The Angry Drunk Bureaucrat: Retail and Zero Sum Games

The Rules of Bureaucracy

Rule #O: "The Rules of Bureaucracy are mutable, non-canonical, non-ordinal, and contradictory, except in the cases where they are not."
Rule #1: "Document everything you do; if you didn't write it down, it didn't happen."
Rule #2 [The Sixty Minutes Rule]: "Never do anything that would cause Ed Bradley, Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Steve Croft, Leslie Stahl, or even Andy Rooney to persue you down a hallway with a camera crew."
Rule #3: "Nothing Simple is Ever Easy"
Rule #4: "It's about the money; follow the money."
Rule #5: "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Rule #6: "Politics is the enemy of good government."
Rule #7: "The biggest detriment to public service is the public."
Rule #8: "The second biggest detriment to public service is the service."
Rule #9: "There's a reason; there's ALWAYS a reason."
Rule #10: "The Law is a harsh mistress: The rigorous and exacting application of which can benefit of society when used correctly to advance good policy and block bad, and be the bane of society when used incorrectly to advance bad policy and block good."
Rule #11: "Public service often involves waking up in the morning, opening up the newspaper, and discovering that someone, somewhere out there thinks that you're a dickhead."
Rule #12: "No one really knows what you do."
Rule #13 [Luke's Rule]: "No one ever acts like the bastard they really are."
Rule #14: "Bureaucracy endures."
Rule #15: "The longer you work in bureaucracy, the more Catch-22 resembles non-fiction."
Rule #16: "Politicians are not smarter than you."
Rule #18: "Money is not created equal."
Rule #19: "Mediocrity is normalcy."
Rule #17: "Within any bureaucratic structure, resources (e.g. people, money, knowledge, etc.) are not distributed uniformly."
Rule #20: "Don't assume a fiduciary liability without a committed resource allocation."
Rule #21: "If you do your job and obey the law, they can't reasonably fire you."
Rule #22: "The Budget will always be wrong."
Rule #23: "Always sign in blue."
Rule #24: "A Bureaucrat must be able to explain and justify his/her actions to laymen without resorting to the phrase 'because the Rules say so.'"
Rule #25: "Never voluntarily relinquish control of an original document."
Rule #26: "Sometimes you just have to say 'Screw the rules'"
Rule #27: "Change sucks."
Rule #28: "Sometimes the answer is 'No.'"
Rule #29: "It is very easy to make difficult decisions when no one has a clue what's going on."
Rule #30: "If you hang around long enough, eventually you will become an expert in something."
Rule #31: "Data, technology, and automatic processes can never completely supplant human interaction."
Rule #32: "Cover thine own ass."
Rule #33: "It's not real until it has its own acronym."
Rule #34:There is nothing more dangerous than an elected, resourceful idiot.
Rule #35: It will always take longer than expected.
Rule #36: Coming Soon...

Monday, February 07, 2005

Retail and Zero Sum Games

The Pittsburgh Business Times floats a story on potential retail development coming to Lawrenceville. Great Economic Development news for the neighborhood; bad news for the Region. Here's why:

Regional buying capacity is defined as the sum of all individual buying capacity. This is all is related to (1) the population of the region and (2) the wages paid in the region:

(1) Lots of mediocre wage jobs, but hordes of people: OK.
(2) Lots of good wage jobs, not a lot of people (i.e., relatively few people being paid, very, very well): Still OK.
(3) Not a lot of good wage jobs, not a lot of people: Bad.

[Pittsburgh seems to fit into category #3.]

Ergo, if you increase the wages of the people living in the Region, but keep the number of people constant, you could expect an increase in the aggregate buying capacity. If you increase the number of people living in the Region, but keep the wages constant, you could see an increase in the aggregate buying capacity. If wages and population are stagnant or declining, buying capacity is stagnant or declines.

So if your buying capacity is not increasing... why build more retail? You don't have any extra money to spend on the new retail. Wouldn't that just detract from the existing retail? Isn't this just a zero-sum game, where ultimately the economic gains are offset by economic losses? Would you be silly enough to put public money into such an unsustainable scheme? Shouldn't you be working to increase real wages or population instead? Should I stop with the rhetorical questions?

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3 comments:

Greg Lagana said...: Why do you hate consumer freedom?; 12:46 PM
Jonathan Potts said...: I guess my question, and if this was answered in the Business Times article, then I missed it, is are public subsidies being used to lure developers to Lawrenceville.?If they are, that's bad; otherwise, there's nothing wrong with someone opening a business on their own initiative, regardless of what it might do to other businesses. It's called the free market. The downside here is that it could threaten the return of public investments in retail that should not have been made in the first place.; 9:07 AM
O said...: That question wasn't answered, probably because the developers are just floating ideas at this point. Chances are that they will be looking for some sort of subsidy eventually.; 9:54 AM