It might be a controversial take, sure, but the linked article/post makes a pretty thoughtful case for the benefits of having functional state capacity vs. outsourcing or just not having it
Bureaucracy is one of those things that people like to bash, but don’t really spend much time considering what it is or what it’s meant for.
“Bureaucracy is when stupid form” is a superficial understanding of an organizational structure intended to:
- mirror the dominant governing structure, so everyone has a shared frame of reference for how decisions get made
- help keep authority is tied to a position/role rather than to an individual to reduce instances of nepotism and favoritism
- standardize oversight structures so there’s a clear accountability chain
- champion expertise so there are people who comprehend important peripheral aspects of a discipline/profession/industry that can cause compounding downstream issues
There are certainly poorly run, poorly organized, and intentionally misused bureaucracies. And we all have nightmare stories of getting bound up in procedural hell. But organizational alternatives for large, complex organizations usually end up being less efficient and more convoluted while also being less effective.
The issue has always been reduction of red tape and corruption and then appropriate funding not whether bureaucracy should exist at all. Glad to some movement away from generalized “bureaucracy bad” takes on the matter.
Why did they use a still from ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’?
Well it’s a clear example.of bureaucracy tbh. And it’s funny specially with those trophies back there.
This is absolutely why infrastructure costs so much in the US.
Enforcing environmental regulation via judicialized procedural review has had devastating consequences on America’s ability to build the thing we need. Housing projects are routinely held up by NIMBYs using environmental review laws to sue developers, often under the most ridiculous of pretexts
The other side to this is that it only protects the people wealthy, organized and well connected enough to sue in the first place. This incentives developers to target lower income rental areas to get around this friction. Don’t want to pick a fight with all the nimbys in the affluent neighborhood, just build your luxury apartment complex in the poor rental neighborhood, where the average person doesn’t even know their councilman, much less that there’s gonna be a town hall on whether to build this gentrifying complex that will probably increase your rent. You don’t even have to pay attention to the environmental toll then, what’re they going to do, sue with all their money going to rent and necessities? The landlords, who do have money, don’t give a shit about the long term health of their tenants and don’t live there so they won’t do anything either.
It took too long to even try to support what positives bureaucrats are meant to bring, then it ended up being something about courts shouldnt be involved in environmental regulation? I gave up after that.
The TLDR is that for almost any given thing we want the government to do, it’s cheaper and more efficient to hire government workers to do it than to hire contractors and nonprofits. The author generalized this conclusion from studies finding a correlation between higher quality dept of transport employees and lower department costs. Makes sense to me.
This take of all government employees being bureaucrats is… oversimple at best. In much the same way that I don’t consider the military servicemembers to be bureaucrats.
You’re right of course, this article specifically talks about civil servants (i.e. bureaucrats) and not other government employees like elected officials or military service members.
