>If your public administration software sucks, you are voting the wrong people into public office.

1. It's very difficult for voters to know how much a given politician will prioritize digital services.

2. Even if a politician appears to have a good digital strategy, will they implement it well?

3. Most decisions about public admin software are made by bureaucrats who aren't elected anyways.

4. Most elections will likely have more important issues than public admin software. Although I agree it probably does have huge returns on investment.

> 1. It's very difficult for voters to know how much a given politician will prioritize digital services.

Sort of but not really. Just keep voting in progressives that believe in government until the bureaucracy gets the message that it pays to be progressive and fix things.

> more important issues than public admin software

In my experience, there is a correlation between parties that follow the science, invest in education, and create useful software.

My critique is towards people that gives up and says that governments cannot make good software. And, that is false. It will never be perfect, like anything else, but it can be good.

> It will never be perfect, like anything else, but it can be good.

As a US -> UK immigrant:

1. This is true.

2. This is made harder or easier by the complexity of the underlying abstractions it is trying to model.

I suspect the software that the NHS has to calculate how much to charge medical patients is very simple.

I think the point being made is that public admin software has to be complicated because the underlying laws, policies, regulations, and procedures are complicated. Sometimes, they are over-complicated. And, sometimes this is deliberate (e.g., if applying for benefits is too complicated, fewer people will complete the process).

If we elect politicians in favor of simplifying government operations, and they can actually succeed, then it follows that government software would naturally simplify as well.

Note: This isn't necessarily the same as reducing government's role.

Interesting. What country is that?

Not the USA for sure. One reason taxes are complicated and full of loopholes is to allow rich people to game their taxes and pay next to nothing. They have enough power and influence and their incentive is to keep things as they are: complicated.

This could be a number of European countries

Works the same way in France, too, for regular salaried income.

If you have other income, like dividends, there are a few more boxes to fill, but it's still fairly simple.

Once you start having serious money, you better have a tax lawyer doing this for you, but I suppose this is the case everywhere.

Several European countries. In the Netherlands taxes are just logging in to a web interface and verifying the provided data.

It's usually filed correctly already. So many times you'll just be clicking next.

Could be Australia? Looking at others commenting though could be a lot of other countries.

The USAs tax system where the online portion was essentially privatized by a single company (Turbotax) was pretty jarring.

It works this way in Sweden. Not sure which country he was referring to.

And Norway, except that if you do not need to make any changes you do not need to do anything at all.

My taxes in Spain were pretty much like that. You get a letter with the government's estimate. If you agree, you don't have to do anything else.

if only the "right" people would run for office...

Where I live, it is possible to elect people into public office that weren't officially running, at least on a local level. There was a prominent example in a nearby town (not a big town, around 50,000 inhabitants) a few years ago in which only the current mayor and some dubios candidate ran for mayor. At the end, a prominent local opposition figure was elected because thousands of people wrote his name + address on the ballot. He accepted and is now mayor.

Most politicians are not around long enough to have to deal with the consequences of their policies. So, they tend to be focused on short term wins. The rare good ones combine that with long term vision that actually makes sense. Often that's not even recognized until decades later.

Four years, maybe eight in some cases. Not much more. That's all they have to prove their worth. Most complex projects easily take longer than that to plan and execute. Civil servants on the other are typically there until they retire. In many countries civil servants enjoy special job protections that ensure it is typically hard to fire them. And since they are large organizations, there's a bit of a rat-race to get promoted to the lucrative top positions. That requires pleasing the people holding the purse strings. Politicians in other words. And politicians need to get stuff done and that requires warm relations with the established civil servant leadership because otherwise nothing gets done and they lose the next elections.

This adds to the problem because politicians basically rely on an already compromised bureaucratic machinery that resists changes to make it smaller. So any new policy just translates into more budget, more people, and more bureaucracy. The old ones never go away.

You see the same pattern of behavior in large corporations except those periodically get forced by their shareholders and the market to do something about it. Sometimes that fails and they get acquired, lose market-share, or even just implode and disappear. If you look at the fortune 500 through the years, you'll see there's a lot of churn there. New companies take up spots vacated by older failing corporations. But pretty much all of them employ way more people than the competitors that ultimately displace them.

Banks were mentioned in the article a few times. Most banks have actually been reducing head count for years. It used to be that they had to have offices in every small city, village, and even neighborhoods. Not any more. Those days are long gone. There are now several startups disrupting the space with online only banks. Any bank looking to survive in that space is pretty much copying that organizational model at this point. And as consumer banking is a this point a low margin product, a lot of the older and bloated banks are clearly struggling.