I agree that merit should include character. The reality is that, in meritocracies, it typically doesn’t as capacity (IQ and executive function) is much easier to measure than character.
Quick side comment about Jane Jacobs - you unintentionally defame her as being an economist. [Says the fellow with an undergrad degree in the subject.] And her book The Nature of Economies is probably the best introduction to economics I've ever read. I think precisely because she doesn't hew to the standard discourse (from left or right) on the foundation of economics, but instead roots it in a naturalistic view. Much as she did with demolishing urban theory. She was a dilettante in both fields, naïve to the jargon and conceits, but brilliantly observant; thus she tends to be rejected by the priests in both. When you stress the social as emergent from the biological, you are working the same vein she did. She was an absolutely natural intellectual, a la Hoffer, not a product of credentialing.
Would it be fair to say that often such natural intellectuals greatest value comes from their ability to state or restate the obvious -- making plain and visible once again those truths or realities that we all know to be valid, but that too often are hidden or covered up with other BS?
Did economics misstep when they forgot their field initially was "political" economics, a social science, when they tried to be too scientific via mathematical modeling, thinking they could capture and understand the reasoning and direction of the 3 billion to 30 billion purchasing decisions that a population of 300 million makes every day?
Well there certainly is a freshness of perspective/approach with the natural intellectual, and they aren't writing to impress or convince other academics. Hoffer's book is surprisingly difficult to read despite it's slightness; you have to reflect on what he wrote and digest it. I guarantee no one reads through that in one sitting, as short as it is.
1) Thank you for bringing Walter Kirn to my attention. Have not read your Palladium reference yet, but it looks interesting. And how can anyone looking at his list of dysfunctional results (as presented above) not be able to win an argument to favor reality over cognitive dissonance and discombobulation?!
2) Your Note 3 caught my eye for some reason: "Purchase of positions seems obviously dysfunctional to us, but was a relatively information-efficient way of matching capacity to perform an office via willingness to purchase it (Allen, 2012)." Can you amplify on that? One part of me says someone who managed to obtain and retain wealth from their estate (even if on the backs of serfs and vassals) probably has some managerial skills worthy of a position of responsibility. If someone says to himself "I am pretty good with numbers and accounting to run this estate, so I can run the Exchequer" there may be validity in that view. But if there is really a power behind the throne, such as a spouse or effective estate manager, actually making things work, then his ego is probably bigger than his capacity. Do we moderns tend to reject the idea of purchasing positions as a decline in character, or thinking that capacity or expertise in one area does not automatically translate into abilities in other areas. From a free speech standpoint, we accept the work of lobbyists and promoters of various kinds, although we remain unhappy that excessive wealth can lead to power and influence violating "one man, one vote", distorting the representative aspects of republican governments.
3) Is there some element of management theory that addresses the optimal size for a management team or group, beyond which it begins to fall apart? I am thinking that the US military now has 300+ general officers, while I suppose we had maybe a few dozen during WWII, with a much bigger manpower and development/procurement responsibility. Some of that must reflect "grade inflation", similar to the bank teller being a deputy assistant executive vice president at the bank. And the Church managed to get by with 5 levels of hierarchy for centuries (even if now there may be a largish Vatican bureaucracy of cardinals and priests we see glimmers of but not the whole picture).
Well, then that makes you more than qualified for the Ministerial Office of Organisational Management and Control. (Although I have no idea just how much it will cost you :-) )
And from there it is only a short hop to the Exchequer, where your economic knowledge is probably far superior to most of the recent claimants to that position.
Ah yes, the curiosity of having more general officers now (with less than 1m active) than we did when we had 12 million souls in uniform. Not a matter of organizational theory at all, it is purely politics. GOs these days have offices and entourages and create government spending in a state/Congressional district; well given that bare fact, can you ever have too many of them? We should count our lucky stars that we aren't another order of magnitude up.
That isn't even taking into account the military pro-consuls we have under the Goldwater-Nichols act. No, we don't call them that though that is in fact what they are. State these days merely handles the formalities of foreign policy - the meat is chewed out in the National Security apparatus.
