Tales in Bureaucracy III

Two years ago, I posted Tales in Bureaucracy and Tales in Bureacracy II - If you weren't reading me back then, you might want to read those first. Those stories got me thinking, what is it about bureaucracy that makes it both so frustrating and funny at the same time? What are the things that bureaucracies have in common, that lead to these kinds of stories?

I came up with two broad themes:

1. Overly strict adherence to procedures

Standard procedures are one of the strengths of bureaucracy, and one of the reasons we have it. People who have expertise develop procedures for others to follow, and a large organization can learn what goes wrong over time and evolve the rules. The procedures that results can, in some sense, have more knowledge built in over time than any one person following them could have. It takes human judgement to know when the rules shouldn't apply, but human judgement can itself be faulty, so people are reluctant to use it.

When I was in high school, I often spent my evenings hanging out at the Coolidge Corner Theater, where several of my friends worked. Lots of free, weird movies, and more time with my friends when they were idle between bursts of busy. I remember one manager, Derek, who was rather... less loose than the rest, though still a nice guy.

One evening, a couple walked in to check the movie schedule, at a time when both theaters were in the middle of showings - which the theaters were filled with people, but there was nobody in the lobby or by the entrance doors, other than a couple of employees and me. The couple got the information they wanted, and began to walk out. As they were opening the doors, Derek noticed they were about to exit through the "enter" doors - and beckoned them back and and asked them to go around a short barrier and over to the "exit" doors. Which were directly next to the "enter" doors, and let out onto exactly the same space.

As they passed through the exit, the woman turned back and said to Derek, "you have the mind of a true bureaucrat."

2. Authority rests with people too far removed from the front lines

I suppose this is one way organizations have of preventing people from using their judgement, just in case they mis-use it.

One summer in college, there was a convenience store I passed most every day between campus and the apartment I was subletting. I would often stop and get a Ben & Jerry's "Bluberry Cheesecake" frozen yogurt. Until they stopped stocking it. I'd check, and there would be none, and I'd go home dissatisfied.

After a few weeks of this, one afternoon I was walking home when I saw a Ben & Jerry's truck outside the store. Ahah! I went in, and there was the Ben & Jerry's guy, stocking the shelves. I asked him if he had any Blueberry Cheesecake, and why hadn't it been there for weeks, and he said that yes, he had it, but the store had stopped authorizing them to stock any "frozen yogurt product". He couldn't unload any of it unless the store asked him to. So I went to the guy at the counter, and asked him to request the Ben & Jerry's guy stock some Blueberry Cheesecake. Sorry, he said, he wasn't authorized to allow them to stock anything management hadn't requested. "Could you ask him to unload just one, and then I'll buy it right now?" Nope, he couldn't do that.

The Ben & Jerry's guy heard this exchange, and beckoned me over to tell me his secret plan. When he was done stocking the shelves, I met him at the back of his truck to complete the clandestine ice cream deal.

Got any stories of your own to illustrate these two themes? Or some new themes to suggest?

the success of conservative economic policy

Now this is funny.

The Economic Policy Institute's "economic snapshot" for this week, "Sluggish private job growth indicates failure of tax cuts", looks at whether the Bush tax cuts have led to lots of new jobs being created. Remember, those tax cuts were supposed to pull us out of recession (well, first they were gonna be returning part of the surplus the government had too much of, and then they were going to prevent us from going into recession, and then they were gonna pull us out of recession).

When job "recovery" first started in 2004, there were many months in which we had job "growth" that was actually based entirely on new public sector jobs. Obviously, tax cuts don't create new public sector jobs. But more recently, in 2005, we started consistently getting more pivate sector jobs each month. Could the tax cuts have led to that?

Now, I remember when those tax cuts were first proposed, a lot of people looked at how much money the government was giving up, how many jobs they projected would be created, and came to the correct conclusion that the government could create a lot more jobs simply by using that money to hire people. But of course, conservatives don't like that sort of economy, based on government spending. It's all about free enterprise and the private sector.

Except... that's what they did. In addition to giving up gobs of money through tax cuts (mostly money held by wealthy people), the Republicans increased both defense spending and non-defense discretionary spending by huge amounts. Clearly, when the government spends a lot of money, it generates jobs. If they're buying a bunch of new tanks and personnel carriers, for example, well, GM or Ford is gonna get a lot of business, and hire people to make those vehicles. And so on. So EPI got estimates from the government about how many new jobs were likely created by this spending since 2001, and compared it to overall job growth:

New jobs resulting from increased defense spending: 1.495 million
New jobs resulting from new non-defense discretionary spending: 1.325 million
... new jobs since 2001 as a result of government spending: 2.82 million
Total new jobs created in the private sector since 2001: 2.01 million

In other words, if it weren't for increased government spending, we'd actually have fewer private sector jobs today than we did in 2001! And that's not even adjusting for the growth of the population (we need an average of 150K new jobs per month to keep up).

I don't find anything inherently wrong with that. Business goes through cycles, and there are years when the government has to step in and spend to make up the difference, until the next up cycle. But tax cuts? Because of the tax cuts, the government has had to depend very heavily on borrowing - possible in large part because China has been buying up gobs of US debt.

Or, economist Max Sawicky puts it,

"The upshot is that the triumph of Republican-conservatarian economic policy consists of an expansion of government jobs financed by loans from the Communist Peoples Republic of China."

Rabit Hole Day

I haven't posted anything today that I don't believe is real in this world. But I haven't ignored Rabbit Hole Day. If you're one of my regular readers, you may already noticed that my LJ went down the rabbit hole today. What did I do?

(comments temporarily screened - a prize for whoever guesses before I unscreen?)

(unscreened: five winners, interestingly, all female. now what's the prize? hmmm)