Good Enough for Government Work: The Public Reputation Crisis in America (And What We Can Do to Fix It)
304
Good Enough for Government Work: The Public Reputation Crisis in America (And What We Can Do to Fix It)
304Paperback(First Edition)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226630205 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 06/14/2019 |
| Series: | Chicago Studies in American Politics |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Public Reputation Crisis
If I ask you to imagine a typical public school in America today, what do you picture? For many, the images that most immediately come to mind depict some version of a large, worn-out building in a low-income area of a major American city. The school might be doing its very best to educate students, but it faces myriad challenges: teachers are underprepared and overworked; administrators are under-resourced and overwhelmed. Textbooks and equipment are outdated, and buildings and classrooms are falling apart.
Now, what if I ask you to picture a private school instead? Perhaps you imagine a neat set of buildings clustered around a small patch of bright green lawn. Kids in matching uniforms hurry to class, where enthusiastic teachers engage them in hands-on curriculum. Modern facilities house everything from a well-stocked library to a cutting-edge science lab, and full-time counselors are on hand to assist with college applications.
If these sorts of differences reflect your beliefs about public and private schools in America, you are not alone. When asked to consider what they know or have heard about how kids in the United States are educated, just 37 percent of Americans rated public schools as either excellent or good. The majority (61 percent) think of them as generally only fair or poor. In fact, roughly three-quarters of Americans (76 percent) give public schools across the country a C grade or lower, suggesting they view them as barely above the bar in terms of quality. These evaluations contrast starkly with perceptions of private school quality; more than twice as many Americans (fully 78 percent) rate the quality of a private school education as either excellent or good.
In this book, I argue that the tendency of Americans to associate "public" with ineffective, inefficient, and low-quality services — and conversely, to connect "private" with effective, efficient, and higher-quality provision — is a central feature of our modern political culture. In fact, an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that government generally does not do a good job managing programs and providing services. As one conservative commentator recently opined, Americans understand the idea of a "technical team working 'with private sector velocity and effectiveness.' ... No one would ever brag about working 'with public sector velocity and effectiveness.'" In recent surveys, just 14 percent of Americans voiced their belief that government is effectively managed, and a meager 7 percent of Americans think government is either excellent or good at "spending money efficiently."
This was not always the case. In fact, according to historians, the phrase "good enough for government work" originated during World War II to describe the exacting standards and high quality required by government. By the 1960s and '70s, however, the idiom was increasingly being employed ironically, in order to denigrate public-sector efforts. Today, "good enough for government work" has become familiar to the point of cliché, implying that something is of such extraordinarily low quality, it could only be acceptable in government.
This semantic reversal reflects a substantial transformation in our national perceptions of government: over the past several decades, a majority of citizens have come to believe that government is wasteful and inefficient, and that the public sector is incapable of offering services that are equivalent to or better than what the private market can provide. When social problems arise, Americans are therefore skeptical that government has the ability to effectively respond.
One striking feature of these beliefs about government is that they span the partisan divide. Despite deep ideological differences between members of the two major political parties in America today, both Democrats and Republicans hold consistently gloomy views of government. For instance, when asked whether government waste is a "major problem," or whether "when something is run by government, it is usually wasteful and inefficient," majorities across all partisan groups agree; in some recent years, partisan attitudes actually converge.
We can see an example of this when we return to Americans' perceptions of public and private education (see table 1.1). Republicans, on average, are about 13 percentage points less likely than Democrats to believe that the nation's public schools provide a high-quality education. This is a slightly larger gap than the partisan differences in assessments of educational alternatives, including private schools, parochial schools, and charter schools, which are viewed more positively by Republicans by 5 percentage points, 8 percentage points, and 3 percentage points, respectively. However, differences in quality evaluations between Democrats and Republicans are dwarfed by Americans' different perceptions of public school quality relative to the quality of each of these private alternatives. Public schools are consistently ranked as being of much lower quality than private schools (by 41 percentage points), parochial schools (by 32 percentage points), or charter school options (by 23 percentage points).
It is true that many of our nation's public schools are in serious trouble. Particularly in the most impoverished neighborhoods of large and diverse cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Detroit, the plight of public schools has been well documented. The differences between public and private school quality are not that simple, though. There are also countless examples of high-quality public schools, both in these same large cities and spread across the country. School quality varies widely among private and charter schools, too. For instance, as a result of the Obama administration's "Race to the Top," nearly all states now have charter schools, but some of these schools are among the state's lowest performing.
