What Is Bureaucracy?

What is bureaucracy? Everyone has an opinion about it, but what is it that so many people love to hate? It is such a pervasive aspect of everyday life that people know it when they see it, or at least they think they do. This blog is going to investigate the phenomenon. What does it look like when it works and what does it look like when it fails? How did it evolve? What could it become in the future?

It exists for a reason. It has a role to play. But just as Hindu philosophy teaches that pain and pleasure exist as two ends of the same spectrum, there is an ideal mean that leads to an optimal outcome between too much bureaucracy and not enough. How and why do we deviate from it? How does this deviation evolve over time?

Since we want to understand its implications for everyday life, Urban Dictionary is as good a place to start as any.

Here is their definition of the word “chickenshit:”

“WWII troop slang for military bureaucratic bullshit. The word implies that the regulations in question are so silly and trifling that they don’t measure up to the level of bullshit.”

Urban Dictionary gives the following sentence as an example in context.

“In life and death matters, soldiers relied on their common sense and ignored the chickenshit regulations their superiors foisted upon them whenever possible.”

Unpacking this, we see a number of concepts.

Bureaucracy is about control. Someone imposes regulations on a group of people that require the subjects of this rulemaking to follow certain procedures.

There are costs to disobedience. The authorities enforce rules with the possibility of sanction that range from social approbation to potential incarceration. Yet, when the cost of compliance exceeds the threat of punishment for deviation, the rational thing to do is to use one’s own judgment. Nobody fills out TPS forms in a foxhole. Bureaucracy asks us to subordinate our own judgment to an authority with superior knowledge or wiser judgment, potentially combined with higher status, or else.

Another aspect of bureaucracy is the locus of accountability. If, in the example above, the soldiers were to comply and they lost their lives in combat, who would bear responsibility? Would it be the planners? Or would the soldiers themselves take the blame for their demise? Who bears the cost? In this corner case, it is the soldiers. But who gets the credit for things working out the way we hope? It could go either way. A politician is someone who claims credit when things go well and who blames his opponent when things go poorly. Is bureaucracy any different?

Bureaucracy is about centralization. It is a way of doing things that someone with authority broadcasts to a wider audience demanding fealty in its application. Embedded in this consolidation of power is the assumption that the situation is static. Factors a rational person would consider in making a de novo decision do not change much in a static world. This model of life doesn’t see people as parts of an unpredictable complex system with unintended emergent behavior. Instead, bureaucracy requires a mechanical orientation in which life proceeds linearly, with scientifically precise outcomes. Do X to get Y every single time.

Confidence in this view of the world means that bureaucracy can be compartmentalized for efficiency, as decisions can be atomized in the interest of efficiency. There are gains from administrative trade to be had by specializing in sub-tasks that roll-up in an orchestrated fashion. Specialization is just another way to describe the application of expertise. Experts are excellent at explaining what has happened. If there is no variation in outcomes, then experts can perfect a system of rules to optimize the utilization of resources in pursuit of a set of desired outcomes.

Rules are impersonal; they do not target individuals. Intended for large groups, these rules can be nothing but objective. In an idealized bureaucracy, there is a rule of law in which the rules apply to everyone equally. Punishment for non-compliance is indifferent to the offender’s status or wealth. Everything is merit-based and level. Is this true in practice?

Bureaucracy is comprehensive. It has to occupy the full space of action because not to do so would invite the controversy of independence. People will discover workarounds that subvert the integrity of the rules. Too much independent action and the system can become chaotically unpredictable, violating the conditions for the system’s existence.

Bureaucracy is slow. If the system is static and mechanical, instead of stochastic and organic, then there is no reason to move quickly. To do so might lead to precipitous, sub-optimal rulemaking. This is a problem because bureaucracy lends itself to ossification. The organizations that make the rules and enforce them are people in a real and legal sense; it’s not in their genetic code to create the conditions of their own expiry. Bureaucracy is forever.

Bureaucracy is brittle. Even as it cannot contemplate its non-existence, it fails to account adequately for the possibility that its own actions could lead to an ineluctable self-destruction. Too much bureaucracy can lead to unintended consequences because we do live in a complex adaptive system.

As the author Nassim Taleb noted in Antifragile, “We have been fragilizing the economy, our health, political life, education, almost everything … by suppressing randomness and volatility.” What is bureaucracy if it is not the act of “suppressing randomness and volatility.”

Bureaucracy is a barrier to innovation. After the Pandemic, we can see the strengths and weaknesses of such an impediment to new discovery. Perhaps the world could have benefited from less innovation in the development of new viruses. It is not a coincidence that governments all over the world relaxed the guardrails in a frantic rush to develop and prove vaccines once Covid appeared.

Bureaucracy is something the authorities abandon when the stakes are high enough.

With this blog, I want to explore all of these points in greater detail and more.

This includes the phenomenon I think of as the Bureaucrat’s Paradox. The administrator may see very little marginal cost of an extra rule or restriction. What’s one more? Yet, she is convinced that the marginal benefit is large. The bureaucrat imagines simultaneously that her actions have no impact even as they are vital. The risk-reward tradeoff for the bureaucrat favors inexorably the creation of more rules, the restriction of more movement, the limiting of options. Often, this is done in the name of insuring against the vicissitudes of fortune.

Bureaucracy emerged for a reason.  It must add value at some level, or in some set of conditions. What are they? That is what we will explore with these essays. Join us.