The key passage in the paper I refer to in my reply is:
“The outright sale of a public office has very strong incentive effects. Income from an office or a commission is generated in a variety of ways (fees, prizes, spoils of war), and an individual who earns a residual claimant income has a strong incentive to collect and otherwise earn his fees, and to do so in a cost minimizing fashion. Generally speaking, this is a benefit of sale. Income is higher when the clerk performs well or the army captain wins the battle. Higher incomes, in a competitive market for office sale, means the crown receives a higher price for the office when it is initially sold. Such a system self-selects quality individuals for the position. Individuals who fail to perform lose money, and are better off selling to the most efficient occupier of the post. Hence the sale of public office has the benefit of eliminating the measurement of qualified inputs and monitoring the output since the residual polices behavior.“
It appears the judiciary became professional the earliest, but not surprising if the aim is neutral justice without favor. I suppose the pain and harm from believing justice was not properly served would be greater than the feeling of being cheated in any normal market transaction, even the buying of an office where the seller had to power to renege on the deal, etc.
Hundreds to thousands of offices being available for sale or patronage is still pretty foreign to our modern thinking/experience with over weening bureaucracies. Clearly not a culture of "that government is best which governs least".
Plus different situations leading to incentives favoring sale in some cases and patronage in others. But I now gather that someone with real hustle could very very well for themselves in certain positions that they "owned".
Final thought for (my) evening: if we want to incentivize superior performance from our "public servants" perhaps we should require that they post a performance bond at the start. Then after 2, or 3 , or 5 years they are "somehow judged" as to how well they did. If not up to snuff they forfeit their bond. A definite "stick" to accompany their "carrot" of continued employment.
There are no meaningful performance metrics for a bureaucrat. I would be hesitant to even employ cost-savings metrics due to the ease with which they could end up a perverse incentive.
Perhaps it is easier to find meaningful metrics for the agency's responsibilities going outward, vs. responding to solicitations coming inward.
The best example I can think of right now (but I agree it is not an exact science):
We can gage that the border is or is not secure by how many people we assess have gotten through, the "plugging" of which is the outward responsibility of HLS, such that no entries are made without being controlled.
Conversely, how many of the legitimately allowed entrants are properly tracked as to their location, administrative status in court or elsewhere, deported for overstays or illegal activity, etc. becomes a measure of responding to incoming "forces" or stimuli.
And that would correspond to what metrics for the individuals in the agency? All measured under the same, or would there be different ones depending on the role of the employee?
A business (even one heavily bureaucratized as all large corporations are) has profit as ultimate metric; all the subsidiary ones in every department and for every individual don't matter if profit is tanking. Alas, there is no public corollary.
I may have been curt with my statement, but not facile. It is a real problem, even with your example. A good incentive can wreak real havoc if it isn't well aligned to what the organization needs to accomplish. We don't even have a political consensus on what (or who) has responsibility for border security, let alone dealing with the conflicting priorities arising from the political maelstrom in DC. The frontline disillusion of Border Patrol means nothing to the next three levels of management, let alone the appointee ranks.
I fully agree the private sector profit/loss criteria works in a big picture way, regardless of the qualities and performance of lower level employees, who may have helped or hindered achieving the end result.
I suspect we could dialog about this all night and not solve the issues :-).
As with Lorenzo, I have no special expertise in organizational theory or bureaucratic mgmt.
I do have some ideas - that might or might not survive exposure to reality. But a major element remains getting a suitably oriented Congress that will dismantle excessive agency scope and radically reform the Civil Service criteria and processes for scope, personnel, promotion, accountability, etc.
I am probably excessively optimistic that that will happen within my lifetime.
So those of us struggling along in education are doubly screwed because our state overlords are both bureaucrats and academics. That would explain bloated administrations churning out "blueprint" after "mission statement" after "brief" saying all the same things in revolving jargon. Such a waste!
Another excellent bit of clarity - thanks again. Filtering through the many sharp points and apt descriptions of currents in play, I find myself matching personal experience point-by-point. FWIW my below-the-radar existence seems to square up consistently, so you’ re providing a valuable reality check and passing the tests. I’m a high school teacher in Los Angeles and the bits about burgeoning bureaucratization ring true.
"This effect is increased when bureaucratisation increases the number of people who do not bear the costs of their decisions, which increases the salience of self-referential status and social-leverage plays."
Thomas Sowell has an appropriate observation:
"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."
The U.S. military has reached out to the people they forced out for refusing the COVID vaccination to try to pull them back in. You can rest assured without the slightest hint of error on behalf of the brass that pushed them out, or that there was really anything wrong in how those folks were treated. There is hubris and then there is bureaucracy.
