Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution

As soon as I read this, I thought of TurboTax and its mission to preserve the crappy system of filing US taxes so that its software can continue to profit.

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

  Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

    First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

    Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

  The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

Systemantics by John Gall has some insightful and surprising gems that feel related to The Shirky Principle, I guess because they're both related to complex wetware systems.

Complex Systems Tend To Oppose Their Own Proper Function. My favorite axiom. Your city has a problem with trash building up on the streets so it sets up a waste management company. The company starts out by collecting trash daily, but then they shift to a Tuesday-only schedule. Next, you get a notice saying that the company will no longer service your building unless you buy their standardized garbage cans (to ensure that the robotic arms on their trucks can pick them up). Eventually, the waste management union goes on strike and the trash starts piling up on the street again anyways.

People In Systems Do Not Do What The System Says They Are Doing. The stated purpose of a king is to rule a country, but in reality they spend a lot of time fighting off usurpers.

This one feels related to the Shirky Principle:

A System Continues To Do Its Thing, Regardless Of Need. The Selective Service System continues to require all 18-year-old male US citizens to register for the draft, even though the US hasn’t had a draft in 51 years.

https://www.biodigitaljazz.net/blog/systemantics.html (one of my many blogs)

This explains a lot about the effectiveness of San Francisco's $600M in spending on drug addiction/homelessness, the spend and problem seem to increase together

The UNRWA, the UN Agency for helping Palestinian refugees has been accused of perpetuating their misery - (The real problem with the UN’s agency for Palestinians, The Economist https://archive.is/c7Pop).

There is a trap here of saying "thus we shouldn't do anything about problems" rather than the more reasonable "we should be prepared to iterate on our efforts".

Not just institutions, individuals too. I’ve seen many individuals ‘dig their heels’ into protecting their own pet project/baby/solution/etc, mainly due to ego.

It takes maturity and humility to step back, assess objectively, trade off pros and cons, and ultimately let the best decisions, ideas and solutions win, even when it’s hard to give up your idea or a solution you’ve worked super hard on.

It's a good article for those who are unfamiliar with these cautionary tales of second order effects and fraud. As someone who believes government is a solution to many problems, these lessons are critical.

I disagree with the universality of the statement "any institution made to solve a problem will preserve it". They back off this in the caveats section.

Two important things to prevent this is to consider the influence of money on a solution/organization, and what kind of oversight is needed for an organization. Also, when spinning up a program, asking "is the problem this org solves a permanent one?" Or can the problem be eradicated?

A group created to clean up trash in a city park system might need to be large one year, but practically non-existent 5 years later if goals are met. The planned decommissioning of such organizations should be considered.

There’s no such thing as a broken system, every system is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it currently gets.

I can think of no better example of than the US Postal Service.

They’re literally is zero reason in 2024 why are we cutting down trees using diesel fuel to ship paper to a mill using coal to make it into paper using more diesel fuel to ship it to my home to be trashed picked up by a dump truck, using more diesel fuel to be thrown in a giant pile on what it would’ve been otherwise pristine piece of land.

municipal authorities, who realized that their best efforts at dératisation [extermination of rats] had actually increased the rodent population

I live in a complex of town houses. We have lots of rats and mice. This is seemingly an unsolvable problem, and our pest control company keeps adding poison traps, but the problem does not go away. They blame government, because the poison they are allowed to put in their doesn't kill the mice, (as this could kill eagles or other animals eating the mice).

We ended up buying our own standard issue traps lately that either slap them to death, or drown them, and the problem is getting better. Makes you question why the pest control company didn't do that. Or not, we know why.

The article mentions this in the very end, but isn't the "Shirky principle" just a case of perverse incentives? Allocating a budget to solving a problem continuously does set the incentives to prolong the problem.

I wonder how much paying after the problem is solved would help vs. paying in advance as it is often done for agencies / institutions.

Corporate rent seeking would seem to be a more prevalent example, even in the context of government. For example, most of the US defense budget goes directly to the military industrial media complex instead of the uniformed military.

