Seeing the federal government outsource vaccine rollout to a big four consultancy makes me think a lot more about what I call "the marketplace of problems"

See PwC, Accenture etc. have a seat at the table with government about "stuff what needs to be done", and in this situation it's a problem. There's likely no expertise in-house for this stuff with them, they'll recruit it in.

There's nothing wrong with recruiting ahead of a big contract, but the people who have the expertise could be shopping themselves to government to run this. Instead, PwC will sell them into government at 3x their salary.

Because Joe/Jane P. Personwhocandovaccinelogistics, doesn't have access to the government ministers who have problems, and the infrastructure to match talent with problems isn't there.

What the big four consultancies mostly do, is maintain a quadropoly on the supply of problems that government and many large businesses have.

Access to problems is a big deal. I know several people who are experts in their field, and people who are growing startup-style businesses (including actual startups), and the hardest thing is to get legitimate consideration by businesses and entities that have problems.

The way you'd get insanely rich in this country if you weren't born that way, is to somehow position yourself to drink from the firehose of problems. There's not shortage of them, but authorised responders to them are carefully curated.

And government ministers are real keen to keep the sell-side happy because it's a rich source of post-ministerial careers as an "Executive Vice President of Customer Success" or some shit.

I personally benefit from businesses not being able to/not wanting to do the things that they need to do, I am a source of expertise that people get at 3x what they'd pay me to provide it on their payroll, but this doesn't stop me thinking about it.