I’ve been saying for a while now that if you can get people to buy into obvious, self-serving horseshit like “American Exceptionalism” you can sell them on pretty much anything.
So wish that your writing were pushed out by mainstream media. Our countrymen & women need to understand how badly they've been mistreated and deluded - so they can come together and build the glorious society of which I know we are capable.
Holy shit!!! Corbin is so precisely accurate in this assessment it is beyond belief. In nearly every example he provides from healthcare to infrastructure projects our sole skill seems to be in creating a bureaucracy for the issue without any result but paperwork. Yesterday the outhouses were full of Sears Catalogs, today we have a whole new source of toilet paper and don't recognize it.
This is an excellent example of what they say in business about metrics, "Be careful what you measure," which applies every bit as much in public spending. Excellent message, and one that needs to be Repeatedly hammered home through repetition. Please keep it up!
Thanks for bringing such facts to us, since politicians of all stripes just talk of big numbers but not the impacts on people. How their lives have improved, or the future is brighter than the present.
This argument really lands. We had “reinventing government” in the 1990s. This was a serious national experiment in outcomes-based governance — led by Al Gore’s National Performance Review and codified in the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA). Some parts of government still bear that imprint. HRSA’s Title V Maternal and Child Health program, for example, has spent three decades tracking national performance and outcome measures to improve real-world health indicators, not just budgets. In public health, it’s an exemplary model of results-driven investment.
We’ve also seen later waves — like the Obama-era Evidence-Based Policy initiatives and “tiered-evidence” grants — that tried to make funding contingent on measurable impact.
There’s a deep well of lessons about what drives implementation success four outcomes-focused spending: stable leadership across administrations, metrics that are meaningful to front-line staff, and a culture of learning instead of compliance.
It is worth studying those experiments with fresh eyes. We actually have decades of data on how results-driven public administration succeeds or stalls — insights that could help shape a new generation of strategies that deliver outcomes, not just receipts.
I’d be interested in hearing a discussion between you and Pete Buttigieg regarding this topic. With his time as DOT secretary he should have knowledge of what was working and what wasn’t as far as investing and successfully implementing large government projects. If the two of you combined your thoughts, ideas and experience, I think something productive and useable would come out of it and that could be then be included in strategic plans that can be used to get many (most) of our government projects and programs back on track and headed in a better direction. A direction that actually benefits all American citizens and voters, not just the morbidly rich ones.
So has Pete updated his answers as to whether GAZA is truly a genocide? I did have a really good opinion of him up to the time I saw him questioned about Gaza. Before that, I felt he might be a good pick for pres. I apologize - I dont have the link to the clip. I'm betting its out there and available. I was so disappointed.
So Corbin, what specific steps are you advocating to infuse the unity into the splintered progressive movement? Ideas, education, debate, and protests and boycotts only go so far. The majority of politicians and leaders are immune to public shame as long as they have other means to maintain their positions, our president and Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle being prime examples.
Titans of Industry, Captains, Leaders, and CEOs were respected and rewarded for job creation, creating company-town communities and cultural outlets ex. libraries, public tranaportation, planetariums, etc. That is Leadership, more than todays greed and personal wealth-building. The dearth of character will not be filled by trumpism.
I googled this with regard to healthcare. There seem to be all sorts of programs that are helping individuals. One thing I do remember from a few years back, though, was an article about healthcare in Costa Rica. Apparently they have excellent outcomes because they have nurses who do community outreach. I was really impressed by that. Their spending isn't particularly high but they get good results. We would do well to emulate them.
My bad. I made the common mistake of reducing "America," the entire north and south continents, to the United States; thank you for correcting me. I was hoping for a RECENT public project completed or services being delivered in one of the fifty states and territories on budget and on time that could be used as a model elsewhere.
I did some more looking and found a lot of discussion about large projects and why they so often exceed their budgets. This is pretty complex but I can conclude that two factors are the sizes of projects and changes to the scope of work. What that makes me think is that small projects are more manageable, but I'm sure they experience feature creep too. I suspect the answer to this is don't reinvent the wheel, think everything through very carefully, and set limits on the scope. Also be sure that results are measurable. These simple steps seem to be impossible in this country though. Sigh.