Counter example: WHO and smallpox

Nah. Correction: Institutions try to preserve themselves. That's the goal. That's the root problem. Once you understand the power of that belief, the behaviour, the rhetoric, etc. all becomes much clearer. The bullshit much easier to cut through. The fact the problems don't get solved is a "side effect" to self preservation.

Of course institutions preserve the problem - that is the reason for their existence - so they are in a fight for survival to keep a systemic problem going. It is even better for them if the institution has managed to enshrine its position in law, creating huge barriers to entry for any upstart that tries to come up with better solutions. Taxis, medicine, banking - there are so many examples.

If you ask me, a freer market is the answer - less intervention, allow simple economic forces to play out. But the inclination is to have more government meddling etc to fix the mess, which has the opposite effect that it was intended to have. This is such a common pattern however, one ought to be asking whether the "unintended effect" (of entrenching the problem) is in reality an "intended effect", with only lip service being paid to 'doing the right thing' to facilitate legal changes.

A while back when I noticed that many upscale gyms were offering high-calorie workout smoothies, shakes and bars. When I did the math, it happened that most of them would completely obliterate whatever workout you had just done (assuming your goal was calorie deficit)...thus prolonging the need for the gym.

This is more or less Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy. https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

A story from a physicist friend working in a mid-size high-tech company:

There was a director-level organization of about 50 people trying to solve a technical research-level problem. The physicist found an innovative solution that was too simple and just worked. When he demonstrated it to everyone, he thought everyone would be very happy. On the contrary, his manager started having unexplained issues with him and he was shortly let go.

He has ultimately given up on corporate politics and is currently a physics teacher at a usual local college.

As the physics teacher, he found that the students in his class barely knew basic stuff (vector addition, etc.) from the pre-requisite courses. He tried to teach to cover up. He diligently and fairly checked the answers/solutions from the students in the mid-term exams, and found that practically no one passed.

He was shortly called by the college dean and heard back. The dean's primary concern was that irrespective of whether students actually learn or not, if so many fail the exams, the college would get shut down.

He is now forced to pass the students even while he realizes that by passing them now, he's setting them up for failure in the future if they actually pursue physics.

I surmise that if the Shirky Principle were to stop acting, say 80% of projects/institutions may just go away and should.

----

In some cases, it's even worse -- Institutions invent fake problems that they allege to be the solution for and then of course never solve them.

Really interesting read. I’ve had this exact thought but not in a well defined sentence before. Especially regarding entities like turboTax or DoT (Departments of Transportation) where they will expand highways even though it’s a well known empirical fact that this typically causes induced demand or more traffic.

It’s really nice to have such a well defined principle to this idea.

I don't understand why saying institutions and focusing on government, the current example I have in mind for this is Google relationship with search and Ads in the AI era.

I guess the principal "Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution" can apply to almost anything though, as really it is talking about "incentives"?

Sounds like a lack of competition. Multiple entities should compete for providing the best solution, and the entities should be rewarded or penalized accordingly.

Literally what Ivan Illich was saying 50 years ago when he talked about counterproductivity in institutions

Luncheon vouchers systems are run by private entities that take a fee on it. I believe the fee is pretty high (a shop owner told me 8%, but I am not too confident).

I definitely believe this system is outdated, that the tax-cut is eaten by said companies plus the extra burden and that the world would be a slightly simpler place without meal vouchers (at least as I know them in France).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meal_voucher

Spam email is another example.

There's a paper from Stefan Savage's group a while back where they were able to estimate overall revenue of a few big spam-generating pharma/counterfeit product networks, and it looks like the anti-spam industry is vastly bigger than the underground spam-generating industry, and had no desire to shut off the ultimate source of their revenues.

There's a reason we don't see many of those emails anymore, and it's not because of any action by anti-spam companies - it's because firms whose products were being counterfeited convinced the credit card companies to shut off the banks handling payments for these purchases. (most evidently went through a couple of banks in I think Azerbaijan) Evidently all the viagra spam was coming from people who also hawked fake Gucci stuff...

I have to leave the example of police and police unions - which have very powerful lobbyists who try their darnedest to keep as many things illegal as possible.

It's funny that nobody mentions such an institution and how it was fixed. Elon Musk fired 80% of Twitter's employees, and it's better than ever.

The most general form of this is Upton Sinclair’s: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.

