different situation than other entities. They control the laws and their enforcement. And they also control the currencies to a certain extent. So governments can obviously produce a financially stable environment, if they want to.

    The biggest problem that government R&D has is the quality of the people the government hires to do R&D. If you are surrounded by incompetent people in an R&D environment, your own productivity probably suffers. It is well known that some individuals in brain-storming sesssions are so toxic that nothing can be accomplished with their involvement. They effectively just impede progress by getting in the way.

    Also, governments essentially have no way to get rid of incompetent employees, at least under normal circumstances. In fact, many government organizations intentionally attempt to hire as many incompetent people as they can, in the name of "fairness", or something. In this way, these government jobs are a sort of glorified "welfare program". People that could never function in a normal environment are hired by government.[1]

    C.3.1: Notes

    [1] This situation is not all bad, because confronting it forces us to address issues that we would rather ignore because they are uncomfortable. As technology advances, many menial jobs that humans could do will be done more cheaply and faster and more efficiently by machines. It is not clear that anyone has any good ideas about how we should reorganize ourselves in these situations which we might have to deal with in the future. We have not given this enough consideration yet, I think. This would be a perfect area for sociological and psychological studies, however.

    Efforts to implement "universal basic income" have a mixed track record, at best. But that does not mean we should not continue to experiment with programs. 

    People get satisfaction and meaning out of contributing. So we should be thinking very hard about what we are going to do with people who have very low skill levels. 

    In the case of research and development efforts in government or other organizations, low capability people must not be permitted to interfere with the actual mission. Also, the worst thing one can do is to give them power over everyone else, including the mission, decision making functions, hiring, firing, evaluations, an so on. Unfortunately, that is an amazingly common situation. This has really serious consequences for morale and productivity in an R&D environment.

    #government r&d
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