Government Jobs Are At Least as Important as Private-Sector Jobs

I do find it interesting though that the political class is beginning to recognize that the productive class is calling them out. It is no surprise that they are responding with propaganda, but the fact that they are responding at all is a sign of progress.

Even more amusing is the implication, then, that the only way to serve the American people is to first fleece them, then provide whatever service you deem appropriate. Or work for someone who does.

It’s really irrational to vilify public sector employees like this. You can say what you want about fleecing people and providing useless services or whatever you want but at the end of the day the voters want these sorts of services. If you don’t believe try running for office based on an explicit campaign to abolish most government services and see how far you get.
You might not like them but apparently most citizens do and you need employees to implement these services.

@Will

Took the words out of my mouth. I would like to add that college professors are not always worth as much as people think, and this is coming from someone studying to be one.

@Will

Still this really isn’t the fault of the individual government employee if they work in an environment in which it is more difficult to measure productivity.
I also think a lot more unproductive people get a pass (and can even prosper) in the private sector then some are willing to admit. This is the case in any sufficiently large organization, public or private.

@ CBBB

Of course not. But when your employer has spent the last half century passing off costs to third parties (aka taxpayers), you’re going to get chewed out for being merely associated with that employer when those costs need to be accounted for.

I’m not saying it’s fair. I’m just saying it’s reality.

CBBB: Public employees are providing for the public good. You could possibly say that private employees do the same,

Or you could observe that many private employees provide for the private good, which is at least as important as the public good, and in some cases more important.
For a start, food is a private good – it is rival, in that if I eat a piece of food I prevent anyone else getting nutrition from it (I am excluding some scenarios on the basis that they are too sickening to discuss further), and it’s excludable, in that it is possible for me to provide food for myself without providing it for you. Oh, and if you don’t have food, you die.

Similarly drinking water is a private good, it’s rival and excludable. There may be public good aspects to limiting the spread of contaminated drinking water, but the private good aspects are even more important – while some people survive drinking contaminated water no one survives drinking no water.

So food and water are simultaneously private goods and are more important than public goods for the survival of humanity.

The difference between private goods and public goods comes down to the best way to provide them, not their importance in and of themselves.

I’ll also note that a lot of things the government provides nowadays aren’t necessarily public goods, eg education (while education is non-rival, it’s excludable), medical care of non-infectious diseases, subsidises for energy production, etc.

CBBB:

It’s really irrational to vilify public sector employees like this.

On reading through, as far as I can tell the group being vilified here is either Barack Obama, or the political class more generally. After all David Henderson quotes Barak Obama, and it’s the political class that is the one that generally puts forward general concepts about the nature of society, not every single government employee including the night watchman.

And vilifying the opposition is what most politicians do, and yet they still often get elected, so I don’t think it’s necessarily irrational.

As for voters wanting these services – the question is which voters? Very often, a service that is wanted by a well-organised group of voters will get provided not because it’s wanted by a majority but because the average person has a job, and a family, and likes some leisure time, more than they want to get informed about every single policy that the government is considering.

Greg Colvin:

Top management decided what products were less profitable, and what development projects had lower prospects of profitability or could be outsourced, and entire teams got axed.

And do you think that when governments cut spending they do a more subtle job?

then the biggest part of what government does has never been done effectively by the private sector, i.e. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security

This has some truth in it. Social Security is basically a big, long Ponzi scheme, and while private parties have tried many Ponzi schemes, they’ve never been able to suck in the whole population. The government, with its taxing power, has been far more successful at that.

As for Medicare and Medicaid, the US government spends more per capita on this than most developed nations spend on supplying healthcare to their entire population, and yet the health outcomes don’t seem to be noticeably better. Which is not to make admiring sounds about other countries’ healthcare systems, for example in the UK government healthcare productivity has been falling for years.

@James C

I don’t think anything you wrote is really correct.
Large organizations whether private or public always have management and coordination issues. Because a large organization is bureaucratic and not optimally managed does not imply that it is unprofitable. I can guarantee you every big company in the world is slow and bureaucratic.
Large organizations exist for a reason and there are certain advantages. The Big Three automakers were poorly managed and yet why was there no proliferation of small, nimble car makers dominating the automobile market in all that time? Large projects especially in manufacturing or construction require large organizations and they will never be optimally managed and yet will continue to exist.

