A commenter pointed to Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
The first group wants to achieve something. The second group is concerned with status, as individuals within the organization and to some degree with the status of the organization itself.
As organizations age, the tendency is for the achievers to lose power and for the status-seekers to gain power.
Along similar lines, Number One Pick writes,
When Zvi asserts an opinion, he has only one thing he’s optimizing for – being right – and he does it well.
When the Director of the CDC asserts an opinion, she has to optimize for two things – being right, and keeping power. If she doesn’t optimize for the second, she gets replaced as CDC Director by someone who does. That means she’s trying to solve a harder problem than Zvi is, and it makes sense that sometimes, despite having more resources than Zvi, she does worse at it.
“As organizations age…”
As organizations age there is less rapid and direct feedback between achieving objectives and the overall status of the organization.
The CDC failed miserably in this pandemic, but amongst many it rose in status.
Meanwhile, if you had a healthcare startup working on a vaccine, it either worked or it didn’t. If it didn’t you started with zero status and you ended with zero status (maybe even less, since before you “coulda been a contender”).
I think its more accurate to state that organizations aim to increase the organizations status, but the conditions of the market define how that’s done. Capitalism is primarily about having firms that are bad at achieving a specific objective, get customers to pay more outputs then you paid for inputs, go out of business. It is agnostic about the status games within organizations, so long as they don’t damage output > input. When either the value of your output isn’t threatened by competitors or its purchase is required by law, it becomes very easy to have inefficient inputs.
“and they’re handling it as well as they can under the circumstances.”
That is debatable. Given the level of screw up, and how some have done better than others, perhaps its *too charitable*. Cancel culture may not be charitable enough, but at some point you are screwing up too big one something too important and charity itself is a sin.
“and appointing Zvi as CDC Director would use up so much of that slack that he couldn’t do other equally useful things later without becoming ineffective and likely to lose reelection.”
This also seems like a highly debatable assertion. People really want the pandemic to be managed well. There is a huge demand for effectiveness here, and huge rewards for effective action. Sure some people might complain at first about certain actions, but if there are real results people are going to notice and reward them. If Biden isn’t smart or brave enough to realize he needs to weather manageable disagreement in the short term to achieve meaningful objectives, why even elect him? It would be like LKY saying “I read polls and do exactly what they say with no critical judgement at all.” The PAP would have lost power a long time ago if they did that. There are in fact individuals in the political arena capable of understanding these tradeoffs and showing some common sense and bravery. De Santis took a lot of shit from the NYTimes for how he managed the pandemic, and I don’t see him getting replaced.
What I read in this post is a lot of cowardice. “Opposing this massively evil and destructive thing would be slightly inconvenient for me, so I don’t want to. It’s easier to rationalize that cowardice if I claim that nobody in my place would be allowed to be brave anyway, rather then just admitting that’s likely a biased assessment of the real situational trade offs.”
Look, I’m a coward too, but I admit it. I’m pretty forthright with my actions, why I take them, what I think could realistically be accomplished if I acted differently. I don’t pretend about who I am. If you want to be coward go ahead, but own up to it. Even Jesus only asked the sinner to admit he was a sinner first.
“Compared to the median person who disagrees with the experts, the experts look pretty good.”
Again, this is debatable. It’s not clear to me that the “expert” opinion was better then the median opinion, which I would summarize as, “virus is really but in a lot of ways just a very bad version of the flu. old people should be more cautious but a lot of people in households that are healthy and young should be allowed to get on in life. closing schools is dumb as shit. I’m going to try to avoid risky activities for the week leading up to visiting grandma and maybe get a test before Christmas but I’m not going to stop seeing my loved ones at the holiday”
Or a million other things. Why the hell are the lockers at the pool I just went to closed? The paper says to “prevent coronavirus”. How does not letting people use lockers prevent the coronavirus? A lady came into the locker room bathroom where eI need to change my kids to spray it down with cleaning solution which has to be done every hour on the hour. But it doesn’t spread on surfaces. I get to the pool early because nobody has been in the family locker room breathing all over the place. Now this women is releasing all her airborne germs in there for five minutes right before I have to go into that enclosed space to spend a bunch of time getting my kid out of their wet bathing suit. How the hell does that help? Some “expert” that even goddamn knows it doesn’t transmit on surfaces required that girl by law to clean the damn bathroom and breath her germs all over. Yes, the median persons opinion is better then that! Yes, I’m glad the political process allowed people like De Santis to overrule the experts. This isn’t hard people. Literally every damn day I see examples of the median person being smarter than the experts.
