The Nature of the Bureaucratic Beast

A great article on Zero Hedge around five months ago:  "Why Is Our Government (And Deep State) So Incompetent?" by Charles Hugh-Smith. I'll be pursuing Hugh-Smith's work, I think, because he operates from the same principle as I do:  "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity."

1. That which is cheap and abundant will be squandered until it is no longer cheap or abundant.

More or less the Tragedy of the Commons--but I like this better. It's true and trying to explain why it's true is a waste of time. We've reached a point in history where we can say, "This is what almost always happens. Let's stop thinking we can prevent it and start thinking how we can manage it."

2. The prime directive of any bureaucracy is to eliminate all accountability. The raison d'etre of bureaucracy, the very reason for its existence, is not to manage complex affairs but to dissipate accountability into a formless cloud so that no member of the bureaucracy will ever face any consequences for his/her actions.

 This is what I was getting at in my discussion of monarchy. The most contemporary example of this is the ongoing investigation of the IRS's Lois Lerner. It's extraordinarily difficult to pin anything on her because of the dissipatory nature of bureaucracies. When Tea Party groups are harassed, when evidence goes missing, everyone in the department just shrugs--"I don't know how that happened."

However, it's a major shift in our bureaucratic development that Lerner hasn't fallen on her sword to shelter the President's administration. Consider the chain of resignations after Watergate; each resignee announcing that he was responsible, not his superiors. Lerner is an administrative lifer and she's decided she's not going anywhere, no matter what her department did.

This is why it's important to consider a bureaucracy as an entity of its own, with particular traits like any creature has, a colony of ants or, more appropriately, kudzu. It's always going to grow and there is no single spot from which the growth originates.

3. Bureaucracies are intrinsically prone to group-think

What I'm  most interested in, regarding group-think, is the power of the disruptive member. The need for harmony within the group is obvious--no one wants to make unnecessary enemies--so the member who is the most willing to cause division can effect the most change.

This principle--group-think and its weakness for internal loudmouths--explains the increasing PC irrelevancy of our mass culture. Looking for maximum agreement, group members offer concessions to their most disgruntled members.

5. One systems-level consequence of tightly connected, interactive complex systems is that they generate routine failures known as "normal accidents," catastrophes that result from seemingly small miscalculations and miscues that cascade into systemic crises. When accountability has been lost, there are no feedback loops left to correct these "normal accidents," so the damage piles up within the organization until it collapses in a supernova model of accumulated incompetence.

In my experience, this is concentrating on fixing problems and not preventing them.

This I see in my day job at a small business, my first dealing with business-to-business matters. After about three months on the job, I said, "If everybody here and out there did their job correctly, half of the country would be out of work."

At least in private enterprise the money wasted on fixing mistakes has a cap--once operating expenses exceed revenues, something has to be done. It has to be worse in government bureaucracies.

6. The moral-hazard-riddled leadership of bureaucracies will choose whatever short-term politically expedient fix reduces the immediate political pain (also known as "kicking the can down the road") rather than risk shaking up the organization by imposing accountability and clearing out the deadwood.

Something I've been saying in private for years, but have never had occasion to say here:

Democracy is the theory that an infinite number of short-term solutions equals a long-term solution.