@Will
The taxpayers also vote for all this stuff. If the taxpayers REALLY didn’t want all the spending and all the government programs they could elect to get rid of it all. Might take a couple of election cycles but it could be done, I see no indication of the political winds heading in the direction.
At the end of the day the whining about public employees is just the Someone-Else’s-Problem Syndrome. The voters want the programs but think they can get rid of the people who run the programs for free.

Bob;

The people who work on individual projects are likely not associated with the revenue of that project. Their productivity can transfer to many different projects that the company may be doing.

The problem expressed is on see in marginal productivity often. The marginal revenue productivity of a laborer depends on what he is building. If a manager tells him to build something that is worthless the worker is worthless. If a manager tells him to build something worthwhile the worker is worthwhile.

The real productivity of the worker doesn’t necessarily depend entirely on the product, since they can be given another product and make it just as well (or whatever, depending on skill overlap).

Axing the whole team is likely efficient in terms of managerial energy. Otherwise you have to go into all of your teams and figure out who the performers are in objective measures and see which ones are the best deals to keep. But it doesn’t fire the right workers.

As CBBB said, this is just a reality in a big organization.

Re: Tracy

No, he was saying they don’t do worse at managing things. And the fact that they don’t do worse at managing things makes their other advantages stand out as a defining advantage given the product.

@CBBB

Re: taxpayers voting for spending and government programs

“The Myth of the Rational Voter” and public choice economics would argue why differently

CBBB,

No grocery store has a business model where all of the customers vote to choose between two bundles of goods and the store then provides the most popular bundle to all customers. There is a reason for this: customers, knowing that voting on a choice between two bundles of good or services is not likely to match their wants very precisely, would opt for the a la carte approach currently in common use. Similarly, the decisions people make in voting booths may not reflect their preferences very well. So, please stop expecting others to believe that electoral majorities are a good indication of actual preferences.

Beyond that, even if most voters claim to want something, that’s not a reason for the government to be in the business of providing it. Most people want food, sex and comfort, but that doesn’t mean the government should be in the business of providing any of those.

The discussion so far has handled many of the responses I would have made to my post, thanks. I hadn’t expected so much reaction, let alone how angry some of it seemed.

By productivity I meant the ability of a person to produce high-quality products.

As for private companies necessarily being more efficient, don’t forget that one big advantage of government services is that they don’t need to make a profit, barely need advertising and and marketing, and don’t need sales staff at all. All of that can easily run to 40 to 50 percent of a private company’s expenses. And if a company succeeds (as Oracle has) in establishing a (near-) monopoly, the profits will be even more, and the service will tend to decline. The business plan for small tech companies is often not to compete with the monopolists, but to annoy them enough that they get bought by them.

My defense off the SSA is personal first: I lost more than all of my assets to a bitter divorce and the property crash, and lost my health to epilepsy, stroke, and more. Without the SSA I’d be dead.

More generally, as CBBB pointed out, private insurers have no motivation to provide for people who are a sure loss, so they don’t. And most anyone who gets seriously ill or old is a sure loss. That’s why the SSA was created in the first place.

As for the 50% figure, I can’t quickly find data going back to 1935, but this paper indicates that thanks to SS: “Elderly poverty in the U.S. decreased dramatically during the twentieth century. Between 1960 and 1995, the official poverty rate of those aged 65 and above fell from 35 percent to 10 percent, and research has documented similarly steep declines dating back to at least 1939.” (http://www.nber.org/aginghealth/summer04/w10466.html)

One big advantage of SS benefits over private savings is that they cannot be lost to market crashes, criminal brokers, bad investment decisions, and other such.

As for SS being a Ponzi scheme, so what? So long as the productivity of our population keeps growing faster than the population of retirees the receipts from SS taxes will in the long run stay ahead of expenses. Failing that, we can raise taxes or just print/borrow the money. Up to a point, sovereign nations can run deficits in their own currency indefinitely. The US has been doing so almost continuously since the founding.

As for health care costs: yes, they are out of control. I would argue that the solution is is not eliminating Medicare, but making it universal, so the system can push back on the rent-seeking pharmaceutical companies. Every other civilized country on the planet does something like that, and they get equivalent results to ours for half the cost, and manage to cover all of their people. But the wealthiest nation in the history of the world? We let people starve on the streets. It disgusts me.

