The Bureaucratic Mass Index
Once I started thinking about the brutalist design of bureaucracy, the more I started to see it everywhere around me.
Closest Point of Approach is about helping decision makers predict bureaucratic action. The more of these cases we see, the better our pattern recognition becomes.
He Loves Speed, Hates Bureaucracy and Told Ferrari: Go Faster
The urge to regulate is the high-fructose-corn-syrup of the modern organization.
“For a company originally built to race cars, this was something close to sacrilege. The problem, he discovered, was that Ferrari was being weighed down by its “bureaucratic mass index,” his name for the excess layers of an organization. The only solution was one that would make Ferrari leaner and faster.
““When the environmental condition is changing at high speed,” Vigna says, “you need to have a team that is able to adapt at high speed.”“
The Repo Market Exodus: Part II
The regulatory push to centralize repo trading is going to have restrictive consequences for US Treasury trading, even as the US national debt explodes. That’s a bold move, Cotton.
“Regardless, with the centrally cleared era looming, monetary leaders will have outlawed virtually all uncleared repo activity of leveraged players. Remove that privilege, in exchange for less systemic risk, and the market reduces its ability to remove mispricings in the world’s most systemically important debt market. What does this look like in practice, and what will be the resolution?”
Beyond Reform: The Limits of the New Labor Bureaucracy
Even unions want to fight bureaucracy because it acts to delay the ineluctable achievement of a workers’ utopia.
“Indeed, if the history of U.S. labor has taught us anything, it is that the state (including its allies in the bureaucracies of the unions and the social movements) will do everything it can to contain, co-opt, and otherwise weaken the power of working people wherever it develops. Replacing these bureaucrats with newer, slightly more progressive leaders will not solve this problem; and believing that we can reform our way out of this dilemma is a dangerous illusion. Furthermore, though there has been a decided and very positive uptick in new unionization, as Eric Blanc has shown, unionization rates are still very low, and we will not be able to solve this problem by simply increasing union membership. That’s why we need to focus on building unions that can fight for and alongside the whole class, including the nonunionized and the unemployed, against all forms of oppression and exploitation.“
Regulators Restart Bid to Curb Bonus Pay on Wall Street
Implementing this kind of mechanism should be renamed the “Opacity in Shadow Finance Act.”
“Banking regulators are planning to revive a proposal that would require big banks to defer compensation for executives and take back more of their bonuses if losses pile up, according to people familiar with the matter.“
Families of NYC subway strike victims say bureaucracy is compounding their grief
This is inexcusable even if it is explainable.
“An attorney who has represented the families of subway strike victims since the 1990s said he feels the MTA is intentionally stonewalling more and more people in an attempt to avoid litigation.
“Lately, I've been finding that both the police department and the transit authority want long extensions of time to gather this information — 60 business days, 90 business days,” said lawyer Alan Shapey. “Then they ask for further extensions and it just seems to be inordinate to me.””
The Latest Plan to Exacerbate California’s Housing Crisis
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different outcomes.
“California lawmakers have passed more than 100 laws to spur the construction of additional housing since 2017, yet they have failed to produce the promised construction boom that would drive down home prices. Many of the new laws have done the opposite, undermining the professed goals of affordable-housing champions.
Through their decisions and actions, institutional investors have been telling lawmakers that the way to ameliorate the affordable-housing crisis is to eliminate burdensome restrictions on home building and rehabilitation of existing properties, and to strengthen private-property rights.
Progressive California politicians say they want to restrict corporate investment in single-family rental markets because they think doing so would help everyday renters and home buyers. Instead, their proposals would force financial capital out, reduce the future stock of rental housing and increase rental prices. That isn’t an idea California should export.”