If it was a high leverage decision, you would have hoped one of the officials appointed to fix the situation would have already noticed and fixed it. So either they are completely incompetent or the decision didn't matter much.
> So either they are completely incompetent or the decision didn't matter much.
Or the field always wins. Every year a large team of highly paid professionals is responsible for selecting the best professional sports prospects to join their team. The team that goes first (almost) never gets the best player. Its not because they're incompetent. And its not because the decision doesn't matter- these are multi billion dollar organizations, and the decision is very much a high leverage one that will directly impact their fortunes.
Sometimes finding the best path is extremely difficult. Sometimes even when someone does see the best path, its still hard to recognize it as such. So I don't think its surprising at all for the best idea to come from outside a team devoted to solving a problem. Especially in today's age when more people than ever can propose solutions and more people than ever can see those proposals and bubble up the ones that sound good to them.
Ideally, yes. But that assumes people are looking into the right places at the right time, with the knowledge to understand what they are looking at. That’s a pretty tall order for any large system.
If the POTUS personally commits to resolving the issue, it is concerning that an outsider can literally sail through and identify a high leverage solution. Like what the hell is going on with our institutions. There might be an explanation but it looks really bad from the outside.
A large team under POTUS has been working on this for two weeks and the Flexport CEO can sail through and come up with this within 24 hours of doing that? That's embarrassing and concerning.
EDIT yes he's not an outsider to the industry, I mean he's an outsider to the group of officials who were tasked with solving this problem.
If you believe that A) you can't have literally everyone in the industry on POTUS's team and B) private industry often has some of the best expertise, I'm not sure I understand why you would be upset about this outcome.
He's upset that the government is (seemingly) incompetent. Defending their incompetence does not change the fact that they were incompetent as someone was so easily able to propose a solution while we have little reason to believe the government had a plan. It doesn't matter if that someone is the world's foremost expert (he's not, by the way) - what good is the government if they can't solve problems they're in charge of fixing?
I would be sympathetic to that if this fix was something highly complicated or requiring significant expertise to come up with. Then I could understand this oversight. And perhaps that's the case here, and it's just my ignorance speaking, but "relax stifling zoning restrictions to immediately double capacity" doesn't seem like it fits into that category of things.
Think of it like a designer giving you a design in 5 minutes. It wasn't the time it took to do the thing that was important, it was the thousands of hours of training that allowed the design to only take 5 minutes.
Ryan Peterson has been doing this for a long time at a high level, it's very hard to get someone like him into civil service.
No, he isn’t an expert, and people in logistics consider him an outsider who is a CEO of a startup that makes software that is helpful for a certain set of concerns within supply chain management. Making software for an industry does not make you a foremost expert.
> Making software for an industry does not make you a foremost expert.
I think it does, if your company is valued at 3.2 billion, does $830m in revenue, and has 10k+ customers (as of 2019) [1]. You probably know what you're doing at that point.
Buttigieg is broadly responsible for this sector on a national federal level.
My question is if anyone is specifically working to solve the current acute port clogging situation, ideally someone who has authority to implement solutions.
At the very simplest, the CEO of a large shipping company should have better contacts to suggest these things to than posting them to the world on twitter and hoping the tweet goes viral enough that somebody in charge notices.
Somebody in the mayor's office should have been getting in contact with people at the major shipping companies, asking for suggestions like this, rather than waiting until a twitter thread got viral enough to embarass them into taking action.