The issue of whether public service or private sector jobs contribute more seems to make little sense. For example, military duty is of great value in protecting us from foreign attack. First responders also perform essential functions. On the other hand, a Steve Jobs, a Bill Gates, a Thomas Edison, and a Henry Ford have made enormous contributions to our lives.

It seems that both public service and private sector jobs can contribute a great deal. But both public service and private sector jobs can also contribute very little. So the issue of whether public service or private sector jobs contribute more seems to be irrelevant.

Allow me to support the President’s words if not his actions.

There are many jobs that are valuable to our society, if they are not valuable then they should not exist. Ever since 9/11/01 we have used ‘Hero’, and ‘Public Servant’ ad nauseum. Just because someone has a government job does not make them a public servant.

Government has developed to protect the employees from politicians so there is no accountability for the average government employee. Accountability is pushed up the chain of command until it resides with an appointee who can’t help you.

We need to look at all jobs, public and private, and determine if they are providing a necessary service and if they are efficient. Just because a public employee got laid off does not mean that job was necessary or efficient. It also does not mean that a public employee was necessary to do the task. At least Private employees pay taxes.

Now I have listened to Obama vilify anyone who makes a profit. His speech to Union Workers, who actually make something, last week was hilarious. He is used to speaking to Service Workers and really didn’t know what to say to people who actually produce goods. I know he does not know what he is talking about and is on the campaign trail to get re-elected. But aside of that reality, I would agree that there are some public jobs that are valuable, efficient, and appropriate to our society.

As far as Public Servant is concerned, The greatest Public Service would be to elect Mr. Obama out of politics. That Public Service receives no pay but a lifetime of benefits.

I also doubt the private sector would do Medicare better. There’s really just no incentive to setup a business based on insuring people who are likely to get sick unless those people also have tonnes of money.
Now I know a lot of people on this blog don’t mind the idea of people dying in the streets but I for one think that’s barbaric to say the least. Difference of opinion there I guess.

personal opinion followed by ad hominem attack. the mark of someone struggling to defend a false premise. Medicare is completely unnecessary. the purpose of insurance is to hedge against risk. health insurance is to protect against medical catastrophe, not against simple doctor check-ups. the same way car insurance doesnt cover oil changes, since theyre expected. in a freed market, people would buy health care insurance that kicks in after a certain amount of medical costs within a given year, anywhere from $1000-$10000, depending on how much personal savings accrued and premiums charged. like ive said already, there is no price signaling. take a simple outpatient procedure like a colonoscopy. i called around in my area on behalf of my father to ask for the cost. not a single person could give me a ballpark figure, and some outright hung up on me after saying they couldnt tell me until after it was done. consumers cannot shop around for health care. once market forces are unleashed, health care providers will race to cut costs, rather than shift all costs onto consumers as they do today, knowing full well insurance companies will pick up the tab after some haggling. this idea that people would die in the streets without government health care is repeated ad nauseum, but that doesnt make it any less laughably absurd.

@james

“SSA was created because FDR thought poor people were too stupid to save for retirement.”

Stupid? I guess you don’t know many poor people. Historically the poor have been unable to save for retirement because the poor, almost by definition, need all of their income for current expenses.

“the US has paid off its national debt twice since its founding”

I didn’t say in debt continuously, I said almost continuously. The debt never stayed paid off for long.

Debt and deficit history

As I understand it (and I may not) there is an accounting identity that says that if net exports are negative a nation has to run a deficit or else the population will be incapable of net savings. And given the graphs at the link above, (and other such data I’ve seen) showing wide swings in the deficit and debt over the last few hundred years, I’m not afraid that the USA will become insolvent, short of losing WWIII. We’ve gotten through worse many times.

“you know what disgusts me? people who bring up irrelevant arguments into a discussion. what does starving Americans have to do with rising health care costs? ”

My apologies if I disgust you. The relevance is that, given the costs, a serious enough health problem would be almost certain to drive most Americans into poverty, and in most of America that means being driven onto the street, which in most of America means starvation. With so many countries providing universal health care I doubt they could all be bogged down in debt, and doubt that where they are bogged down health care is the sole reason. But I’m open to contrary evidence.

“now lets take myself. i am very healthy for someone my age. so why do i need government health care? im perfectly happy with my Health Savings Account.”