Though often the causes are not cynical or nefarious.

Legal barriers to entry and similar regulations are often the form entrenched players use to preserve their problem.

It's a hard balance to strike because the examples of harm from too little regulation make easy soundbites. But the costs of the certification are complex and difficult to quantify, albeit very real.

"The Thirteenth Voyage" of Ijon Tichy is quite an amusing read on the topic

This appears in the biggest way in the financial sector. The US financial sector is now about 12% of employment.

The US used to have a much simpler financial sector, due to strict regulation.

* Banks could not do brokerage, and brokers could not do banking. (Glass-Stegall)

* Banks could only do boring stuff - transactions and loans.

* Utilities were mostly rate of return regulated, paid dividends, and had stable stock prices.

* Utility ownership was simple - there was a limit of 3 on ownership tree depth. (Utility Holding Company Act)

* Stocks traded much more slowly. There were no hedge funds, leveraged buyouts, private equity (which is leveraged buyouts under another name), or high frequency trading.

* Major companies could have only one class of voting stock, a NYSE rule. (Ford Motor was grandfathered in, being older than the NYSE).

* Home loans came mostly from savings and loan companies, which could pay higher interest rates than banks.

All that held from 1940-1980, arguably one of the greatest periods for the US. Then came financial deregulation.

The big effect was that if you wanted to make money, you didn't go into finance. You went into manufacturing.

It seems many of these - e.g. turbotax - are more specifically regulatory capture. The capitalistic business that makes a profit on tax preparation surely opposses the government giving it away for free.

One of the reasons defense spending in the US is so high and why programs like the F-35 have gone $183 billion over original cost estimates, is because of the Shirky Principle.

I’m convinced that earned value management (EV), which is a requirement of contractors to follow under the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR), is a very subtle form of regulatory capture that serves the needs of the managerial professional class over that of the warfighter, workers, and tax payers.

EV, at its surface, appears to be a tool for the government to ensure contractors provide honest work and control costs. Because it’s essentially waterfall, it incentives raw task execution and disincentives managing risk, fixing bugs, and satisfying non-functional requirements.

We have acquisition programs that follow the systems engineering process, with discrete execution steps of design, development, integration, etc. with people’s careers focused on fulfilling those stages of development. The later in this process an issue is discovered, the more expensive it is to fix [1].

The kicker is that a good manager, under EV, will work to exceed performance, get a task done ahead of schedule, and under budget. This manger has every reason to not solve bugs and to pass them on later in the process.

There is no reason for anyone in this process to change it, because careers depend on it continuing to exist, and contractors, as institutions, really benefit from it.

In the bad old days of defense contracting, contractors would seriously underbid contracts. As soon as they got the award, because they underbid everyone, the contractor would immediately send a series of change requests to increase the budget. The government has ways to eliminate this risk, such as hiring two contractors to do the same job, then drop a competitor who attempts the change request ramp. Though this is expensive.

With EV, contractors get a ramp up and further contracts, without having to directly engage in shenanigans. EV incentivizes the development of brittle and incomplete solutions, like aircraft that give their pilots hypoxia and melt holes in the decks of carriers. The genius of EV is that contractors effectively get change requests and follow-on contracts, and everyone in the system can act honest and honestly say they are acting honest.

What I would do instead is change these perverse incentives by amending the FAR by adding alternative oversight mechanisms, such as a knowledge point framework to develop risk modeling or use economic modeling such as cost-of-delay. The problem is that everyone benefits from the current system and you would need strong leadership by many in congress on an obscure issue.

[1] https://deepsource.com/blog/exponential-cost-of-fixing-bugs

Another book that covers the topic - Quigley's the Evolution of Civilizations. Taken from a summary:

"Quigley defines a civilization as “a producing society with an instrument of expansion.” A civilization’s decline is not inevitable but occurs when its instrument of expansion is transformed into an institution—that is, when social arrangements that meet real social needs are transformed into social institutions serving their own purposes regardless of real social needs."

He spends some time defining institutionalization, when groups transition from being a group that was formed to accomplish a goal, to being a group whos goal becomes to preserve the group, the various stages involved, and the points where there's opportunities to rectify the situation via reform.

bingo

A wise man once said. You doin too much, gah.

