Stupid Is as Stupid Does
Separating direction from outcomes is a mistake.
Biden, Trump and the Meaning of Stupidity
Stupid people gain nothing while obliging others to take a loss.
Sounds like strategy consultants?
Or, maybe, this smacks of the Rob Henderson good about luxury beliefs: beliefs that confer status on the upper class while inflicting costs on the lower class. You know? Like “Defund the police.”
Is bureaucracy stupid by definition?
‘The chief thing to note about Cipolla’s conception of stupidity is that it isn’t synonymous with what smart and illustrious people think is ill-advised or foolish. It’s far more interesting than that. He insists that stupid people are evenly distributed throughout society. For Cippola there are, per capita, as many stupid people among go-cart salesmen and swamp-dwelling gator hunters as there are among laureled economists and tenured intellectuals.
‘Cipolla divides people into four categories: helpless, bandit, intelligent and stupid. In any normal interaction between two people, he contends, the helpless person suffers a loss while the other gains. The bandit exacts a benefit while levying a loss on the other. The intelligent person gains while enabling the other person also to gain. The defining trait of the stupid person is that he gains nothing while obliging the other to take a loss.’
Outrage for Bidens final AI crackdown
The outgoing administration issues new AI chip export restrictions.
One iatrogenic consequence of this is that the US is encouraging China to accelerate efforts to develop its own AI chips to make it less dependent on industry behemoth Nvidia.
‘China believes it’s a “flagrant violation of international multilateral economic and trade rules," and NVIDIA issued a scathing statement calling the guidelines “unprecedented and misguided” believing they will only “derail innovation and economic growth worldwide.”’
History Suggests DOGE Won’t Accomplish Anything Unless It Gets Support From Congress
Will DOGE engage Congress successfully? It’s going to be difficult.
‘The President’s most critical mistake, however, was not obtaining buy-in from Congress. When the committee made recommendations for legislative changes, he quickly sent them to Capitol Hill, expecting lawmakers to serve as a rubber stamp. This was a reasonable assumption given that in 1906 Congress passed significant regulatory legislation, including the Hepburn Act, which gave the Interstate Commerce Committee power over railroad rates, and two pieces of legislation — the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act — to protect consumers from unsafe food and drugs.
‘Yet, congressional chieftains like Speaker of the House Joseph G. Cannon and Senator Nelson Aldrich saw reorganizing the executive branch as wholly different. They viewed it as, in the words of Montana Republican Senator Thomas H. Carter, “an executive encroachment on the sphere of congressional action.” And these power brokers had little interest in letting Roosevelt infringe upon their prerogatives. Even worse, the committee’s recommendations threatened vested interests and jobs, including patronage jobs over which members of Congress held sway.’
FDA’s “Belt and Suspenders” Approach to Mifepristone Approval
There is a recursive aspect to regulation in the US in which the regulation anticipates litigation and political opposition and tries to defease this resistance with overly prescribed rules.
No wonder the courts are such a hot topic. Regulation in the US is just the first salvo in an ongoing war in which special interests tangle over what the final outcome will be.
‘In November 2022, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion activists filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Amarillo, Texas, challenging the agency’s regulation of the abortion medication mifepristone. In Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, the plaintiffs argued that FDA had inappropriately rushed approval of the medication in 2000 without adequate evidence that the medication met the agency’s safety standards. They asked the court to remove mifepristone from the market nationwide.’
Republicans plot Biden regulatory rollback ahead of Trump inauguration
Given limited Congressional time (and the need to prioritize vetting the new Cabinet), Congress needs to prioritize which of the 1,300 new regulations subject to Congressional Review to roll back.
Biden’s volume strategy will likely sneak some bad rules past the goalie.
‘There are 1,300 regulations available for repeal using the Congressional Review Act, and 108 of them are regarded as significant. However, the Senate will be strapped for time as it works to get Trump’s Cabinet in place in the early weeks of his administration.’
Two-thirds of German howitzers await repairs as bureaucracy slows Ukraine’s combat capabilities
The good news? German howitzers are very effective. The bad news? German howitzers are very effective. They require repairs because of the intensity of their utilization.
The repairs require bureaucratic approval. This delays the repairs.
