Kakonomics may work in Italy but not in SA
For us, the mutual acceptance of mediocre service will end in a quick descent into hopelessness, writes Carlos Amato
TWO news clips this week illustrated an astonishing mystery of South African public life: the survival of the sh***est. To be precise: if your job is to help the people, you don’t have to do your job — you just sommer keep your job. Witness the Cradock-based riot cops who stank up Grahamstown on Wednesday. They seemed to have arrived straight from 1986. With news cameras rolling, they fired rubber bullets without provocation, in flagrant breach of standing orders.
They arrested a protester for the crime of — who knows? “shouting while black”? — and dragged him across the street like a bag of sand, relishing his physical debasement. They dragged a student over a hedge she was hiding behind. They stalked up and down the hedge like slavering beasts, training shotguns on distant figures, bellowing threats.
These oiks-cum-Orcs clearly had no fear of losing their jobs. What chance of being punished for mere assault and inflammatory aggression, when the Marikana shooters and commanders got away with a massacre?
Hlaudi Motsoeneng has no fear either, despite burning mountains of public money, despite his shrunken fedora, his shrunken intellect, his malignant ego. What chance of comeuppance when his patron is guilty of worse?
These feats of protected negligence poison South Africa’s future, and not merely because of their direct effects. They also deepen the grip of kakonomics on our national mind.
Kakonomics is a cultural-economic appetite for unspoken pacts of mediocrity. Tim Harford of the Financial Times wrote about it recently, and Tony Leon mentioned it on these pages last week.
The term was coined by Italian sociologist Diego Gambetta and philosopher Gloria Origgi, using the Greek root kakos, meaning bad or rotten. But it has a nice scatological ring on these shores.
Gambetta and Origgi observed that Italians are happy to accept shoddy work from a client or colleague, in exchange for the licence to underperform themselves.
For example, a Turin professor agrees to present five summerschool lectures at another university, for a tidy sum. He will give only three lectures, all rehashed. The university will pay two-thirds of the fee, two months late. Both parties are pleased: the professor gets a paid holiday in Rome; the faculty saves money for cocktails. The students get shafted.
Where kakonomics reigns, anyone who breaks the mould by working hard invites the resentment of everyone else — by outperforming, you make them all feel bad, and jeopardise the collective licence to slack off. The deal is that everyone gets to feel fine about being a bit sloppy, even dodgy. Everyone must pretend that everyone else is doing a great job.
In Italy, the penalty for kakonomics is a stagnant economy and inefficient public services. The reward is la dolce vita; mediocrity at work permits more downtime and pleasure. But in South Africa, we don’t have enough dolce vita to go around — and we don’t have time for it. We need to work like Germans on speed to have a future worth sticking around for.
And our kakonomic pacts exclude and penalise the majority, for whom there is no coasting but an enforced hopelessness.
The most shameless kakonomic pacts can be seen in and around our public sector: between supine ANC MPs and the Zupta elite; between workshy unionised teachers and the vote-hungry ANC; between the state and state-owned entities; between the state and the consultants it pays lavishly to write fancy strategies that are never implemented.
The private sector does kakonomics too. Look at the media: readers refuse to pay for real journalism, and in exchange we spray them with clickbait drivel that’s cheap to produce. Look at cellular operators: they accept the government’s abysmal management of broadband in exchange for permission to profiteer on data costs.
But the energising effect of the profit motive can offer an antidote to our creeping kakonomics. Federica Duca, an Italian sociologist at the Public Affairs Research In- stitute in Johannesburg, says South African businesses, especially private healthcare, are more efficient than Italian equivalents.
“One reason is that the private health sector is less prominent in Italy, and tends to align with public sector standards — there is a continuity in attitude and behaviour . . . This is not the case in South Africa. When the rich opt for a private provider, they demand a very good service and don’t compromise on that.
“The main difference, though, is that in Italy we have better public services, especially health and education, despite the progressive attacks on state institutions.”
That presents us with a Catch22: for South Africa to reach Italy’s level of equity and development, an environment in which kakonomics is manageable, we have to kill kakonomics.
It may even be arguable that South African kakonomics is more deeply destructive than its dodgy cousin, corruption, which does not necessarily prevent broad prosperity. Like postwar Italy, or post-millennial China, South Africa could become rich and dynamic while tolerating a discreet level of graft — provided there was sufficient cultural pressure on crooked actors to compensate with diligent effort.
In France, for example, a contractor may pay a kickback to win a road contract, but then he makes damn sure he builds a flawless road. It’s a point of honour.
What makes matters worse for South Africa is that kakonomies flourish in bad times. Workers in a struggling company tend to cut corners. Teachers call in sick when pupils are dof. The comforts of individual mediocrity are a consolation for general mediocrity.
As an often unproductive hack, I’m in no position to theorise on how we might defeat the monster of kakonomics. But here’s one final, mediocre thought: a k*k president doesn’t help.
SA kakonomics is more deeply destructive than its dodgy cousin, corruption