Median person opinion, give the vaccine to the old first. Poll after poll shows this.
Expert opinion, waste it on young healthy people for political and ideological reasons.
THAT IS LITERALLY THE MOST IMPORTANT CHOICE OUR SOCITY IS MAKING RIGHT NOW BY AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE.
Common man gets it right, expert gets it wrong. Does this dude have eyes? Can he not see this shit? Is his technocrat class consciousness that fucking honed.
“Up until the moment the shelter-in-place order dropped, I kept hearing stories of parents trying to pull their kids out of public school, only to get told that their unfounded virophobia didn’t matter and their children would be given failing grades if they didn’t attend. The experts successfully swooped in and saved us from all of that, figuring out which way the wind was blowing only two weeks later than competent amateurs. This was a useful service. Without the experts, things would have stayed open forever.”
The experts were the ones telling parent their children would be failed. They were the ones that opposed travel restrictions.
I remember that week that the stay at home order happened. I remember arguing with my parents to not go out and to wear a mask, and them telling me that the news said I was crazy. Then the NBA cancelled a game because of a COVID test, and the next day the cascade began. The experts didn’t do that. The CDC didn’t save us from one damn thing. The fucking NBA did. They did it because they were afraid of personal liability.
“At one point we tried a very simple best-person-picking procedure that really should have worked and ended up choosing Donald Trump as the best person. ”
Donald Trump got my parents the vaccine. Biden called them racists. I’d say we did just fine.
“But it almost always gets someone in the top 50%, sometimes the top 25%. ”
I disagree. The response to this pandemic was really really really bad. It was bad even compared to the kind of pandemic responses our society has put forward in the past. There are too many WTF moments to claims “which is the best of all *possible* worlds”, with the *possible* doing way more work than it deserves credit for. If you have a cartoonist hatred of Trump and the deplorables and the median person, then you think the response is top 50%. If you don’t, you think its way “below replacement” as they say in saber metrics.
“The first group wants to achieve something. The second group is concerned with status, as individuals within the organization and to some degree with the status of the organization itself.”
And technocrats are in which group?
In both. But, on average, their concern with achievement probably declines and their concern with status probably increases the longer they are there (and when they begin employment, they may find that the culture of the organization is more oriented to achievement or status).
Technocrats, and most employees, are split on how much achievement vs how much organization domination / butt kissing / career.
the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions
Writing the rules and controlling promotion – this is how the colleges have been discriminating against Republicans, Christians, capitalists.
I will add something else.
When a person browses the WebMD entry on aspirin, they don’t then go “OMG aspirin is so dangerous I won’t take it for my headache.” They take what they find useful and discard the rest.
When the CDC decides that people can’t buy $5 at instant at home tests, people don’t have the option of ignoring such an obviously bad decision.
The CDC has power, and when it gets it wrong it has the power to impose that on millions. WebMD has no power. Therefore, if they are going to wield that level of power, the CDC has to be held to a higher standard.
Sorry, Scott is somewhat off-base with this one. It’s a very seductive line which seems obvious, well, of course people in the political arena have to worry about what it takes to retain their positions and that this tends to distort their behaviors and decisions.
But ‘optimize’ makes it seem like this concern is both severe and continuously pressing in its salience, and that it requires a lot of distortion from what would otherwise be wiser decision-making.
The error here is to underestimate a structural factor in modern organizations – not just USG and not even just governments – which is that the incumbency advantage has continued to increase since WWII, leading to simply incredible levels of personnel stability and across many contexts and domains, evidenced by the gradual increase in average age even after correcting for demographics, and also by the fact that when you research the history of many organizations it’s amazing that the same few names just keep coming up over and over. Names of people who, I must emphasize as strongly as I can, are only rarely heroic talents and savvy political operators, and much more often mediocrities on both counts, who managed to get themselves into positions which have been gradually but increasingly structurally insulated from these kinds of stressful distruptions, as if they are enjoying something approaching academic or judicial ‘tenure’. (Indeed, in USG, after three years of civil service, one is so hard to fire that it’s actually called ‘tenure’.)
