> Government is usually optimized around operational activity, and it usually does so very well from the perspective of how the organization is designed.
First, I think this depends a lot on your locality. I think you'll find a lot of places where people are nowhere near as complimentary about basic government services like DMV as you seem to be.
Second, I think this depends a lot on the type of service and how large a segment of the population needs it. Everybody gets driver's licenses, so there is a limit to how much suckitude the DMV can have before it becomes a political issue. But many social services are only used by a small fraction of the population, so unless you are one of those people or know one of them closely enough, you won't be aware of how much those services suck, and if you are aware of it, you will have a very hard time getting other people, who don't use the services and don't know anyone who does, to care. And the people who do need those services are usually those who have little if any ability to push back at suckitude.
Finally, I think you are ignoring the huge difference in how the incentives of a government organization are determined, as compared with those of a corporation. A corporation is a business: its fundamental incentive is to make money. Corporations that don't do that go out of business. A government organization, however, has whatever incentives were put in place by the political process that created it (and those incentives can gradually change as the political process changes); and the one constant about government organizations is that, once they're created, they never go away.
Do large corporations really suck less than the DMV? YouTubers dealing with random copyright strikes, Amazon warehouse workers, Comcast users, PayPal users suddenly denied access to their income stream, medical insurance customers bankrupted by claims - and others - are all entitled to wonder if the DMV is really the pinnacle of suckitude.
To outsiders, this looks like a mythological problem in the US. There's a simple-minded - and wholly wrong - narrative of "private sector good, public sector bad".
There's certainly room for improvement in the public sector. But there's a lot more to the public sector than the DMV and the IRS, and the sector as a whole doesn't do too badly - when it isn't being interfered with politically.
> Do large corporations really suck less than the DMV?
As I said, I think it depends on your locality, and of course on the large corporations. Also see below.
> there's a lot more to the public sector than the DMV and the IRS, and the sector as a whole doesn't do too badly
I think you are giving far too much credit to the public sector. As I said, government services which everybody uses, like DMV, have much less room for suckitude than services which only a small fraction of people, most of whom are indigent and hence have little or no ability to push back at suckitude, use. I think most people would be shocked if they knew how badly many of these services suck. (I only happen to know because I happen to have married someone who was helping several friends to try to navigate these services, and so I have had first-hand experience with them.) The suckitude of the large corporations that you describe simply pales in comparison. And, unlike in the case of those corporations, people have no alternative if the government is providing the services.
Its not that they suck less but that they have a P&L insentive. Because they are arent politically mandated they’ll eventually run out of money, the government dont have the same problem, they can continue as long as there is political mandate.
Do those services suck because of operational problems or were they designed to suck?
Its not clear from your answer how much blame you are putting on operational issues and how much blame (if any) you are putting on the misaligned incentives between governments and the people who use their services.
> Do those services suck because of operational problems or were they designed to suck?
For the worst ones (the ones that only a small fraction of people, most of whom are indigent, use), neither. They suck because of misaligned incentives, but the systems were not "designed" to suck; they were designed in response to political pressure from voters, who are mostly ignorant of the misaligned incentives and believe that, if they vote for a system that will "help the poor", for example, that the system that results will actually do that. And since most of them never have to interact with the system directly, they don't realize that in fact it is not doing what they voted for.
First, I think this depends a lot on your locality. I think you'll find a lot of places where people are nowhere near as complimentary about basic government services like DMV as you seem to be.
Second, I think this depends a lot on the type of service and how large a segment of the population needs it. Everybody gets driver's licenses, so there is a limit to how much suckitude the DMV can have before it becomes a political issue. But many social services are only used by a small fraction of the population, so unless you are one of those people or know one of them closely enough, you won't be aware of how much those services suck, and if you are aware of it, you will have a very hard time getting other people, who don't use the services and don't know anyone who does, to care. And the people who do need those services are usually those who have little if any ability to push back at suckitude.
Finally, I think you are ignoring the huge difference in how the incentives of a government organization are determined, as compared with those of a corporation. A corporation is a business: its fundamental incentive is to make money. Corporations that don't do that go out of business. A government organization, however, has whatever incentives were put in place by the political process that created it (and those incentives can gradually change as the political process changes); and the one constant about government organizations is that, once they're created, they never go away.