The Clay Shirky talk, "The Collapse of Complex Business Models" is play on "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter (as mentioned in the post).

Another great person to study in systems and complexity is Jane Jacobs.

One parallel is see is people "warning" about the impending population collapse (which we desperately need), but what we need to do is actively restructure our society to handle it gracefully.

https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/archae...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs

I used to believe that any organization who takes morality seriously must fund it's equal and opposite organization. It would serve as a foil, collecting unhappy customer stories and potentially turning them into lawsuits. The second organization's stated goal is to end the first organization. But after a moment's thought, the Shirky Principle clearly makes this unworkable - both orgs want to survive, so the second org will, in general, tend to shirk its duties (so to speak) and function merely as a private welfare scheme and a cloak of respectability for the first.

I'm always thinking about that when I see various homeless shelters in my city.

Yes I dont doubt that people there work from their goodwill... but... if homelessness disappear, they will be out of business? From some point of view, homelessness is GOOD for them?

Same thing with all those African charities I guess, but I dont have any direct experience with poverty in Africa while I see homeless daily

…duh? I thought this was common knowledge.

I thought this was going to be an article about the Agile Industrial Complex or Clean Architecture.

They don't need to intentionally try. Institutions that do things to solve problems compete against ones that do things to survive. Even if everyone, in their mind, is trying to solve problems, over time the institutions that survive are the ones that "solve the problem" in a self-perpetuating, self-empowering way.

Accountants, tax consultants, (many types of) lawyers, real estate agents and other useless middlemen, all examples of professions that shouldn't exist, given that there are cheap, easy and efficient technical solutions for the problems they solve.

Why are they still in business? Because the law prevents more efficient solutions. Why are laws made in such a fashion? Because said industries offer lucrative deals to lawmakers if they give in to their lobbying.

The corruption in the western world is deep and pervasive. It's just one level removed from the public perception s.t. the price we all pay for it is hidden.

The weapon producers are the most obvious group.

Police system wants criminals to persist. Justice system wants litigations to persist. Medical system wants diseases to prolong. Religious leaders don't want to us to reach our own god. Political and military leaders want the country to be threatened. Education system don't want us to learn on our own. So, they create artificial pressure to get educated. Even top technological companies pay legal bribes to users not to use competatiors product. so on.

Only solution to all this is: Think how would we live if such entities did not exist. Then develop necessary skills and use them in daily life.

It does seem that the incentives are pretty aligned with keeping the organization in place and thus not solving the problem. The incentive structure would have to change to fundamentally fix the issue.

Perhaps our institutions could be replaced by finite lifetime endeavors, similar to vc funds.

Reminds me of us vs Japanese tv shows. Theirs often last only a season or two and the stories are good. Ours go on and on till we are sick of them.

Related: The purpose of a system is what it does. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

It would be better to submit the paper for peer review verifying the claims.

It is great to have opinions, but it is even better to rigorously check them against reality.

I didn't see any mention of Robert Conquest's 3 laws of bureaucracy:

1 Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

2 Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

3 The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies

Most times they don’t need to preserve the problem as the problem always slowly evolves and so does the institution. Another reason they cannot easily preserve problem is because there is competition. I do think this could be happening for medicine, and most likely place for it to happen

  I'm on a Committee
  (Phong Ngo)

  Oh, give me a pity, I'm on a committee
  Which means that from morning to night
  We attend and amend and contend and defend
  Without a conclusion in sight.

  We confer and concur, we defer and demur
  And re-iterate all of our thoughts
  We revise the agenda with frequent addenda
  And consider a load of reports.

  We compose and propose, we suppose and oppose
  And the points of procedure are fun!
  But though various notions are brought up as motion
  There's terribly little gets done.

  We resolve and absolve, but never dissolve
  Since it's out of the question for us.
  What a shattering pity to end our committee
  Where else could we make such a fuss?

  Copyright  Phong Ngo
  RG
  APR99

It also happens at a larger scale where an entire industry maintains the status quo. I think of this every time I read "the $x B ____ industry"

In addition to mentioning the key quote that is now known as the Shirky principle, Kelly also says the following in his blog post:

“The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions (like a company, or an industry) can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem.”

