OK, I've continuously sided with Kurt over Nick in their cooking wars, but this is just obscene. You can't brown more than about 250 grams/half a pound of ground beef at a time. The beef starts shedding liquid and then it stews rather than browns. If you need to do a lot, you have to brown it in batches.
Also, the oil goes in before the beef. You have to get the oil hot to brown the beef. Putting cold oil into a pan full of ground beef will just reduce the temperature and you'll get grey stewed sludge rather than browned ground beef.
Can none of these fuckers read a recipe book? The very first time I read a recipe for a ragu, it taught me
how to brown your ground beef properly. It won't have been anything fancy -- almost certainly Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course.