PRIVATE AND PUBLIC INCOMPETENCE (COMMENT).

PRIVATE AND PUBLIC INCOMPETENCE (COMMENT). My niece Molly commented that it took ten hours of her time and over half a year to get their health insurer to spell her name correctly and to list her as a spouse and notes that there is private incompetence as well as public incompetence. We have an unlisted phone number, not because we wanted one, but because the Cablevision representative misspelled our name absurdly badly. (We haven’t tried to change the spelling because we are afraid that Cablevision would find a way to make things worse.) I think that Cablevision’s incompetence in our case resulted from a worker who did not care about anything he did. What interests me about the passport office is that bureaucracies—both private and public– are supposed to be good at doing repetitive tasks well. I was convinced by the quality movement of the eighties that errors can be reduced by adopting appropriate systems—for example, that hospital personnel can be persuaded to wash their hands regularly.