The Intangible Value of the Public Sector

Most of my favorite bloggers write about subjects other than government, which means I have little cause to link to them here most of the time. So it's nice to be able to point to this thoughtful rumination by Matt Yglesias on the value of public sector investments and the stimulus, particularly his defense of greening federal buildings. Matt argues:

"Japan entered its “lost decade” with infrastructure that was in many ways much more advanced than America’s. The abysmal quality of our current passenger rail service means, for example, that there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that would improve things. And it seems to me that increasing the energy efficiency of federal buildings and doing repairs on our schools would be extremely valuable. After all, for decades now the country has been persistently governed by folks ideologically predisposed to underinvestment in the public sector. Individual projects are, however, always going to be subject to debate. What most conservatives seem to be doing, however, is just kind of pounding the table and insisting that any public sector undertaking is, by definition, 'pork' and/or 'waste' and that’s just not a tenable position."

I think this is a problem for public service in general. It's possible to estimate the ultimate economic value of the National Science Foundation, or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or the Education Department. But it's hard to prove it. Agencies don't produce revenue and profit, they produce the conditions in which we live. It's easy for political parties to float ideas like abolishing the Education or Commerce Departments in part because it's hard to imagine what our society would be like without them--they're far-fetched plans. And because we're used to the conditions in which we live, we don't pay much attention to the processes by which they're produced.

And that's a recruiting and performance problem, too. All the agencies that are trying to draw direct lines between individual positions and agency mission are recognizing this: you've got to tell people what they're producing in order to convince them their jobs are interesting, and to convince them to perform.