And most are saying, “NO‼️”, because they understand that the psychopathic, globalist-aligned top brass intends to ship them out to be slaughtered on the fields of Ukraine or riddled with bullets in the underground tunnels of Gaza‼️
In other words, they won’t risk their lives in Predator Class wars for profit that have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the national security interests of the United States.
This will not change. Recruitment numbers will not bounce back until current Pentagon leadership is removed and severely punished for their TREASON against the nation.
Without fundamental top to bottom reform of all branches of the military, no loyal, patriotic American prospective soldier will ever again trust military leadership.
That may be true for some, maybe most of them (IDK?) But, then why did they sign up to begin with? It's not like "predator class wars" were just invented. But, if I had worked for any organization that treated me that way, I sure the hell would not go back to work there.
That is all very over-stated. No Western forces are being committed to Ukraine, that is really the point. And a Russian defeat in Ukraine is clearly in the general Western interest. (As an Australian eyeing Xi’s CCP regimes’s very “pushy” behaviour, I am firmly in favour of a Ukrainian victory: this is very much the bipartisan view in Australia, hence Australian being a significant donor to Ukraine. South Korea and Japan are clearly making very similar calculations.)
As for the Hamas-Israel War, that was set off by Hamas’s dash-cam progrom and it is pretty clear that most Arab governments hope that Israel can smash Hamas, whatever they may say publicly. The US’s military deployment’s are fairly clearly aimed at discouraging outside parties from intervening. (Though there being US hostages does provide a complicating factor.). That the leaders of both Hezbollah and Iran have given “great work Hamas, nothing to do with us” speeches suggest it is working.
Meanwhile, it looks like the Venezuelan regime, having disastrously looted its own economy, wants to have a go at looting Guyana’s. The New World disorder is not an encouraging time. A stable international order is something that is created, it is not inherent.
At one time, America took the position that events in our hemisphere mattered. Sadly, much stupidity was done in the name of progressivism and the current admin only acts against US interests. Guyana could become a significant issue; moreso if handled poorly or if China were to engage.
To summarize: Meritocracy isn’t necessary for a polity to work. Patronage and purchase will suffice as long as character is valued and effective feedback loops are established and maintained. Meritocracy works, but only if character is included in the definition of meritocracy. Bureaucratization overwhelms functional systems, destroys feedback systems, and drives out or neuters merit. If bureaucratization is cloaked with the mantle of equity and social justice it is more destructive and harder to counter.
In essay 19, “Diversity Inclusion Equity as bureaucratic pathology,” you observed that a problem with bureaucracies is that they tend to focus on tasks and processes rather than on goals and outcomes. But the more they reject merit in favor of irrelevant external appearance, the more they will *have* to rely on tasks and processes.
When employees don’t understand - and, more importantly, don’t care enough to even try to understand - the reasoning behind their organization’s tasks and processes, then the best that can be hoped for is that they’re at least capable of following a set of step-by-step rules.
An intelligent, motivated employee, after learning how the business works and the goals behind the tasks, will be able to intelligently apply the rules and adjust them according to circumstances. But the last thing we want is an unintelligent, unmotivated drone adjusting the rules. Therefore, any vestiges of initiative must be thoroughly eradicated from such a workforce.
Customers, struggling with an AI-generated voice at the other end of the phone line, often quickly ask for a representative. Dealing with an unintelligent robot mindlessly following an if-then script and leading callers in circles is maddening. So, we’ll know we’re in trouble when customers start preferring the mindless robot to the human representatives.
".... All [bureaucracies] are led by decision-makers who do not bear the costs of their decisions." You might add that they also have a vested interest in expanding their empires.
I agree that merit should include character. The reality is that, in meritocracies, it typically doesn’t as capacity (IQ and executive function) is much easier to measure than character.
Having a bureaucracy too large for the available talent is a serious issue. It is clearly a problem for the Late Roman state, as I briefly note here: https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/downward-resilience.
My Darwinian explanation for the Great Silence is that advanced technology overwhelms species adaptations.
Quick side comment about Jane Jacobs - you unintentionally defame her as being an economist. [Says the fellow with an undergrad degree in the subject.] And her book The Nature of Economies is probably the best introduction to economics I've ever read. I think precisely because she doesn't hew to the standard discourse (from left or right) on the foundation of economics, but instead roots it in a naturalistic view. Much as she did with demolishing urban theory. She was a dilettante in both fields, naïve to the jargon and conceits, but brilliantly observant; thus she tends to be rejected by the priests in both. When you stress the social as emergent from the biological, you are working the same vein she did. She was an absolutely natural intellectual, a la Hoffer, not a product of credentialing.
