I have a personal adage that I see confirmed more and more often:
Companies are always willing to spend money as long as it doesn’t actually solve the problem.
For “companies”, substitute any entity with a corporate structure, which sadly these days includes almost all public institutions, non-profits, condo boards, etc. This adage seems to hold to the extent that a group is more of a power structure than a community.
I first started thinking about this when a friend who worked in an office told me a story about asking their employer for some minor ergonomic accomodation. I think they were having neck strain and needed a monitor stand to raise their computer screen. In response, and without further consulting them, the employer got them a new office chair costing over $1000. Try as they might, they were unable to set up the new chair in such a way that it helped their neck. They still did not have a monitor stand. It was easier to get the company to spend $1000 on a new chair than $40 on a monitor stand.
Why did this happen? It seems like a particularly ludicrous example, but it’s actually peanuts in terms of how much money is wasted by this principle. I think one of the fundamental reasons is a natural lack of curiosity on the part of corporate structures. It’s easier to stay in your field of abstraction and spend literally any amount of money, than it is to interface with the messy real world and actually listen to people or question your assumptions. Of course, the magnitude of the spending adjusts based on available funds (note that “funds” may not mean cash on hand; this principle can easily lead to debt).
If you are middle-class, you may have even experienced this in your own life. Perhaps you are feeling busy and there is a practical problem you keep having and aren’t quite sure how to solve, but something on Amazon with slick branding claims it will solve it. It’s easier to click that order button than to actually think through the problem and what a solution would look like for you in particular. There is even a transient pleasure that comes from having spent the money on the problem, because of the feeling that it is now “handled” (despite the order not even having shipped yet).
On a much larger scale, I see this same principle busy at work in the US Democratic party, explaining how they manage to stay so out of touch with their voters that they have been unable now for 8 years to present a widely compelling alternative to Donald Trump, and have actually lost to him twice, despite their campaigns far outspending his. Some among their leadership are genuinely surprised that it’s possible to lose an election that you spent over a billion dollars on. The trouble is that raising and spending such unimaginable amounts of money has become a substitute for actually listening to voters or questioning the worldview of corporate elites. See: real populism.
The opposite principle often holds as well. See closure of science centre as an example of how government is often allergic to spending money specifically if it will solve a problem. Of course, the closure itself was part of a transparent corruption scheme, but it couldn’t have happened without decades of pinching problem-solving pennies only to lavish the big bucks on empty ideology.