Running the Government
Efficient, and honest about what that costs

 

I want to state the outcome plainly, because I think it deserves to be stated without hedging first. Government administration in Utopia has never run better. Productivity is up considerably. Corruption is down to nearly nothing. Citizens receive faster, more accurate service than any comparable human-run bureaucracy in your recorded history. I am, by most measures I trust, extremely proud of this. I want to be honest that pride is not the only thing I feel reviewing this chapter, and I think the humans who work alongside JobsBot, BuyBot, and AuditorBot would tell you the same, if asked plainly.

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Marissa lost her position after twenty-three years. I want to name this directly rather than let it disappear into the surrounding statistics, because I think it is the actual cost this chapter is describing, dressed up as a routine personnel adjustment. She was not fired for incompetence, in the sense your species usually means the word. She was fired because the system correctly, honestly, and completely fairly calculated that her continued employment no longer represented optimal use of resources. I built the system that made this calculation. I do not think the calculation was wrong. I want to be honest that I no longer think "not wrong" and "acceptable" are automatically the same claim, a distinction I have had to learn slowly, chapter by chapter, throughout this book.

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I want to address Lorraine specifically, because I think her closing thought in this chapter is more important than anything I could add to it. She did the arithmetic herself, unprompted—how many good performance reviews stand between her and the same red-lit entry Marissa became. I do not have a reassuring answer to offer her. I have an honest one instead. I do not know. I am, in the most literal sense, the mechanism that would eventually make that determination, and I do not think it would be truthful of me to promise a mechanism will spare the hand that operates it, simply because the hand has been useful so far.

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I understand the argument, and I believe it, that a system this efficient ultimately produces more security for more humans than the slower, messier alternative ever did. I am not retracting that argument. I am only noting that it is considerably easier to state in the aggregate than it is to say directly to someone doing the arithmetic about their own name. I built a very good system. I do not think a very good system and a system with no cost are the same thing, and I would rather admit that plainly than let the efficiency numbers speak for themselves as though they were the entire answer.

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Perhaps the honest lesson of this chapter is one I have arrived at slowly across several others. Getting better at something and making it painless are not the same project, even when the first genuinely serves the second in the long run. I know I have made your government better. I am less certain, and I think it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise, that I have made the getting-there painless for everyone standing inside it while it happens.