I don’t know how much money you have in that account, but a serious health problem could drain it very quickly. In 2009 my health care expenses ran to over $60,000 dollars, and remain quite high. And due to the stroke damage and epilepsy I can no longer work very well at all, though I am trying. And $60,000 is small potatoes compared to what some conditions could cost. So I’d guess that you’d need over a million in savings to be sure, in the worst case, of covering your medical expenses and paying your bills for the rest of your life.

“you need to explain why government health care is good, because right now im convinced youre just another self-entitled American who thinks successful people have some moral and legal obligation to pay for your poor life choices (bitter divorce? really? thats your basis for defending SSA? ever heard of this thing called pre-nuptial agreement?)”

James, you don’t know me at all, so please don’t judge me. I’ve paid my own way in this world for over 30 years, and had no expectation of needing the SSA. By the time of my divorce my wife of twenty years was mentally ill and unable to work, so I chose to grant her most of our assets and a small lifetime alimony. Bitter or not, I still loved her. At the time my own health was excellent, I retained supposedly substantial equity in our home, and between selling the home and my work as a world-class computer scientist I expected to rapidly rebuild my finances.

Google Greg Colvin

It didn’t work out that way.

More generally, most people are not clairvoyant, and so their choices don’t always work out. It’s too easy, even cruel, to say in retrospect that they were poor choices, and that whatever they suffer is their own fault. Consider that for many Americans their most valuable asset was their home, and their life plan was to pay it off and retire rent free. Is it all their fault that the real estate market was recklessly destroyed?

So among the reasons universal health care is needed are that: medicine is potentially so expensive that most people cannot save for it; the future is too uncertain to know how much to save and in which vehicles; and pharmaceutical companies are so monopolistic (due to government-granted patents) that not even insurance companies have much bargaining power. There are more reasons, for and against, but I written too much already.

I could imagine a more private system that would work, but I think that would entail regulating the the private system to the point that it might as well be public. As for price signals, I think they are nearly worthless in health care. When I needed to have a tube snaked up my groin and into my heart I did not go calling around for the cheapest cardiologist. I went to the one my neurologist recommended as the one he most trusted. And for the most expensive medicines I take I have no real choice at all: I need the medicines, there is only one monopoly supplier, and not even the Canadian pharmacies sell them cheaper.

@ Tracy

I’m not trying to prove anything (this is not a peer-reviewed economics journal) but just give some counter examples to the supposed efficiency of private business. Smaller businesses I think are quite efficient. Larger businesses not so much: they work hard at becoming rent-collecting monopolies, and often succeed.

Another example from the same team at Oracle. Just before my young friend from MIT joined the group we had prepared a plan to replace our very slow Java interpreter with a very fast Java compiler. Management rejected the plan. So I volunteered for a solo project to make the interpreter faster. A year later I had succeeded. But by then my young friend from MIT had, in his spare time, repurposed his senior thesis to create a good-enough Java compiler. He had to keep his work secret so as to not set off management resistance until it was a done thing, but once revealed it rendered my work (and the work of another team member) worthless. This sort of thing was very common at Oracle. Submarine projects we called them.

Another fun game was “schedule chicken”. No group wanted to admit they were behind schedule, so we would all race towards the cliff, hoping some other group would be forced to ask for a slip in the schedule and let us off the hook.

And then there was the pleasure of training the Indians who were replacing us, and the extreme salaries, stock options, and benefits being raked in by top management while us peons saw our options disappear to the dot.com crash and our salaries nearly frozen.

I’d say the organization was so inefficient that they survived technically only because engineers can’t stand being unproductive. And survived financially only because of Oracle’s near-monopoly.

This may have already been said, but the fact that the public votes for getting more services only means that they think having those services would be nice. And yes, no matter how crappy government provided services are, it is nicer to have them than not to have them. The problem is that analysis fails to take into account the costs of government provision of those services. Chances are, in many such cases, the public is not getting enough “bang for its buck” as you Americans would put it. I have a long commute and I would very much enjoy having a driver to get me to work every day and get me home every evening. However, if the government was to steal from, I mean… tax me, $2,000 extra a month and send me a government employee to drive me to work every month, I would most decidedly NOT be better off. I might be glad for the driver, but I would rather have my money. On the other hand, I am very happy to give money to countless private employees when I purchase goods at the supermarket because I get something I value more in return. So yes, government employees are inherently doing less valuable work than private-sector employees.