I would drop the 'inadvertently' though.

What a thought-terminating cliche of a title.

It's a glaring omission that the word "capitalism" doesn't appear once in this because is at the heart of what the real problem is.

To borrowo another commenter's example: waste management. The town starts picking up the trash daily. It may cut back services and standardize waste bins to streamline the process and cut costs. But here's where it really goes awry: the waste management gets privatized, usually in some kind of "public private partnership". Or it and other municipal functions may be delegated to private insitutions, namely HOAs, which historically have been quasi-government actors that were created primarily to exclude people (ie systemic racism, segregation [1]).

Now HOAs are menat to be resident bodies but the actual management gets privatized to management companies. A government is accountable to its people. HOAs typically aren't accountable to their residents. They are filled with tinpot dictators, self-interested NIMBYs and corruption. Contracts go out to a company controlled by the HOA president's family, etc.

Some of this happens through innocent delusion like the myth of small government being good but usually it's because of corruption and/or lobbying by the beneficiaries of said policies. For public-private partnerships, it's even worse because, to make the prospect attractive, the government assumes all the risk and the private "partner" captures all the profit. This is one way that train companies are run into the ground: in the search for ever-inreasing profits, prices are jacked up and services are cut.

As soon as the stakeholders are separated from who the solution is for, you see exactly what's mentioned. This has been known for centuries and can be analyzed as the workers' relationship to the means of production.

The best internet is municipal internet. Why? Because it's by and for the residents. There are no shareholders who need to be constantly appeased with higher and higher profits.

Capitalism just promotes and rewards rent-seeking. That's all this is.

[1]: https://housingmatters.urban.org/articles/how-hoas-can-shape...

I tend to think that this isn't inherent to institutions (or individuals), but rather that institutions that have this behavior tend to grow and last, whereas institutions that do not stay small and eventually disappear. A kind of survivorship bias.

True, but then how do problems actually get solved? Perhaps only by agents that would benefit if the problem were solved.

For instance, send UNICEF into nations with extreme poverty, and you will get back a bunch of sad stories, a bigger UNICEF, and a larger population to feed. Send a cigarette company, and magically the people will find a way to create an economy to fund their nicotine addiction. There are other solutions to the plagues of poverty, such as civil war, narco-states, natural resource extraction, and refugee migration.

Not your intent? Well, you probably didn’t actually want to solve the problem; you just wanted to feel good about your intent to solve the problem, and now I ruined it for you, so I’m the problem.

Hello ATF.

IT and Kubernetes

The problem is money and the way it is allocated. Institutions can't ossify if the funding dries up first.

In a market system, an institution that fails to serve a purpose goes out of business.

In a command system, too, bad management gets the axe.

In the hybrid system we have had since the early-mid 20th century, institutions can be both 1) insulated from market discipline; and 2) influence their own funding through lobbying and legislation. The former does not occur in a market system, and the latter does not occur in a command system.

What is missing is negative feedback. Systems without negative feedback are typically unstable.

It’s like the old consulting adage: “If you’re not part of the solution, there’s money to be made by prolonging the problem.”

Many here will see connections to The Innovator's Dilemma. So I want to ask, are you aware of any business that recognized it had become an impediment to further innovation and "consciously" applied the suggestions from TID? Has anyone done a review of their own business trying to see if they had become part of the problem rather than the best solution to the problem?

The ones that don't no longer exist. Survival of the Obstructionest.

Some institutions obsolete themselves. Though I can't think of one as they are arguably not "institutions".

Ah yes, the US Healthcare industry in a nutshell

The systems people are just nodding

Turbo Tax. Southwest Airlines lobbying against high speed rail.

One solution is to keep these organizations so lean and understaffed that they would love to eliminate tasks and reduce the scope of their responsibilities.

Interesting links in the article and comments, but it seems like two different concepts are mixed here – the nature of bureaucracies and wrong incentives. I struggle to understand how cobra and rat cases are "institutions trying to preserve the problem".

