Regardless of private or public, left- or right-wing, bureaucracy begets more bureaucracy. Like a ratcheting effect.
Complaints about bureaucracy is (at least) as old as written history. You may have seen yesterday's frontpage story "The Collapse of Complex Societies (Book Review)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7207348
Another interesting analysis (for us geeks) is the "complexity catastrophe" described in the book Design Rules: The Power of Modularity. TLDR: Dependencies eventually get so tangled that the cost of change outweighes the expected benefit, and a system which can no longer adapt to the changing world eventually fails outright.
Exploding overhead also happened in education, both K-12 and higher ed. And probably every other mature domain worth examining, if we bothered to look.
Seeing Like a State (James Scott), Bullshit Jobs (David Graeber) and Design Rules (Baldwin, Clark) all address complexity in their own way.
As a geek, I think "path dependent technical debt". For us, there's little to no incentive to cleanup, and certainly no reward, even though everyone moans about it nonstop.
The only notion I have is that, like reducing technical debt, fighting admin overhead (expanding bureaucracy) requires constant effort and investment, that no one is willing to make.
I (greedily) welcome a more optimistic take on this problem, if any one has some ideas. Please.
Regardless of private or public, left- or right-wing, bureaucracy begets more bureaucracy. Like a ratcheting effect.
Complaints about bureaucracy is (at least) as old as written history. You may have seen yesterday's frontpage story "The Collapse of Complex Societies (Book Review)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7207348
Another interesting analysis (for us geeks) is the "complexity catastrophe" described in the book Design Rules: The Power of Modularity. TLDR: Dependencies eventually get so tangled that the cost of change outweighes the expected benefit, and a system which can no longer adapt to the changing world eventually fails outright.
Exploding overhead also happened in education, both K-12 and higher ed. And probably every other mature domain worth examining, if we bothered to look.
Seeing Like a State (James Scott), Bullshit Jobs (David Graeber) and Design Rules (Baldwin, Clark) all address complexity in their own way.
As a geek, I think "path dependent technical debt". For us, there's little to no incentive to cleanup, and certainly no reward, even though everyone moans about it nonstop.
The only notion I have is that, like reducing technical debt, fighting admin overhead (expanding bureaucracy) requires constant effort and investment, that no one is willing to make.
I (greedily) welcome a more optimistic take on this problem, if any one has some ideas. Please.