In fact, studies of public versus private school quality find decidedly mixed results. A recent study by the US Department of Education comparing educational outcomes for kids in over 6,900 public and 530 private schools found that, after adjusting for characteristics of the students — such as gender, race/ethnicity, disability status, and ESL (English as a second language) status — there were no significant differences in reading scores by fourth grade. On mathematics, average scores for public school fourth-graders were actually higher relative to students in private schools, all else equal. This might be surprising to most Americans who assume that public schools, on the whole, are consistently outperformed by the private alternatives. As I argue in this book, though, negative stereotypes about public-sector incompetence and inefficiency systematically bias how individuals perceive government, even when public programs and services are objectively similar to or even of higher quality than the available private alternatives.
My intention in this book is not to suggest that government is without flaws; far from it. There is no shortage of examples highlighting problems with government waste, inefficiency, incompetence, and downright dysfunction. From the delayed response to Hurricane Katrina to the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act, from the Vietnam War to the 2008 financial crisis, from the Veterans Affairs hospital scandals to price escalation in military equipment acquisition, from interminably long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles to the shutdown of the Social Security website after regular business hours, from the Big Dig to the Bridge to Nowhere, American government has frequently earned its poor reputation.
My aim in this book is not to push back against this ample evidence. Indeed, I will argue throughout the following chapters that government must do more to ensure it is a wise and responsible custodian of public funds, and also that government would do well to get out of the way when private citizens left to their own devices can implement effective, efficient, and equitable solutions to the problems they face. Instead, my point is this: real and significant failures on the part of government have shaped citizens' perceptions over the past half century — but in turn, citizens' perceptions of government now have important effects of their own.
Anatomy of a Reputation Crisis
What has happened to American government in the eyes of its citizens can only be described as a profound public reputation crisis. In the corporate world, a reputation crisis is an event or a series of events that causes consumers to reconsider the value or integrity of a private company. Reputation harm can stem from any number of sources: a tragedy outside a company's control threatens to undermine confidence in its operations (e.g., Johnson & Johnson takes a substantial hit after several deaths from cyanide-tainted Tylenol are reported); illegal or unethical dealings tarnish perceptions of corporate responsibility (e.g., Volkswagen struggles to appease customers and regulators after it is caught rigging its emissions systems); dissatisfaction with the quality of a particular product or service drags down the reputation of an entire brand (e.g., the British supermarket chain Tesco fights to reassure consumers after its beef burgers are found to contain large quantities of horsemeat). Generally speaking, though, a crisis event of some kind or another casts doubt on a company's competence or ability, or calls into question its commitment to social responsibility. Whatever the catalyst, the initial reputational damage can have long-term and far-reaching consequences, resulting in lowered share prices, lost revenue, layoffs, or even bankruptcy and dissolution.
For a classic example of how a reputation crisis can unfold, consider the video game Pong. An incredibly simple, two-dimensional table tennis simulation, Pong was the first game developed by Atari, in 1972, and was one of the very first multiplayer arcade video games. Pong was introduced by Atari at a local bar called Andy Capp's Tavern, and the fact that it could be played as a social rather than solo game made it an immediate favorite among patrons. As one of Atari's founders noted: "It was very common to have a girl with a quarter in hand pull a guy off a bar stool and say, 'I'd like to play Pong and there's nobody to play.' It was a way you could play games, you were sitting shoulder to shoulder, you could talk, you could laugh, you could challenge each other. ... In fact, there are a lot of people who have come up to me over the years and said, 'I met my wife playing Pong.'"
The arcade game soon became a staple in bars, pizza parlors, and bowling alleys around the country, and Atari profited enormously from its commercial success; Pong brought in four times the money earned by other coin-operated games available at the time. Flush with orders for the arcade version, Atari began developing a Home Pong console that could be sold directly to consumers. Video game fanatics and historians have called Pong "one of the most historically significant" video game titles of all time and "the most important video game ever made," crediting Home Pong with helping to launch the home gaming console market.