Bureaucracy kills.
‘However, military equipment repairs are also slowed by bureaucracy. In Germany, each spare part requires a separate export license for military equipment. According to a representative of one defense company, this process can take months.’
OpenAI urges US to prioritize AI funding, regulation to stay ahead of China
Incumbents and market leaders always want more regulation. Helps to ossify current market conditions.
‘OpenAI on Monday laid out its vision for artificial intelligence development in the U.S., saying the country needs outside investment and supportive regulation to stay ahead of China in the race for the nascent technology.’
U.S. Federal Agencies Could Benefit From Bureaucratic Reform
The culture needs to change for innovation to succeed in government agencies.
‘“I would humbly suggest that the biggest problem that the [U.S. Department of Defense] has to moving fast in high tech areas where we’re worried about our national security is solely based in our acquisition systems. I don’t think it’s a lack of willpower; I don’t think it’s a lack of ideas; I don’t think it’s a lack of innovation,” Stout continued. “I think that we have really smart people up and down the national security enterprise that know what needs to happen but [are] hamstrung by a bureaucratic system that will not let go."’
Safeguarding innovation from bureaucracy: The techno-libertarian pivot
Are our assumptions about market failure out-of-date?
Is the term “market failure” a weaponized excuse for bureaucratic expansion?
‘Shapiro warns that innovation faces political resistance, often from legacy industries clinging to outdated regulatory models. Agencies also resist change. This underscores the need for a decisive techno-libertarian policy pivot, one that rejects long-held assumptions about market failures and government expertise.’
Cut smart, not blind: How DOGE should be approaching government waste
Will DOGE approach bureaucratic reform rationally or will it have a partisan tint?
We’re about to find out.
‘Despite these clear examples of programs that deliver a strong return on investment, the new administration’s primary tool for rationalizing the government — the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, headed by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — seems dead-set on across-the-board reductions. As part of this, universal return-to-office mandates are intended to induce federal employees to quit.
‘These mandates, whose goal will be to reduce federal workforce numbers, carry unintended consequences. Skilled professionals, particularly those in information technology and cybersecurity roles, are among the first to leave federal service when flexible work options are rescinded. This attrition poses significant risks to national security, especially as cyber threats from adversaries such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran grow more sophisticated.’
The UK wants to do its ‘own thing’ on AI regulation, suggesting a divergence from U.S. and EU
Sure, the UK can put in place independent AI regulation.
But they’re still constrained by the companies themselves. The UK, on its own, doesn’t have wield sufficient influence to direct the AI companies, no matter how many fifty-point plans they issue.
‘Her comments echoed remarks from Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday that Britain has “freedom now in relation to the regulation to do it in a way that we think is best for the U.K.” after Brexit.
‘“You’ve got different models around the world, you’ve got the EU approach and the U.S. approach – but we have the ability to choose the one that we think is in our best interest and we intend to do so,” Starmer said in response to a reporter’s question after announcing a 50-point plan to make the U.K. a global leader in AI.’
Taming the unaccountability machine
Capacity is a huge problem in the public service. This explains the move to consulting.
‘And perhaps more importantly, the “capacity” we are talking about here is specifically management capacity. There is no very complicated or intractable problem of the state’s ability to command real resources or physical objects. The problems we keep facing relate to its ability to process information – to reliably make good decisions based on the state of the world in which it finds itself.
‘This is the most glaring symptom afflicting the modern state/outsourcing/consultancy nexus.[1] Communication across organizational boundaries is difficult. Once a function is moved out of the government office building and into somebody else’s premises, it is intrinsically more difficult for the state to know about it. Can we find some way of putting this intuition into more rigorous terms — of going from clinical observation to diagnosis?’
Trump’s proposed cuts to the federal workforce could increase dependency on contractors, experts say
Will DOGE focus on wasteful government contracts?
‘Likewise, political scientist Paul C. Light, writing for the think tank Brookings Institution in 2020, found that the number of employees supported by federal contracts and grants increased from 4.8 million in 2017 to 6.8 million by the time Trump’s first administration ended. In contrast, the federal workforce remained at a little more than 2 million individuals.
‘Overall, however, Ralph contended that an effort to reduce contractor spending is trending.’