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Grant Smith's avatar

Thanks for the reference to late stage bureaucracy! The technocrats have tried to address the point you make here: "It’s in bureaucrats’ interests to substitute measures of activity—justified by stated intent or purpose—for measured outcomes and effectiveness. Note how the bureaucratised academy substitutes things easily measured—total number of publications, say—for something actually useful."

They do this by differentiating measures of performance (what you're calling measures of activity) from measures of effectiveness. Every initiative these days is supposed to have both clearly delineated. Now, in a bureaucracy there are few if any incentives for the measures of effectiveness to actually BE such...

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Jason Manning's avatar

The expansion of bureaucracy and hoarding of authority includes bureaucrats managing the grievances of their subordinates, and then stoking the market for their own services. I've written elsewhere how this fosters a moral dependence on authority characteristic of victimhood culture: https://jasonmanning.substack.com/p/moral-cultures-4-moral-dependence

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