Atari followed on Home Pong's success with the release of the Atari 2600. First sold in 1977, the system came with its now-iconic square joystick controllers and used removable cartridges rather than built-in games. This meant Pong could be followed by other iconic games, including Space Invaders, Frogger, and Centipede. The 2600 would come to both define and dominate the multibillion-dollar home video game market, and Atari became synonymous with home gaming. According to the director of the Videogame History Museum in Frisco, Texas, "Atari started it all. Atari is what brought video games into the mainstream." By 1982, about 80 percent of the video game market was controlled by Atari, and Atari accounted for fully 70 percent of its parent company's revenue.
Fast forward to just a year later, and things looked decidedly different. By 1983, the video game market had crashed, and in just the second quarter of that year alone, Atari lost roughly $310 million. The company could barely give away some of its inventory. As a remarkable story in the New Yorker would later describe:
Demand for video games had fallen so much that the company [Atari] dumped fourteen trucks' worth of merchandise in a New Mexico landfill and poured cement over the forsaken games to prevent local children from salvaging them. ... The landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, about ninety miles north of El Paso, is the gaming world's Roswell. This is partly, perhaps, because of its proximity to the real Roswell, but also because they're both rumored to be hiding aliens: the dump was said to hold more than three million copies of the famously awful Atari adaptation of Steven Spielberg's "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial."
For Atari, the release of the E.T. video game had been a crisis event. Following the box office success of the film, its director, Steven Spielberg, tapped Howard Scott Warshaw at Atari to design the video game. (Warshaw had made a strong impression on Spielberg with his successful video game adaption of Raiders of the Lost Ark the year before.) But negotiations took longer than expected, leaving Atari with less than six weeks to get the game on store shelves in time for Christmas — compared to the standard lead time of six months or more. As one journalist described it, the result was that "in five, magical weeks, [Warshaw] took the blockbuster film E.T. and turned it into a horrible video game." The game was "a commercial flop and a gaming disaster"; it was "primitive," "a confusing mess that left players frustrated and disoriented," and it would come to be hailed as "the worst video game of all time." When the New Mexico landfill was finally excavated in 2014, the number of E.T. cartridges was closer to thousands than millions. The symbolism could not be ignored, however: the game was literally junk.
A confluence of factors led to problems at Atari — oversaturation of the market, competition from Nintendo and the home computer, and poor internal management — and the video game market as a whole would soon rebound from the 1983 video game crash and continue to thrive. But E.T. would mark a turning point in consumers' perceptions of Atari. The company would go on to release games that were widely considered high quality, including Ms. Pac-Man and Q*bert, but Atari could not regain its former prominence, and consumers began defecting to competitors like Nintendo and Sega. By 1985, there was no coming back; "what was left of Atari's once-mighty video-game division limped along from owner to owner for another two decades" until it was forced to declare bankruptcy in 2013. The relevance of this "once important" company and "titan of the arcade era" had "dwindled almost to nothingness by the turn of the millenium."
This brief history of Atari provides a step-by-step case study of a corporate reputation crisis. As the story illustrates, what makes crisis events particularly damaging is that once an organization loses its reputation for quality and competence, that reputation is exceptionally hard to restore. While product or service quality might matter in establishing a company's reputation, it is perceptions of quality that matter most in a reputation crisis. Whether or not Atari was still capable of producing quality games was important. But once customers lost confidence in the brand, the critical question was whether the company could successfully rebuild consumers' faith.
When private companies do not quickly rebound from a reputation crisis, they can soon find themselves in a downward spiral. First, a crisis event causes a loss in consumer confidence. As a result, corporate revenues decline. In response, the company makes cuts in order to reduce expenditures. In turn, this enforced austerity leads to an actual reduction in customer service or product quality, which merely serves to confirm consumers' negative views. In this way, a reputation crisis quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as customers defect and service quality declines.
In this book, I argue that the same phenomenon can occur in the public sector — and indeed, has occurred in America over the past half century: American government is in the midst of a reputation crisis. Like reputation crises in the private sector, a public reputation crisis has three defining characteristics. First, large swaths of people come to hold predominantly negative perceptions of government. These beliefs are widespread enough that they become "common knowledge" and exist as shared understandings among citizens. Second, negative perceptions are highly resistant to change. Even in the face of new information about the cost, quality, or effectiveness of government, beliefs about government persist. Third, those who hold particularly negative perceptions begin to "opt out." That is, when given the opportunity, individuals who believe government is wasteful and inefficient will choose to move from public services to private alternatives, when feasible. And when sufficient numbers of people opt out of public services, the result can be a decline in the objective quality of public provision, with consequences for us all.
(Continues…)
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