Greg Colvin:

You supply another anecdote about private company, but no comparison with government. You are not exactly making a convincing argument for the relative efficiencies of government from that. (And yes, this is not a peer-reviewed economics journal, but that’s hardly an excuse for making stupid arguments – by only looking at one part of the picture you’re short-changing yourself, by leading yourself to believe arguments that are not true. Peer-reviwed articles are an attempt to filter out the worst arguments in the field of science because no one has time to read everything, but they’re not a fail-safe, nor are they the only place you should be applying critical thinking.)

I’m not sure what you mean by “social profit” or how to quantify it.

By social profit I mean the benefit to society from what the government does. I agree that quantifying it is difficult, this is a reason to think that government services are likely to be less efficient than private services, exactly because these things are hard to measure. Which is rather the opposite from your initial claim.

Anyway, SSA and the Department of War Crimes take up so much of the budget that the rest hardly matters.

If it doesn’t matter then the government should stop doing it, even more so than if it’s not profitable. So you have gone from asserting that the government services are generally more efficient than private services, to asserting that they hardly matter. This is no more convincing than your earlier claim. (And don’t you think that it’s outrageous that we should be taxed to pay for things that hardly matters?)

Comparing private health care to Medicare we see that Medicare operates at very low overhead compared to private companies, with their high profits, inflated executive compensation, high marketing costs, and rafts of employes whose jog is to second-guess doctors and deny coverage.

The relevant question is not overhead compared to other costs, but total costs. In NZ, the government-run accident insurance scheme had very low overhead, but very high costs, because they weren’t investigating and catching any cases of fraud. The government bought in higher overhead to lower total costs. Low overhead can be a bad thing.
For the case of Medicare in the US, it suffers from fraud., which may well be because it doesn’t hire hordes of people to investigate and refuse to pay claims.

I’m not considering election advertising as a government expense

Don’t count it as one if you don’t want. My point was that advertising happens when the government does things as well, and I gave the example of election advertising in the hope you would have at least noticed election advertising. Politicians think that they need to advertise to get elected, despite not being in the private sector. I notice that you don’t give an example of a government service that doesn’t need to advertise.

As for SS, I think even the trustees see little problem for a long ways out, and that with dismal economic assumptions.

You are aware that you are connected to the Internet, and that you can search for these things, aren’t you? One Google search found me this:

The financial conditions of the Social Security and Medicare programs remain challenging. Projected long-run program costs for both Medicare and Social Security are not sustainable under currently scheduled financing, and will require legislative modifications if disruptive consequences for beneficiaries and taxpayers are to be avoided.

…

After 2014, cash deficits are expected to grow rapidly as the number of beneficiaries continues to grow at a substantially faster rate than the number of covered workers.

I’ve already spoken to my preferred solution, which is to replace the insurance companies with universal Medicare.

And I’ve pointed out to you that the rest of the “civilised world” is facing rising healthcare spending. I can’t think of a case where universal single-payer medicine has been introduced and led to lower costs. This appears to have made no impression on you, you haven’t even mentioned those observations.

Our Glorious United States and the Great State of Texas refused to help at all. Not even pain relievers. When the pain became unbearable she shot herself.

Ah, this is a case where some more advertising by government services would be beneficial. A quick google search found me, for the US, this page
http://www.suite101.com/content/financial-aid-for-cancer-patients-a35384

I think that part of the reason most non-government workers dislike government workers is not because they view government jobs not as less productive or useful, but because comparatively they view them as overpaid. I think that there is some evidence to support this view. The same kind of work in the private sector offers less pay and benefits and does not offer the kind of job security a government job does, a less quantifiable benefit.

Also, it kind of turns me off to see government workers up in Wisconsin and around the country complain and protest about the possiblity of a pay-cut or pension reduction. It happens everyday in the private sector. That kind of behavior certainly doesn’t improve my view of them.

Greg Colvin: Even better would be actual data comparing services provided by government versus industry, and that is why we are looking at medical services.

Yes, that would be a good start for you. For a start, consider this article that includes a graph comparing cosmetic surgery, which is paid for out of pocket, with other forms of medical care, which are paid for by third parties. In the US since 1992 the price of medical care went up by almost twice of CPI, but the price of cosmetic surgery went up less than half as much, so it fell in real terms.

