“the neoliberal idea that everyone is motivated by narrow self-interest is wrong.”

I must admit, I have never met a neoliberal of this type before but I hear them talked about an awful lot by the left. They sound so dim I think they must be made of straw. Liberals and libertarians would acknowledge that someone’s interests matters in their decision making (that may be self-interest, or interest in their families or in their friends, or in their values). ‘Pro-social’ behaviour as described in this study can easily be accounted for in those terms too.

I wouldn’t disagree with your claims that over-managing is a bad thing. The study appears interesting but seems to miss out an important alternative explanation: the workers in the study are less efficient at getting the job done than average, and so do unpaid overtime to catch up. That is a problem with associating ‘productivity’ with time spent working.

The thing about the private sector, is that you can tell if a company (at least one that isn’t politically influential and able to extract funds from a cozy position like, say, Capita) is actually productive by looking at its balance sheet. By definition, you can’t do that with the non-profit sector.

If the studies conclusions are true though, then that doesn’t merely endorse public sector work so much as genuine non-profit work, i.e. more charitable companies that accept voluntary donations.

It also doesn’t take in to account how the working time directive conflicts with the threat of disciplinary action. There is the potential for parts of the public sector, say the police for example, to tell their workers that there is no way legally they can pay workers for doing more than the EU dictated maximum hours of work. Therefore the onus is on the worker to do everything they need to do inside the time legally ascertained as being the max someone should work…in a resource dry area such as the public sector something that is contradictory to the realities of the situation in that some of those people simply won’t be able to do the work in the amount of time allotted, with no money to employ more people to do the job.

Consequence? Workers being disciplined for not doing their work on time because it is now their responsibility to make sure they do it in the time given…oh, unless of course they volunteer to do the work on their own time of course…

I had a long chat with a friend of mine whop works for the DWP and he catalogued the very long list of stupidities and inefficiencies where he works. People off sick on full pay despite having only worked 30 days in the 18 months they had been there and a raft of similar stories.

I think the knightly motive that you mention exists, but it tends to only exist in sections of the public sector where workers can see a direct cause-effect relationship between what they do and it’s positive contribution. Back office staff see far less of this and are therefore don’t really have the knightly motive.

I think it’s also worth identifying the knightly motive in the private sector, that tends to occur in small businesses when workers have a more direct relation between their work and positive outcomes.

As a leftie I find this all rather depressing if understandable. I’d quite like to see the productivity of the public sector improved. The best solution in my view is to concentrate on a decent tier of middle management, line managers who deal with employees on a day to day basis and are driven by incentives to perform well and feel that they have the power to deal with problematic employees.

As I pointed out when Chris posted this article on his own site, the paper he refers to is not comparing public and private sectors, it’s comparing the profit-making and non-profit making sectors. Thus charities are included under non-profit making. Because of this, it’s wrong to equate non-profit making with the public sector.

Nick – what about public choice theory? What about James Buchanan, who calls people with Le Grand’s knightly motives “zealots”, who are actually dangerous? What about Milton Friedman on why socialised provision “always fails”?

It’s not a straw man under attack at all.

Dan

The examples you give are all about the public sector. How can you draw conclusions from them about whether “neo-liberals” are “motivated by narrow self-interest” or not?

Dan

There is nothing inconsistent about believing in knightly motives operating at the margins and also believing that socialised provision always fails. You can’t eat knightly motives or live in them (both goods that are narrow and self-interested), and they cannot outpace the other incentives that state welfare generates.

I would argue that efficiency of public sector vs private sector is largely due to structure rather than any kind of profit motive or public/private ownership. There are workers in both sectors who are detached from any kind of result or reward for their work, there are limited ways of mitigating the problem and I feel that this is the issue that needs addressing not the public vs private ownership question.

This suggests that what Julian Le Grand called “knightly motives” are significantly more common in the public sector

What fraction of public sector strike have been called with “knightly motives”, rather than knavely ones?

How many public sector workers renounce part of their pay packet, to benefit those that they serve?