No need to apologize! I know what you meant. I just didn't find a neat summary that applied to the entire US. I did find an AI capsule, but it was too general. I did find many examples in various communities or states though. Ironically I also found health stuff about vaccinations and other measures that are being destroyed now. My point is that there seem to be many small initiatives but I didn't find something that aggregated them. I didn't do a thorough search though.
Agree. But within those successful small projects, we can dig out a few nugget principles that can be applied to larger ones. Yes, the bigger, the more complex and the larger socio-economic risks. What I've found that works best is to bring ALL the stakeholders into the planning and decision-making at inception as well as key milestones during the project lifetime, respect their separate interests while prioritizing them, mitigate power imbalances, and rule by consensus (the need for everyone to be able to live with the group decision) rather than a majority or most powerful top down decision-making process. And finally assess the delivered results against the initial goals as the metric for success or failure, and create a lessons-learned document to inform the next projects. In short, no more government and corporate interests telling us what we need to accept. Lots of lip service is given to this kind of process, but they are few and far between in actual practice. Doesn't make a project faster and in probably most cases cheaper, but it also doesn't run roughshod over the public's interests.
These would encompass every project that involves public funding. That means government would have a leadership role even when dispensing grants to for-profit or non-profit entities, ensuring the principles are followed or denying funding. This is no different than zoning enforcement, just incorporated INTO the process rather than a step to be checked off the list of to-do's.
What do you think of Gross National Happiness as an alternative to GDP? It's currently only in use in Bhutan, but it is designed to provide a metric for sustainable development, environmental conservation, promoting culture, and good governance, not just economic activity. Are there any better alternatives?
I’ve been saying for a while now that if you can get people to buy into obvious, self-serving horseshit like “American Exceptionalism” you can sell them on pretty much anything.
Sure looks like I was right, huh?
So wish that your writing were pushed out by mainstream media. Our countrymen & women need to understand how badly they've been mistreated and deluded - so they can come together and build the glorious society of which I know we are capable.
Godspeed, Corbin
I appreciate your ability to separate the signal from the noise and cut to the heart of the matter.
Great post.
Holy shit!!! Corbin is so precisely accurate in this assessment it is beyond belief. In nearly every example he provides from healthcare to infrastructure projects our sole skill seems to be in creating a bureaucracy for the issue without any result but paperwork. Yesterday the outhouses were full of Sears Catalogs, today we have a whole new source of toilet paper and don't recognize it.
This is an excellent example of what they say in business about metrics, "Be careful what you measure," which applies every bit as much in public spending. Excellent message, and one that needs to be Repeatedly hammered home through repetition. Please keep it up!
Thanks for bringing such facts to us, since politicians of all stripes just talk of big numbers but not the impacts on people. How their lives have improved, or the future is brighter than the present.
This argument really lands. We had “reinventing government” in the 1990s. This was a serious national experiment in outcomes-based governance — led by Al Gore’s National Performance Review and codified in the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA). Some parts of government still bear that imprint. HRSA’s Title V Maternal and Child Health program, for example, has spent three decades tracking national performance and outcome measures to improve real-world health indicators, not just budgets. In public health, it’s an exemplary model of results-driven investment.
We’ve also seen later waves — like the Obama-era Evidence-Based Policy initiatives and “tiered-evidence” grants — that tried to make funding contingent on measurable impact.
There’s a deep well of lessons about what drives implementation success four outcomes-focused spending: stable leadership across administrations, metrics that are meaningful to front-line staff, and a culture of learning instead of compliance.
It is worth studying those experiments with fresh eyes. We actually have decades of data on how results-driven public administration succeeds or stalls — insights that could help shape a new generation of strategies that deliver outcomes, not just receipts.
Exceptional insight and evaluation of a dire situation for a money hungry society. Thank you!
There’s a saying, a truism, that goes - ‘some people know the price of everything but the value of nothing’.
I’d be interested in hearing a discussion between you and Pete Buttigieg regarding this topic. With his time as DOT secretary he should have knowledge of what was working and what wasn’t as far as investing and successfully implementing large government projects. If the two of you combined your thoughts, ideas and experience, I think something productive and useable would come out of it and that could be then be included in strategic plans that can be used to get many (most) of our government projects and programs back on track and headed in a better direction. A direction that actually benefits all American citizens and voters, not just the morbidly rich ones.