Would it be fair to say that often such natural intellectuals greatest value comes from their ability to state or restate the obvious -- making plain and visible once again those truths or realities that we all know to be valid, but that too often are hidden or covered up with other BS?
Did economics misstep when they forgot their field initially was "political" economics, a social science, when they tried to be too scientific via mathematical modeling, thinking they could capture and understand the reasoning and direction of the 3 billion to 30 billion purchasing decisions that a population of 300 million makes every day?
Well there certainly is a freshness of perspective/approach with the natural intellectual, and they aren't writing to impress or convince other academics. Hoffer's book is surprisingly difficult to read despite it's slightness; you have to reflect on what he wrote and digest it. I guarantee no one reads through that in one sitting, as short as it is.
Perhaps I should call her “strikingly observant social commentator”.
Trenchant diagnosis. I find the essays increasingly compelling with each addition. Please keep them coming. And get that book published!
Ditto.
1) Thank you for bringing Walter Kirn to my attention. Have not read your Palladium reference yet, but it looks interesting. And how can anyone looking at his list of dysfunctional results (as presented above) not be able to win an argument to favor reality over cognitive dissonance and discombobulation?!
2) Your Note 3 caught my eye for some reason: "Purchase of positions seems obviously dysfunctional to us, but was a relatively information-efficient way of matching capacity to perform an office via willingness to purchase it (Allen, 2012)." Can you amplify on that? One part of me says someone who managed to obtain and retain wealth from their estate (even if on the backs of serfs and vassals) probably has some managerial skills worthy of a position of responsibility. If someone says to himself "I am pretty good with numbers and accounting to run this estate, so I can run the Exchequer" there may be validity in that view. But if there is really a power behind the throne, such as a spouse or effective estate manager, actually making things work, then his ego is probably bigger than his capacity. Do we moderns tend to reject the idea of purchasing positions as a decline in character, or thinking that capacity or expertise in one area does not automatically translate into abilities in other areas. From a free speech standpoint, we accept the work of lobbyists and promoters of various kinds, although we remain unhappy that excessive wealth can lead to power and influence violating "one man, one vote", distorting the representative aspects of republican governments.
3) Is there some element of management theory that addresses the optimal size for a management team or group, beyond which it begins to fall apart? I am thinking that the US military now has 300+ general officers, while I suppose we had maybe a few dozen during WWII, with a much bigger manpower and development/procurement responsibility. Some of that must reflect "grade inflation", similar to the bank teller being a deputy assistant executive vice president at the bank. And the Church managed to get by with 5 levels of hierarchy for centuries (even if now there may be a largish Vatican bureaucracy of cardinals and priests we see glimmers of but not the whole picture).
This paper describes the dynamics of purchase. http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/venality.pdf
Not aware of optimal size analysis in organisational theory, but it is not an area of expertise for me.
Well, then that makes you more than qualified for the Ministerial Office of Organisational Management and Control. (Although I have no idea just how much it will cost you :-) )
And from there it is only a short hop to the Exchequer, where your economic knowledge is probably far superior to most of the recent claimants to that position.
Ah yes, the curiosity of having more general officers now (with less than 1m active) than we did when we had 12 million souls in uniform. Not a matter of organizational theory at all, it is purely politics. GOs these days have offices and entourages and create government spending in a state/Congressional district; well given that bare fact, can you ever have too many of them? We should count our lucky stars that we aren't another order of magnitude up.
That isn't even taking into account the military pro-consuls we have under the Goldwater-Nichols act. No, we don't call them that though that is in fact what they are. State these days merely handles the formalities of foreign policy - the meat is chewed out in the National Security apparatus.
The key passage in the paper I refer to in my reply is:
“The outright sale of a public office has very strong incentive effects. Income from an office or a commission is generated in a variety of ways (fees, prizes, spoils of war), and an individual who earns a residual claimant income has a strong incentive to collect and otherwise earn his fees, and to do so in a cost minimizing fashion. Generally speaking, this is a benefit of sale. Income is higher when the clerk performs well or the army captain wins the battle. Higher incomes, in a competitive market for office sale, means the crown receives a higher price for the office when it is initially sold. Such a system self-selects quality individuals for the position. Individuals who fail to perform lose money, and are better off selling to the most efficient occupier of the post. Hence the sale of public office has the benefit of eliminating the measurement of qualified inputs and monitoring the output since the residual polices behavior.“
Yes, an interesting essay.
