The idea that the government should be run like a business is a popular one. “It’s also a terrible one,” writes Ray Fisman, a professor of economics at Boston University. “Businesses and government do fundamentally different jobs, and efforts at remaking government with an eye to cost-cutting can end in disaster. That’s because a lot of what the government does is hard to quantify and involves complicated tasks that inevitably require bureaucratic coordination and, yes, inefficiency.” Yes, let’s try to make the government work more efficiently, Fisman says. “But that’s different from cutting the government down to size, and it’s certainly not the same as simply running it like a business.” | 🎨 by Sam Drew #nytopinion