My own story is that much of this is a side effect of (partially, but very much ongoing and needed) successful efforts to reduce discrimination and keep talented, driven, smart people out of many important industries and jobs. When women and minorities just flat-out don’t get hired in high paying private sector jobs, you’re going to get a higher-than-economically-reasonable number of such people working as teachers, postal workers, and lots of other stable-but-not-prestigious-or-lucrative jobs, which are skewed towards the public sector.
We haven’t adjusted our societal expectations to these facts and what they mean for hiring and paying public servants. Any attempt to fix that now ironically runs up against the perception that government is so incompetent that throwing more money at the problem is a terrible waste, whether that’s true in a particular case or not.
Edit to add: I think this combines with what David Chapman’s points about society internalizing the postmodern critique incompletely. This makes it much easier to tear down people trying to lead and reform as intrinsically untrustworthy just for wanting to do that, while we haven’t yet gotten enough metarational people in high enough places to build institutions that can function anyway, and don’t yet know what those could look like.
My own story is that much of this is a side effect of (partially, but very much ongoing and needed) successful efforts to reduce discrimination and keep talented, driven, smart people out of many important industries and jobs. When women and minorities just flat-out don’t get hired in high paying private sector jobs, you’re going to get a higher-than-economically-reasonable number of such people working as teachers, postal workers, and lots of other stable-but-not-prestigious-or-lucrative jobs, which are skewed towards the public sector.
We haven’t adjusted our societal expectations to these facts and what they mean for hiring and paying public servants. Any attempt to fix that now ironically runs up against the perception that government is so incompetent that throwing more money at the problem is a terrible waste, whether that’s true in a particular case or not.
Edit to add: I think this combines with what David Chapman’s points about society internalizing the postmodern critique incompletely. This makes it much easier to tear down people trying to lead and reform as intrinsically untrustworthy just for wanting to do that, while we haven’t yet gotten enough metarational people in high enough places to build institutions that can function anyway, and don’t yet know what those could look like.