It appears the judiciary became professional the earliest, but not surprising if the aim is neutral justice without favor. I suppose the pain and harm from believing justice was not properly served would be greater than the feeling of being cheated in any normal market transaction, even the buying of an office where the seller had to power to renege on the deal, etc.
Hundreds to thousands of offices being available for sale or patronage is still pretty foreign to our modern thinking/experience with over weening bureaucracies. Clearly not a culture of "that government is best which governs least".
Plus different situations leading to incentives favoring sale in some cases and patronage in others. But I now gather that someone with real hustle could very very well for themselves in certain positions that they "owned".
Final thought for (my) evening: if we want to incentivize superior performance from our "public servants" perhaps we should require that they post a performance bond at the start. Then after 2, or 3 , or 5 years they are "somehow judged" as to how well they did. If not up to snuff they forfeit their bond. A definite "stick" to accompany their "carrot" of continued employment.
"somehow judged"
There are no meaningful performance metrics for a bureaucrat. I would be hesitant to even employ cost-savings metrics due to the ease with which they could end up a perverse incentive.
Yes, RC, that is rather curmudgeonly.
Perhaps it is easier to find meaningful metrics for the agency's responsibilities going outward, vs. responding to solicitations coming inward.
The best example I can think of right now (but I agree it is not an exact science):
We can gage that the border is or is not secure by how many people we assess have gotten through, the "plugging" of which is the outward responsibility of HLS, such that no entries are made without being controlled.
Conversely, how many of the legitimately allowed entrants are properly tracked as to their location, administrative status in court or elsewhere, deported for overstays or illegal activity, etc. becomes a measure of responding to incoming "forces" or stimuli.
And that would correspond to what metrics for the individuals in the agency? All measured under the same, or would there be different ones depending on the role of the employee?
A business (even one heavily bureaucratized as all large corporations are) has profit as ultimate metric; all the subsidiary ones in every department and for every individual don't matter if profit is tanking. Alas, there is no public corollary.
I may have been curt with my statement, but not facile. It is a real problem, even with your example. A good incentive can wreak real havoc if it isn't well aligned to what the organization needs to accomplish. We don't even have a political consensus on what (or who) has responsibility for border security, let alone dealing with the conflicting priorities arising from the political maelstrom in DC. The frontline disillusion of Border Patrol means nothing to the next three levels of management, let alone the appointee ranks.
I fully agree the private sector profit/loss criteria works in a big picture way, regardless of the qualities and performance of lower level employees, who may have helped or hindered achieving the end result.
I suspect we could dialog about this all night and not solve the issues :-).
As with Lorenzo, I have no special expertise in organizational theory or bureaucratic mgmt.
I do have some ideas - that might or might not survive exposure to reality. But a major element remains getting a suitably oriented Congress that will dismantle excessive agency scope and radically reform the Civil Service criteria and processes for scope, personnel, promotion, accountability, etc.
I am probably excessively optimistic that that will happen within my lifetime.
Thanks for your feedback.
So those of us struggling along in education are doubly screwed because our state overlords are both bureaucrats and academics. That would explain bloated administrations churning out "blueprint" after "mission statement" after "brief" saying all the same things in revolving jargon. Such a waste!
Another excellent bit of clarity - thanks again. Filtering through the many sharp points and apt descriptions of currents in play, I find myself matching personal experience point-by-point. FWIW my below-the-radar existence seems to square up consistently, so you’ re providing a valuable reality check and passing the tests. I’m a high school teacher in Los Angeles and the bits about burgeoning bureaucratization ring true.
Lorenzo, can you write more on effective non-meritocratic selection systems? Or have you written on this already?
I think Lorenzo may be asleep (he's in Australia) but he will be back in due course.
The best paper on the matter I know of is here: http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/venality.pdf
The place I have written about such at most length is here: https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/downward-resilience
"This effect is increased when bureaucratisation increases the number of people who do not bear the costs of their decisions, which increases the salience of self-referential status and social-leverage plays."
Thomas Sowell has an appropriate observation:
"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."
