> These things happen in private sector organizations too
It's not a matter of public/private indeed, it's a matter of size. The bigger an organization, the more dis-aligned individual and collective incentives become.
* In a start-up you can't afford to harm the enterprise in order to further your own interest: if you act parasitically you'll kill your host almost immediately.
* In a big company, you won't make a meaningful difference, neither positively nor negatively, so you may as well serve your own interests, irrespective of their effect on the whole company.
Corollary: people who want to play corporate politics concentrate in big companies, because that's where you can do it with relative impunity.
Big private companies offset this competitive disadvantage through economy of scales and/or lobbying; public services do it through taxes and monopolies. NASA isn't inefficient because it's public, but because it's huge. Its only chance to beat SpaceX would have been through political influence, the way taxis lobby against Uber (or car dealers against Tesla, AT&T against antitrust laws...), but it's too late, SpaceX is already too visibly successful and too useful: any politician killing it would be classified as corrupt / communist / whatever you call a shameless apparatchik in the USA.
It's not a matter of public/private indeed, it's a matter of size. The bigger an organization, the more dis-aligned individual and collective incentives become.
* In a start-up you can't afford to harm the enterprise in order to further your own interest: if you act parasitically you'll kill your host almost immediately.
* In a big company, you won't make a meaningful difference, neither positively nor negatively, so you may as well serve your own interests, irrespective of their effect on the whole company.
Corollary: people who want to play corporate politics concentrate in big companies, because that's where you can do it with relative impunity.
Big private companies offset this competitive disadvantage through economy of scales and/or lobbying; public services do it through taxes and monopolies. NASA isn't inefficient because it's public, but because it's huge. Its only chance to beat SpaceX would have been through political influence, the way taxis lobby against Uber (or car dealers against Tesla, AT&T against antitrust laws...), but it's too late, SpaceX is already too visibly successful and too useful: any politician killing it would be classified as corrupt / communist / whatever you call a shameless apparatchik in the USA.