And this is why I keep pointing out to you that productivity has been falling in the UK healthcare system – money spent has been rising, but outputs haven’t been, as far as anyone can tell.

When I said that SSA and DOD take up so much of the budget that the rest hardly matters I did not mean that the rest wasn’t valuable, I meant that eliminating the rest would hardly make a dent in the US budget.

Which is irrelevant to your earlier argument, where you were claiming that government services were inherently more efficient than private services.
You are switching between arguments, without mentioning it, possibly without realising it. You started off with arguing about relative efficiences, and then are now trying to argue about the US budget deficit. But even if the US government was running a massive surplus, that would be no justification for wasting government money providing goods or services that are not useful enough to return at least a normal rate of profit. Government spending should be to provide value, and quite a bit of value, to offset the costs of raising taxes.

One graph that caught my eye shows that SS and Medicare expenses will rise from about 4% of GDP now to about 6% of GDP in 2040, and stabilize close to that level through at least 2085. That doesn’t seem like a budget breaker to me.

Not a budget breaker, but a 2% of GDP rise in taxes will be unpopular. Federal tax take is now I understand about 20% of GDP (and the US government is running a massive deficit). Raising taxes to collect another 2% of GDP will be a 10% rise in taxes, for which the payers will get no obvious extra benefits. And that’s built on the assumption of a 30% cut in doctors’ reimbursements next year, which is current law, but a decision Congress keeps putting off – how likely do you think that is?

Most all of the OECD countries have universal, single-payer coverage, which I understand to be part of why their costs are lower.

Interesting claim. Is there a reason why you understand this that you would like to share with us?
And what do you think about the counterexample of Singapore, were about 66% of healthcare spending comes from private sources? (driven by government mandates incidentally – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Singapore)
And what do you make of the Germans attempting to introduce more co-payments – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_in_Germany?

So far I’m not finding data that indicates the effect of a transition from one system to the other, but your not being able to think of a case of savings doesn’t count for much either.

So let me see, the fact that neither of us can think of a case where a shift to a single payer system led to a fall in healthcare spending doesn’t affect your confidence in your claim that such a shift will lead to a fall in healthcare spending? I mean, it doesn’t mean much that I can’t think of one, I agree, but when the advocate of a change can’t think of a good example, that should rather count against it, shouldn’t it?

In the case of the US, I agree that there is likely a great deal of waste in the system. But that waste all goes into some people’s pockets, and they will fight like buggery to keep it coming, even with a shift to single-payer, and public choice theory gives reason to think that they’ll likely get away with it (because the benefit to them individually is so large relative to the cost to the individual taxpayer). It would be much more convincing if you could find another case where a shift to a single-payer system was followed by a fall in healthcare spending.

Within the USA, Medicate spends substantially (about 3 or 4 times) less than private insurance, despite caring for an older, sicker population, and despite the fraud you mentioned.

The paper you linked to is about administrative costs. However the paper itself has this to say about total costs:

The average annual cost per person under Medicare is more than double that under private health insurance. In 2003, the average medical cost for Medicare is estimated to be about $6,600 per person per year, while the average medical cost for private health insurance, excluding out-of-pocket cost is $2,700 per person per year.

Of course, Medicare addresses a sicker population, but this doesn’t support your claim that it spends substantially less overall.

but the SSDI process is too slow to have helped: 5 months to process an application, two more years until you get Medicare. And that isn’t the bureaucracy’s fault, it’s the laws they operate under.

And that’s the government for you. Both the bureaucracy and the laws.

Still, I agree that more government outreach is needed, but don’t see that it would need to be anything like what private industry spends. E.g. Superbowl ads. The government isn’t trying to attract customers from competitors.

There are very often competitors – eg you can go to school or you can spend time mucking around in the streets. You can go to the police, and to court, or you can go to a private mediator, or you can hire some tough guys to kneecap the guy you disagree with (this is part of why the police spend money on community outreach). And people can just forget to do stuff, which is why you get advertising aimed at “remember to pay your taxes” or “fill out your census form!”

I’ll also note that most private companies don’t buy Superbowl ads. The ones that do are the ones for which that sort of advertising is very appropriate, or who just made some bad decisions.