The U.S. military has reached out to the people they forced out for refusing the COVID vaccination to try to pull them back in. You can rest assured without the slightest hint of error on behalf of the brass that pushed them out, or that there was really anything wrong in how those folks were treated. There is hubris and then there is bureaucracy.
"The U.S. military has reached out to the people they forced out for refusing the COVID vaccination to try to pull them back in."
Apologies that I am linking CNN, but the title is enough to make the point:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/02/politics/us-military-covid-vaccine/index.html
And most are saying, “NO‼️”, because they understand that the psychopathic, globalist-aligned top brass intends to ship them out to be slaughtered on the fields of Ukraine or riddled with bullets in the underground tunnels of Gaza‼️
In other words, they won’t risk their lives in Predator Class wars for profit that have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the national security interests of the United States.
This will not change. Recruitment numbers will not bounce back until current Pentagon leadership is removed and severely punished for their TREASON against the nation.
Without fundamental top to bottom reform of all branches of the military, no loyal, patriotic American prospective soldier will ever again trust military leadership.
That may be true for some, maybe most of them (IDK?) But, then why did they sign up to begin with? It's not like "predator class wars" were just invented. But, if I had worked for any organization that treated me that way, I sure the hell would not go back to work there.
That is all very over-stated. No Western forces are being committed to Ukraine, that is really the point. And a Russian defeat in Ukraine is clearly in the general Western interest. (As an Australian eyeing Xi’s CCP regimes’s very “pushy” behaviour, I am firmly in favour of a Ukrainian victory: this is very much the bipartisan view in Australia, hence Australian being a significant donor to Ukraine. South Korea and Japan are clearly making very similar calculations.)
As for the Hamas-Israel War, that was set off by Hamas’s dash-cam progrom and it is pretty clear that most Arab governments hope that Israel can smash Hamas, whatever they may say publicly. The US’s military deployment’s are fairly clearly aimed at discouraging outside parties from intervening. (Though there being US hostages does provide a complicating factor.). That the leaders of both Hezbollah and Iran have given “great work Hamas, nothing to do with us” speeches suggest it is working.
Meanwhile, it looks like the Venezuelan regime, having disastrously looted its own economy, wants to have a go at looting Guyana’s. The New World disorder is not an encouraging time. A stable international order is something that is created, it is not inherent.
At one time, America took the position that events in our hemisphere mattered. Sadly, much stupidity was done in the name of progressivism and the current admin only acts against US interests. Guyana could become a significant issue; moreso if handled poorly or if China were to engage.
Interesting times.
To summarize: Meritocracy isn’t necessary for a polity to work. Patronage and purchase will suffice as long as character is valued and effective feedback loops are established and maintained. Meritocracy works, but only if character is included in the definition of meritocracy. Bureaucratization overwhelms functional systems, destroys feedback systems, and drives out or neuters merit. If bureaucratization is cloaked with the mantle of equity and social justice it is more destructive and harder to counter.
Very nicely summarised.
In essay 19, “Diversity Inclusion Equity as bureaucratic pathology,” you observed that a problem with bureaucracies is that they tend to focus on tasks and processes rather than on goals and outcomes. But the more they reject merit in favor of irrelevant external appearance, the more they will *have* to rely on tasks and processes.
When employees don’t understand - and, more importantly, don’t care enough to even try to understand - the reasoning behind their organization’s tasks and processes, then the best that can be hoped for is that they’re at least capable of following a set of step-by-step rules.
An intelligent, motivated employee, after learning how the business works and the goals behind the tasks, will be able to intelligently apply the rules and adjust them according to circumstances. But the last thing we want is an unintelligent, unmotivated drone adjusting the rules. Therefore, any vestiges of initiative must be thoroughly eradicated from such a workforce.
Customers, struggling with an AI-generated voice at the other end of the phone line, often quickly ask for a representative. Dealing with an unintelligent robot mindlessly following an if-then script and leading callers in circles is maddening. So, we’ll know we’re in trouble when customers start preferring the mindless robot to the human representatives.
Nicely observed.
".... All [bureaucracies] are led by decision-makers who do not bear the costs of their decisions." You might add that they also have a vested interest in expanding their empires.
Meritocracy!!?! Pshaw. Pshaw, I say. More like smerticocracy amirite? You know I’m right. The guy in the back, he knows!
Smerticocracy = Ostentatiously smart but not really? Something like midwit?