to ponder

It is better to read a little and ponder a lot
than to read a lot and ponder a little
Denis Parsons Burkitt

In modern society Time is Money. From childhood on, we are conditioned (trained) to do things as fast and efficient as possible, even at the same time! This is usually contradictory. In quite a few cases, fast and efficient are quite good, but not all the time. We unlearn our ability to think, to get a handle on things, to contemplate, to think things through, to ponder. Instead, the credo Time is Money leads to mistakes, incorrect assumptions or even worse.

To ponder is taking a step back, to reflect on why we do things, to question the solution that jumps to mind. In more cases than we would want to admit, in hindsight we might conclude we may have been a bit hasty, that perhaps we should have taken a longer perspective, that perhaps we shouldn't have blindly suggested the standard solution. Should we have pondered first?

Government services and market discipline

Sometimes, the government provides services that at a certain time are thought to be more efficiently done by the market. This usually results in a situation where the services including the organisations that provide those, are privatised. While each privatisation is unique, in practice – in the Netherlands...