So has Pete updated his answers as to whether GAZA is truly a genocide? I did have a really good opinion of him up to the time I saw him questioned about Gaza. Before that, I felt he might be a good pick for pres. I apologize - I dont have the link to the clip. I'm betting its out there and available. I was so disappointed.
I have not heard his remarks. I’ll have to look for them.
And I need to correct myself - it wasnt the actual is it a genocide, but something to do with continuing to send bombs to Israel.
There is so much STUFF!
This is the one - pod save america interview. But you know, I bet he might have corrected his statement since then.
https://onsitepublicmedia.substack.com/p/pod-save-america-couldnt-even-save
Thanks. I’ll check it out.
Are we great yet?
So Corbin, what specific steps are you advocating to infuse the unity into the splintered progressive movement? Ideas, education, debate, and protests and boycotts only go so far. The majority of politicians and leaders are immune to public shame as long as they have other means to maintain their positions, our president and Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle being prime examples.
Titans of Industry, Captains, Leaders, and CEOs were respected and rewarded for job creation, creating company-town communities and cultural outlets ex. libraries, public tranaportation, planetariums, etc. That is Leadership, more than todays greed and personal wealth-building. The dearth of character will not be filled by trumpism.
Is there one example of something done efficiently somewhere in America that we can use as a model of how to do something right?
I googled this with regard to healthcare. There seem to be all sorts of programs that are helping individuals. One thing I do remember from a few years back, though, was an article about healthcare in Costa Rica. Apparently they have excellent outcomes because they have nurses who do community outreach. I was really impressed by that. Their spending isn't particularly high but they get good results. We would do well to emulate them.
My bad. I made the common mistake of reducing "America," the entire north and south continents, to the United States; thank you for correcting me. I was hoping for a RECENT public project completed or services being delivered in one of the fifty states and territories on budget and on time that could be used as a model elsewhere.
I did some more looking and found a lot of discussion about large projects and why they so often exceed their budgets. This is pretty complex but I can conclude that two factors are the sizes of projects and changes to the scope of work. What that makes me think is that small projects are more manageable, but I'm sure they experience feature creep too. I suspect the answer to this is don't reinvent the wheel, think everything through very carefully, and set limits on the scope. Also be sure that results are measurable. These simple steps seem to be impossible in this country though. Sigh.
No need to apologize! I know what you meant. I just didn't find a neat summary that applied to the entire US. I did find an AI capsule, but it was too general. I did find many examples in various communities or states though. Ironically I also found health stuff about vaccinations and other measures that are being destroyed now. My point is that there seem to be many small initiatives but I didn't find something that aggregated them. I didn't do a thorough search though.
Agree. But within those successful small projects, we can dig out a few nugget principles that can be applied to larger ones. Yes, the bigger, the more complex and the larger socio-economic risks. What I've found that works best is to bring ALL the stakeholders into the planning and decision-making at inception as well as key milestones during the project lifetime, respect their separate interests while prioritizing them, mitigate power imbalances, and rule by consensus (the need for everyone to be able to live with the group decision) rather than a majority or most powerful top down decision-making process. And finally assess the delivered results against the initial goals as the metric for success or failure, and create a lessons-learned document to inform the next projects. In short, no more government and corporate interests telling us what we need to accept. Lots of lip service is given to this kind of process, but they are few and far between in actual practice. Doesn't make a project faster and in probably most cases cheaper, but it also doesn't run roughshod over the public's interests.
This sounds extremely reasonable. I guess my question would be, who will do these projects? Are you talking about community initiatives?
These would encompass every project that involves public funding. That means government would have a leadership role even when dispensing grants to for-profit or non-profit entities, ensuring the principles are followed or denying funding. This is no different than zoning enforcement, just incorporated INTO the process rather than a step to be checked off the list of to-do's.
What do you think of Gross National Happiness as an alternative to GDP? It's currently only in use in Bhutan, but it is designed to provide a metric for sustainable development, environmental conservation, promoting culture, and good governance, not just economic activity. Are there any better alternatives?