Before I get into this blog, I should probably introduce myself a little. I'm Bob, a policy and regulation analyst based in the UK. Day to day I mostly work on British and European policy, but of course what's going on in the US impacts all of that.

On here, I plan to write about policy, economics, tech regulation – oh and maybe a bit about competition too. I'm not going to shoehorn myself into one niche here though. I did choose the name of this blog, Technocrap, because I imagine a lot of what I chat about will be tech-related in some aspect. Anyway, please do subscribe, follow me on Farcaster (and Twitter, although I'm pretty inactive there) and yeah, please get involved in comments/DMs etc!

More and more, governments around the world are shifting towards operating like businesses. This follows the mass privatisation of key industries we have seen over the last few decades too. But is this actually helping? Frankly, no. It's not. Since the privatisation-heavy neoliberal agendas of Reagan in the US and Thatcher in Britain, things haven't really got any better. In fact, I would argue that the quality-of-living (relative to time-periods) for most people, globally, has been on the decline since then.

In Britain, we have seen our public services DECIMATED by these economic choices. I'm not sure there is any successful example of the privatisation of essential industries, which actually makes a lot of sense. Industries which provide goods and services necessary to the health of people and their work across the economy such as water, energy and transport should not be expected to pursue profits to survive. Of course, these need to break even to continue, but this can be managed by governments – the costs of train tickets, for example, could be based on an estimate of journeys taken on any given route per year – how should those journeys be priced to pay to maintain and gradually improve that route? That is all that needs to be worked out.

These essential services facilitate the rest of the economy significantly, and so should be treated as the building blocks to a successful economy, rather than another privately managed part of it.

Another space that this feels relevant to is universities (colleges for any American readers). Tuition fees have gone up and up, more so in the US, and are totally unaffordable for most people. I know that I won't ever pay off my student loan, it will be written off after 30 years and won't be near fully paid off. But most people, especially those in the US will have to deal with far worse consequences than me due to repayments and crazy interest rates. All the while, the actual quality of university education seems to be declining (at least in relation to what we pay). I paid just under £10k a year for my 3-year degree. Not one of those years was worth that. A year of it was online thanks to Covid-19 and in both other years, the amount of teaching and support available was nothing short of lacklustre. But this shouldn't come as any surprise to the politicians and economists who have caused this. If you force universities to act like businesses to survive, they will act like businesses – cutting costs, raising prices and accepting more high-fee paying international students at lower entry requirements. The goal of most universities has become profit rather than education.

With Trump back in the White House, I fear that the US Government is going to be ran increasingly like a business. We are already seeing this through Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE). The DoGE has begun to ruthlessly cut civil service jobs, aiming to streamline the government's work and improve its efficiency, bearing quite a resemblance to the billionaire's approach to managing Twitter (now X) when he bought it. And again, has this worked? X has become mostly boring and hard to use for the average person. I used to find myself checking Twitter hundreds of times a day, my feed curated perfectly, but now – it's just boring. My feed is a mish-mash of crypto ads, far-right nonsense and then the occasional post about football which I'm actually there for. Is this approach what we want for our governments and essential services?

Running the government or private corporations in this way sets them up for those who agree with their owners. It creates a sandbox for a certain group of people. I hesitate to even call this an echo chamber, because there are no echoes. It's just a locked room to which only one group has the keys. While this has been bad for Twitter/X, that's the decision of its owners, but for governments this kind of change should be the decision of the people.

After I got sick of X, I could just leave. If governments ruin economies and industries through cost-cutting and profit chasing, I can't quite do that – most people definitely can't because unlike X, we can't just opt-out of the worlds our governments create for us. Let's rethink how we want governments and essential services to facilitate the economy, not force them to partake in it at the cost of our living standards.