> is garbage disposal in Europe so much more efficient now that it has all been privatized, compared to the mid-90s?

Is it?

> Are trains running cheaper?

They're up about 6% in real terms (or about 0.23% a year) since 2000 [1]. That said, I don't think most European rail is privatized, so this is a strange example.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/product/page/PRC_H... deflated with CP00

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runarberg a day ago | parent [-]

> Is it?

Yes and no. Garbage disposal is more efficient now then it was in the mid-90s, but that has everything to do with the infrastructure and nothing to do with the ownership model. More on that later.

The ownership of infrastructure and the operation are split where private operators are allowed to compete with national operators on the same infrastructure. This is true for trains and electricity, and in some cases garbage disposal. Many of the national operators are publicly traded with the national government being the majority shareholder.

Some countries in Europe have gone much further in privatizing the rail network then others. The UK being the canonical example of privatization, and Norway being an example of a country privatizing more slowly.

If the promises of neo-liberalism were true, we should see the efficiencies gained in the UK compared to Norway. Yet, no such evidence exists. And that is because efficiencies correlate with the quality and the quantity of infrastructure, not the ideological policies that dictate the ownership of the operators.

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JumpCrisscross a day ago | parent [-]

> efficiencies correlate with the quality and the quantity of infrastructure, not the ideological policies that dictate the ownership of the operators

I mostly agree. Infrastructure quality (including institutional quality) dominates. Ideology is usually cover for a lack of evidence.

But ownership modes do create different incentive structures. Full private ownership is famously terrible in natural monopolies. It’s a well-known market failure and folks who proselytize fully privatized utilities are stupid or venal. For many other things, however, private ownership works. A good example is package delivery. (Train operation is a weird case. The UK fumbled. Italy did not. On the other end of the spectrum, DB is a trash fire.)

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za_creature a day ago | parent | next [-]

You may want to double-check your priors on the incentive structures.

For goods and services where demand is inelastic and the barrier for entry is high, the invisible hand will end up colluding to extract the most value possible (housing, utilities, groceries, healthcare). If the state does this, the ruling party starts catching strays and is eventually replaced. Of course, for the distinction to matter, you need to be able to meaningfully create new parties.

Your point stands for elastic demand, where you can choose to vote with your wallet (restaurants, vacations, gyms). Capitalism did a good job of adding to this list during its growth stage (transportation, entertainment, communications) but nowadays it's mostly established cartels that dominate all of the above in what appears to be a race to the bottom.

The incentives for package delivery are closer to the first category than the second though, since consumers end up with whatever company the supplier signed up with, thus mostly eliminating choice and reducing quality to the bare minimum required by the contract (not unlike the postal services).

Even when the customer gets to choose, the end results are still worse than vertical integration. Consider the food delivery apps that replaced most restaurants' in-house delivery teams: they have a direct interest to collude to keep prices high since they all earn the same no matter what restaurant you buy from, whereas for the individual restaurant it makes sense to throw in free delivery to get you buying from them.

I guess the biggest downside to private ownership is that it creates an incentive to have collusion service providers masquerading as adding value (realtors, brokers, speculators, resellers, risk managers, etc.) while providing plausible deniability to the state (which is of course responsible for its failure to regulate the incentive structure for these value-added services on a case-by-case basis).

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runarberg a day ago | parent | prev [-]

The thing is that the policy has been splitting off infrastructure from the operators, allowing competition of operators, and selling off shares of national operators. This policy is straight from the books of neo-liberalism, and it promised us greater efficiency.

My point is that these promises are lies. Neo-liberalism is a failed policy (yet it is the dominant policy among every single government in power today). And when GP claimed education was expensive because it is done by the government, I was here to call it out as another lie of neo-liberalism.

	▲	rglullis a day ago \| parent [-]
		> And when GP claimed education was expensive because it is done by the government Not what I said. Read again.