Yes! This is the one. So good.

People who enjoy that may also enjoy "All Late Projects are the Same" https://web.archive.org/web/20130818024030/http://www.comput...

Related:

Why it is important that software projects fail (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24390855 - Sept 2020 (72 comments)

Why It Is Important That Software Projects Fail (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20109316 - June 2019 (18 comments)

Why it is Important that Software Projects Fail - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=932956 - Nov 2009 (26 comments)

Good find :)

I find it interesting how this ties in to the "productivity paradox."[0] The idea the author seems to be getting at--that software accelerates the creation of ever more elaborate solutions (often to problems created by prior iterations of software), and in the process leaves a wake of complexity that frustrates and baffles the society it was supposed to serve--is something I'd like to read more about.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

The article presents an interesting case study, but it's unclear how generalizable it is from a single example.

One idea the author suggests is that tax agencies will grow to take up roughly 1 percent because 1 percent of the budget is so negligible. The U.S. provides an interesting contrast. In 1955, the IRS was 0.08 percent of GDP [0] [2]. In 2008, it was 0.093 percent of GDP [0] [1]. So it's much lower, but also has remained fairly steady between 1955 and 2008. Looking ahead, the new IRS budget is around $20 billion, which is 0.072 percent of GDP [0]. To pick another example, the Canadian Revenue Service was about 0.2 percent of GDP in 2018 [3] [4].

One other assumption is that the Australian Tax Office does the same, at least when normalized to GDP. I'm not sure that's true, but investigating that would take more time.

[0] https://taxfoundation.org/blog/irs-budget-increase-technolog... [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYGDP [2] https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/budget-united-states-gov... See page 1000

expense as a percentage of gdp is a nonsense number. expense as a percentage of the actual budget makes far more sense. why are we accepting silly statistics here?

There are pros and cons to every statistic. Percent of GDP accounts for the fact that the economy is growing, which means more to tax. I used it primarily because the article does. I think percent of receipts makes more sense as receipts are essentially the agency’s product.

thank you! Bookmarking now :)

No problem, I actually hadn't read it myself but was intrigued enough to go looking. Worth it!