Cobra effect, in particular, is an immensely interesting topic of how rewarding the metrics can distort the system, otherwise known as Goodhart's effect. I highly recommend reading these two papers on the subject for anyone interested:

- Categorizing Variants of Goodhart's Law [1]

- Building less-flawed metrics: Understanding and creating better measurement and incentive systems [2]

Adding the "Cognitive Surplus" book to the to-do shelf, but it seems like Shirky principle is mostly about institutions and the nature of bureaucracies. Now, a good question would be - when and why Shirky principle does not apply to the institutions. My first thought is the difference between bureaucracies that have "owner" and ones who lost it.

When a bureaucracy has an owner (person or group of people) who can change the bureaucracy in response to external events, then it's probably unlikely to have Shirky effect (WHO and smallpox example in comments). However, bureaucracies that have lost their owner will most likely have this effect.

The best thing I read on this subject (how bureaucracies work) is Samo Burja's "Great Founder Theory" [3]. If anyone can suggest something along these lines on the fundamental principles of bureaucracies, I would appreciate a lot.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04585

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266638992...

[3] https://samoburja.com/gft/

...because solving the problem would make them unnecessary.

Such an important principle when considering the governance of and improvement of societies.

I noted that the article didn't mention the War on Drugs; probably books have been written about the Shirky principle and the US's war on drugs.

As I understood, this principal has two sides of different behavior. The Institute do not understand that they solve the problem and behave like they do not know how to solve it. And the Institute do it specifically postpone the solution just to show that they do some work but in reality they do not do nothing to solve the problem...

Illich talked about this. That’s what Medical Nemesis was all about, and Deschooling Society.

It seems to then follow that every organization started to fix a problem should build in an expiration date.

“To oppose something is to maintain it. To be sure, if you turn your back on [Rome] and walk away from it, you are still on the road [to Rome]. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

Did someone say Agile Coach?

Corporations do that also by keep hiring lobbyists to get congress to sell out, to keep the problem in place.

Like TurboTax & H&R Block not wanting the IRS to automate personal taxes. ...and their lobbyists got congress to pass a law to block the IRS.

NATO and its system of related organizations is another great example. Built to defend against the USSR, when the USSR fell it made sure to repeatedly provoke Russia so that the threat from the east would be preserved.

French sociologist Jean Baudrillard wrote of the supposedly "anti-racist" French NGO "SOS Racisme":

Every society must designate an enemy, but it must not seek to exterminate it. This was the fatal error of Fascism and the Terror, but it is also the error of the soft, democratic Terror, which is in the process of eliminating the Other even more surely than the Holocaust. The operation that consisted in hypostasizing a race and perpetuating it through internal reproduction, which we stigmatize as a racist abjection, is now being carried out at the level of individuals, in the very name of man's right to control his own process genetically and in all its forms. SOS-Racism. SOS-whales. Ambiguity: in one case, it's to denounce racism, in the other, it's to save whales. What if, in the first case, it's also a subliminal call to save racism, and thus the anti-racist struggle as the last vestige of political passions, and thus a virtually doomed species?

People trying to protect their cushy feeder? No shit Sherlock. It starts with a single individual and goes up to highest level of Government / Corporations

"Economic Facts and Fallacies" by Thomas Sowell is a very good book that talks a lot about this (indirectly).

https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/economic-fac...

This is a classic example of "show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome".

I could also see how this same incentive might apply to nonprofit groups as well. i.e. nonprofit groups might actually have an incentive to perpetuate the existence of problems they purport to attempt to solve, because the folks who work there would be out of a job and might lose their prestigious titles as authorities on whatever their chosen problem is.

The first main example used here is dumb. The point wasn't that carpooling needed to go back to being inconvenient again, the problem is obviously that if you expand the definition of "carpooling" too much you get unlicensed and unregulated common carrier transportation companies that are effectively taxi or bus services with no oversight at all, and people could get killed.

Of course there's ways around that, and maybe the trade-offs are worth it. That's what the legislation concluded it seems. But the argument here is a strawman.

Since I don't see anything in the comments about lawyers or barbers:

Lawyers don't want to solve problems. They just want to add them to their practice areas.

Try asking an IP lawyer, "Does software need to be patentable?"

That will be like asking a barber, "Do I need a haircut?"

I know