The Road to Hell

We have been applying mechanical rules to non-linear, dynamic systems for far too long.

When an institution establishes a program, it does so with a specific intention. It states an objective that it wants to obtain with the implementation of this new initiative.

For example, Congress may respond to a set of large-scale industrial pollution events with laws restricting the activities of manufacturers. The objective here is to prevent future similar occurrences. To enforce these laws, Congress establishes a dedicated agency. Let’s call it the Environmental Protection Agency. The law is written at a high-level. Implicit in it is the assumption that there is an important trade-off between the economic benefits of human activity and the costs this imposes in terms of damage to the environment, say from impaired water quality or the accumulation of waste requiring disposal. This means that the EPA will interpret the law to write rules and promulgate policies its staff believes will obtain the lawmaker’s desired outcome, including balancing the demand for economic development.

At the same time, there are other federal agencies put into place to effect rules and regulations for other Congressional priorities. Housing and Urban Development seeks to make it easier and more affordable for citizens to rent or own housing. There are hundreds of federal agencies. There are rules, more rules, and then some other rules. The Federal Register has tens of thousands of pages of them.

It’s not just Congress. States make rules, too. For example, many states have their own environmental schemes, some of which may be more restrictive. There are counties and cities.

What’s more, there is a dynamic aspect to this, as well. Over time, the agencies grow in influence, with an expanding set of more proscriptive policies.

We live in a system of people acting in what they think of as their individual best interests while trying to follow these rules with varying degrees of compliance. We don’t just pay income tax. We pay an additional tax in having to live with this set of administrative oversight in the belief that the benefits of doing so are worthwhile: reduced pollution, affordable homes, widespread availability of high-quality healthcare, an education system that leads to a better quality of life, etc.

We believe that the purpose of this bureaucratic activity is to obtain a set of specific objectives spelled out in legislation.

And yet, often, we don’t seem to get the outcomes these policies were meant to facilitate. Take housing, for example. Homelessness in the United States has spiked to all-time highs. This is despite the fact that we have spent billions on the problem. Environmental rules proliferate like bacteria in a laboratory Petri dish, but we are told that the climate crisis has never been more urgent. Our education system is inferior to those of other countries.

One recent example of overreach was a case in which the federal government ruled against a family that wanted to build on their property. The EPA ruled that this work was illegal because of some freestanding water the EPA deemed to be an “inland water way” despite the fact that the water was not contiguous with any cognizable thoroughfare.

Mike Schellenberger has written exclusively about the failure of homeless policy in California including the proliferation of non-profits working crisis in California without any real sense of progress. The non-profits are growing, at least.

Cybernetics is the study of circular feedback mechanisms in systems. Think of machines where the output returns to be also input.

One of the concepts of cybernetics is the powerful notion that the “purpose of a system is what it does.” Systems are complex. We can only see the outcomes they produce. The only inference we can make about a system, the only one we should make, is to look at it without preconception and say if a system does X, then its purpose is to do X. It doesn’t matter what anyone said at the beginning about making Y happen. The purpose of the system is to do X.

In systems, there is a difference between intention and purpose. Bureaucracy is a set of people, rules, and policies that governs the behavior of a system made up of other people doing things. We may intend for bureaucracy to do one thing, but its purpose emerges in practice.

The intention of the homelessness eradication bureaucracy in California may be to reduce the misery suffered by the indigent, the mentally ill, and the substance-addicted who live on the streets. The purpose of the homelessness eradication bureaucracy in California is to funnel billions of dollars of state funds into non-profits ostensibly focused on the problem.

The intention of the EPA is to reduce pollution. The purpose of the EPA is to exert government control over all kinds of human activity.

It’s not just government. The intention of the HR department in a company is to help the line function optimize the human capital it employs and to manage the labor dimension of the firm’s legal risk. The purpose of the HR department is to filter the type of people who get the opportunity to apply for jobs, wresting control and power from the line managers. The intention of the strategic consulting firm is to help the C-suite improve performance. The purpose of many strategic consulting firms is to extract lucrative fees and to install their allies and former employees in positions of influence in the client firm.

We could go on at length. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

This is fundamentally disappointing for anyone interested in solving the problems these agencies were meant to address.

But it does (at least) two things.

One, when we compare the intent of a system and its realized purpose, we can identify situations that need fixing. For existing situations, the bigger the gap, the more urgent our attention should be.

Two, it means that we need to monitor the discrepancy between intention and purpose. Early diagnosis can help us get back on track quickly and inexpensively.

We should make our intention crystal clear at the inception of any project. It’s not enough to look at the intention of any individual, incremental rule. We need to look at the changes in the overall system over time.

Nothing should be beyond our scrutiny. If the intention of DOGE is to streamline government, but the purpose turns out to be something different like, say, political retribution, then we need to have a conversation.