Along Came Polly

The wages of bureaucracy is death and mediocrity.

We all want to be safe. Who doesn’t want to be safe?

I think that’s the presumption behind a lot of bureaucratic policy. Every one of these purports to make us marginally safer. Think of those complicated Labor Department bulletins near the photocopier or the breakroom coffee machine.

There are two problems with this mentality.

One, it ignores tradeoffs. Everything today seems to ignore tradeoffs. We constantly seek balance between safety and treasure, between risk and reward. Infinite safety would come at the expense of any chance of reward. Sitting at home on your couch without moving? Safe. The chance that you’ll meet your future husband, or make some money, or write something interesting, or cure cancer? Or anything. Zero.

Why does so much of public discourse today ignore tradeoffs? Modern Monetary Theory says we can print money (as a proxy for resources) out of thin air, ad infinitum. The sophistry behind this reminds me of the Indian “guru” who says he can conjure diamonds out of thin air for his acolytes, particularly his, ahem, wealthier ones. We can bask in the warmth of collectivism, but the people on the bottom rung will freeze to death, surrounded by piles of uncollected garbage and dirty ice. We must cut fossil fuel emissions to save the planet; there is no mention of the costs this imposes on working people.

Two, it’s not true that more rules make us safer. Sometimes more rules make things more dangerous. Sometimes more rules bring the danger to us.

Here’s a great tweet from maritime expert, John Konrad:

‘I wrote a book on the BP oil disaster …

‘When the Deepwater Horizon explosion dominated Twitter for months, the narrative was simple: BP cut corners on safety.

‘That story was comforting. It was also wrong. Dead wrong.

‘The disaster wasn’t caused by too little safety.

‘It was caused by safetyism.

‘Before the explosion, HR and HSE departments overwhelmingly filled with women who never worked a dangerous job in their life became obsessed with eliminating all injuries offshore. Not major hazards. Not catastrophic risk. ALL injuries, even minor cuts & bruises.

‘Tens of millions of dollars. Thousands of hours of paperwork. Endless training modules.

‘Everyone,from dishwasher to captain, was empowered to shut down a drilling operation costing millions per day to prevent a sprained ankle.

‘Meanwhile, people with deep technical expertise, guys who actually understood blowout risk, were sidelined or fired for saying the obvious:

‘That HR induced exhaustion causes accidents.

‘That drowning crews in paperwork makes them miss real danger.

‘That spending money on back-injury training means less money preventing explosions.

‘… HR and Safety became powerful, organized, coordinated via expensive software, mobile & completely detached from reality.

‘One crewman reported a serious onboard fire that nearly killed someone. Nothing happened for weeks. When he kept pushing a manager told him to STFU.

‘He called HR to report the “verbal abuse.” Within hours, an executive helicopter full of HR Quick Reaction Team launched from Houston. They didn’t investigate the fire.

‘They investigated him, the guy who called HR.

‘Their conclusion? The man reporting the fire was “repeatedly harassing the crew to report the fire.”

‘He was fired. A company-wide HR memo publicly shamed him.

‘All in the name of “safety.”

‘Here’s the truth they refused to accept: offshore drilling is dangerous. You cannot extract tens of millions of barrels of oil without injuries & yes, sometimes death.

‘…

‘But HR didn’t eliminate injuries offshore. They just reclassified them for statistics, exhausted the workforce, and made people afraid to report real problems setting the stage for a major explosion …

‘The hard truth is this:

‘Safetyism caused the BP explosion.

‘Safetyism has killed millions.’

This example is so perfect it seems invented. Human Resources (HR) and HSE (health, safety, and environment) bureaucracies at BP created the conditions for the blowout that killed people, caused billions of dollars in environmental damage with massive downstream consequences, and almost took down the whole company.

It’s everywhere. It’s pervasive. Here’s a definition from Greg Lukanioff and Jonathan Haidt of Safetyism (in an educational context):

‘Safetyism is the cult of safety–an obsession with eliminating threats (both real and imagined) to the point at which people become unwilling to make reasonable trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns. Safetyism deprives young people of the experiences that their antifragile minds need, thereby making them more fragile, anxious, and prone to see themselves as victims.’

There’s that word again: tradeoffs.

The people who promulgate these rules don’t consider the tradeoffs for various reasons. They may not understand the technical considerations, as in BP. They may think they’re doing the right thing by protecting the weak, but they’re substituting their judgment for that of the protected (or their guardians). In education, shouldn’t these questions be determined by parents? More basically, they may be advocating for their own interests. Not bringing any economic value to the table, these institutional busybodies insert themselves into conversations in which they do not belong to obtain power and status.

The people making these rules to make everything safer do not care what happens to their charges. Not really.

This is the HRification of everything. The purpose of a system is what it does. The system gives people power and status who shouldn’t have power and status; it’s not about improving outcomes.

Their behavior is tied to empathy, or at least that is how they justify it. Where is your compassion, man, if you can see suffering and not try to do something about it?

Well, there are various kinds of suffering. We live in a game of suffering whack-a-mole.

Look at New York City in the wintertime. For multiple mayors, the designated policy of the City was to force the homeless into shelters in the cold, even if they didn’t want to go. The previous mayors placed a great weight on keeping homeless New Yorkers alive.

This mayor did away with the rule. As of this writing, sixteen of them have died from exposure. Apparently, his empathy for the homeless extended to imagining what it would be like to have someone tell him what to do (ironically). His primary concern for them was to give them the freedom to choose. Unfortunately, many of them are mentally ill and incapable of making the rational choice. So they froze to death on the streets.

The warmth of collectivism was insufficient to sustain them.

The State of California has thrown billions at their homelessness problem and it seems to have only worsened. Of course, lots of people at politically-connected non-governmental organizations, so-called, have made a ton of money.

T.S. Eliot speaks to the moment.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour.
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Our prediction is that this will continue until it cannot. Cut-throat competition, debt crises, and disruptive migration will create conditions in which HR’s dominance is unsustainable. The bureaucratic excesses of the past decades will be seen as untenable luxuries. Only then can the Hollow Men be made to withdraw.

This could come sooner than we think.