The real tragedy is not that people in these positions feel pressure to deviate from their preferred and wiser courses of action, it’s that, just like many academics with tenure, they don’t seem to show much interest in wanting to use their protections and incumbency advantages as a shield to defend themselves when they take risks to try to do the right things.
Scott’s narrative tends to reduce blame and level of culpability, but I’m telling you, if you ever spend time around some of these people, you would see that, on the contrary, we should be raising it.
Those incumbency rates don’t increase spontaneously. This very structural factor, this process of increasing structural insulation from stressful disruptions, isn’t it driven by the desire to not lose stressful competitions? If one can no longer be removed from one’s position in such a competition, one’s as good as won. Also, I think Scott’s analysis of tenure misses key incentives, which explain at least some of what’s going on, but that needs more CPU time than I have atm.
It’s complicated and I concede I haven’t quite figured it all out to my satisfaction. We start with an observation and notice a gradual but big change, then we recognize the pattern poses a puzzle that will take some more investigation and careful study to solve. But I’m convinced it’s a big deal that is under-recognized, and is probably something I’ll explore here in the comments in the coming months.
However, let me begin by saying that “isn’t it driven by the desire to not lose stressful competitions” is, while of course true in the broad sense, somewhat misleading in this particular case.
In particular, I believe many of the kind of people I’m talking about do not have have it takes to translate that desire into insulation in their own particular cases, and that instead they are more like windfall beneficiaries of structural accretions that were advanced by other parties in other cases and for other purposes, and which ended up contributing to this phenomenon in a broad, generalized way.
To put it more simply, they were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, just when – for reasons that had nothing to do with their own savvy, ‘optimization for power’, or personal actions or maneuvers – it became much, much harder to replace incumbents. Fauci is 80 years old and has been in the same position for 36 years, and from what I’ve looked at so far, that seems consistent with about when the rot really began to set in.
Now, from a dynamic point of view, a sudden shift in conditions of legal and social climate can be a windfall to one generation of lucky individuals who did little to ‘earn’ or ‘grab for’ it, but when it becomes the new static status quo, the new generation will be full of people who are indeed optimizing for power given the new rules of the new game. I know these people – they will be ruining our lives in due course.
Some people will criticize the point made by Hayek in The Road To Serfdom that “the worst rise to the top” when looking at the top positions in USG bureaucracy, saying that many of these people seem motivated, ethical, and talented. They don’t appreciate that a particular range of cohorts was like “The Class The Stars Fell On”, and that when we finally get a little generational turnover through the typical biological solution to these problems, they will have some nasty surprises among which will be to discover themselves updating their opinion their Hayek’s prophecy. Too late though.
In this context, I invite you to consider Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics:
(1) Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
(2) Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
(3) The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
In regard to (3), John Derbyshire noted that sometimes an organization actually is run by a cabal of its enemies. He was thinking of the postwar British Secret Service, and maybe in the US, the FBI and CIA infiltrated by Russian agents. Closer to home and more recently, a great deal of the federal bureaucracy was controlled by a cabal of the enemies of the elected president.
John Moore thinks the third law is almost right; it should read “assume that it is controlled by a cabal of the enemies of the stated purpose of that bureaucracy.”
I would also add some of Parkinson’s Laws. Notably, bureaucrats want to multiply subordinates, not rivals.
Conquest’s Laws are entertaining, silly, and wrong. They’re like Murphy’s Law.
They should not be taken seriously.
“Did you two visit the same reality?” – My own experience is that if they are entertaining it is in the manner of “funny ’cause it’s true”, and the accuracy (and thus wisdom and insight) of all three laws is reaffirmed daily in my own lived experience. But I’m open-minded about it if you can explain to me where you’re coming from.
They are much less correct, especially #3, for profit oriented organizations that really care about profits.
This excludes academia, gov’t, NGOs, think tanks, and possibly media today.
I’d agree that #3 seems to be the weakest of them as there are many counterexamples.
Nevertheless, #1 and #2 are quite strong in my experience.
“But someone else will decide to always trust *their* friend, a guy in a MAGA cap who says coronavirus is fake and Dr. Fauci is a Satanist. Compared to the median person who disagrees with the experts, the experts look pretty good.”
I’m that guy in the MAGA hat. Say what you will, but I’m pretty sure I have a consistently better record than Cuomo and the NY experts on the virus. I mean, didn’t Fauci laud Cuomo for his efforts?
As much as I dig Scott Alexander (maybe *because* I dig him), it genuinely troubles me that he’s failed to update on covid. If he had written that post 10 months ago, fine – but we’ve had so much data come in since then!
Same with Megan McArdle, one of my favorite bloggers ever :(. And basically every other smart person I know or read 🙁
I personally detest Trump, so I could never stomach a MAGA hat myself. But it’s clear to me he was closer to correct on covid than nearly everyone in my intellectual tribe.
For me, the most troubling part with some of the bloggers you mentioned was their complete and total *unwillingness* to engage with opposing viewpoints. The “science” was delivered from on high back in March and anyone that disagreed with it attained kook status. Well, if I get to have kook status, then I’m gonna go all in, including with my MAGA hat. And now, here we are nearly a year later and I’m still seeing the same tired arguments.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I won’t hold your never Trumpism against you – there was a lot to dislike.
Some tech companies accumulated enormous power that could be wielded for political purposes. That was generally a completely unexpected development. Ten years ago, almost no one saw that happening, and people who went into the tech industry didn’t go in for reasons of political power. But it happened. That power was just sitting there, and it attracts large numbers of people who seek to wield and control it. We see a similar dynamic in academia.
Many companies, both tech companies and not, never accumulate vast political power and leverage, and there isn’t an issue. A restaurant might run for 100 years and be reasonably successful, without being a giant political entity.
The moral of the story isn’t that age attracts power hungry status seekers. It’s that power attracts power hungry status seekers. And power just sitting there, that wasn’t planned on, will attract those that seek to exploit it.
“The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization. The first group wants to achieve something. The second group is concerned with status, as individuals within the organization and to some degree with the status of the organization itself. As organizations age, the tendency is for the achievers to lose power and for the status-seekers to gain power.”
To be sure, the private sector is not immune from such suboptimal behavior, even in relatively small, purportedly profit-maximizing organizations as large as GE, as small as a 15-person shop, and any size in between. I have observed such “king of the mountain” games in organizations of all sizes.
I agree, but the advantage the private sector has is that these entities still need to make money. If the status seekers can’t manage their business fairly well, it will decline and disappear.
I think you’ve just articulated the causes of the term ‘office politics’ – the shorthand used to describe this dynamic and how it turns to manifest itself into actions/behavior.
I would be interested in reading what you’d might write about how a third group fits into things: those that are tasked to measure. The ‘KPI folks’ in an organization who try like heck to apply analytics used in manufacturing, to service levels where quality is much much more murky and less straight forward. I haven’t worked for an organization yet who could find the meaningful things to measure. They opt, instead, for using the data that is the most readily available and let it be the main driver. The meaningful things get short shrift and efforts for true improvement not seized upon.
Tech founders have written about how different types of people are attracted to their companies at different phases. The type of expert described by your absurdly verbose #1 pick, someone who is good in an emergency, bears more resemblance to someone at a startup, not someone at a larger, older organization. The problem is that startup-type people get bored and leave, so the people that are left have to build a sustainable organization without them.
Age and size are big problems for private sector companies. Government organizations have the added problems of capture, looting, diffused power, insensitivity to achieving stated goals, and sensitivity to voter opinion.
I wouldn’t expect people at a large, old, government organization to be better than smart amateurs. A possible exception would be if the org had exclusive access to crucial data.
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/02/07/why-i-am-not-in-charge/
is Zvi’s response to Scott, and one I think is considerably more correct, at least in his evaluation of the motivations of bureaucrats.