DIEing in Nice Red Tape

In which I partly agree with David Brooks and Mark Edmundson

https://meme.aho.st/abolish-useless-government/

[Note this is cross-posted at Accordingtohoyt.com, comment there or here]

Thanks to Stuart Schneiderman¹, my attention was drawn to this NY Slimes column by David Brooks (it’s an archive link) in which he points out that there are a lot of bureaucrats in government and business and they seem to mostly subtract value rather than add it.

Brooks in turn links to an article by Mark Edmundson, a professor at the University of Virginia. In that article, which I read as a rational lefty in the process of being red-pilled and fighting to maintain his delusions, the prof tries to explain that the DIE bureaucrats at his university are nice people who are trying to make the world a better place even if they do so by means of mandatory DIE in academic annual reports.

… I had just learned that there would be a new aspect to our annual reports. We would be asked to tell our overlords how each one of our activities contributes to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Teaching? How did it advance DEI? Scholarship? How did it help speed DEI on its way? If you get an honor or an award, you are to say how it contributed to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Outside consulting: did it do any DEI duty? And what does the university mean by Diversity, by Equity, by Inclusion? The university doesn’t say. There are no official definitions out there to consider. 

So I had a lot to tell my friend about administrative interference with academic freedom. I didn’t want the university deans and DEI enforcers setting the agenda for my teaching or my scholarship, or for anyone else’s. At the same time, I couldn’t really argue with my friend’s observation: the people in the dean’s office and the DEI enclaves are decent sorts. I like them...

DIE is one of those things that sounds nice and which no one should complain about, but which is in fact built on a lie. Edmundson, as a self-confessed Bernie Bro and literature professor, may lack the desire or the tools to prove it, but it remains the case. But I digress, because Edmundson does show some signs of detecting the over-reaching problem

The good people who came up with this notion are — without knowing it, I suspect — softly tyrannizing us. They are also softly tyrannizing themselves. And what they are up to isn’t only a university matter. It is happening in corporations, medical centers, primary and secondary schools, foundations, and NGOs. Surveillance and discipline, carried out almost exclusively by good people, are becoming pervasive.

Now again, we can perhaps question whether DIE bureaucrats are good people or not, but they undoubtedly see themselves as good people who are doing all this for our good. Moreover each one is a good little cog in a machine.

Instead, we find ourselves within a web of power whose influence is everywhere and whose center is nowhere. And who administers this power? Not the king, or the duke. And not even — this will matter in what’s coming — the president. Power is now administered by everyone in what we might call an administrative position. The ones who design, vet, and disseminate the mandatory work surveys; the ones who have a hand, or just a finger, in getting the annual reports out to the workforce, whether a faculty or a corporate population; they are the ones who evaluate the students for intelligence, grade them for performance, collect data on their likes and dislikes. These administrators of power include marketing people and advertising people and public relations people — all the people who count and characterize, and whose work manages to shape the lives of their subjects.

All these people — most of whom are no doubt good people — are watched and counted and measured in turn. Do some have more disciplinary power than others? Do some have more surveillance power? Maybe — but it probably doesn’t really feel that way to any individual. They are just doing their jobs. A certain amount of such bureaucratic calculation and observation is critical to the functioning of a mass society, certainly. Yet I think the collective effect of these jobs done by good people is more discipline. The collective effect is less freedom. One is observed more. One is judged more. 

[… very very long …]

In truth, there is no center of power to take possession of. If Trump wins the next election, the forces of discipline, which are deployed by no one, in the interest of no one, will continue to compound themselves. The college-educated will get to push more of the buttons, but they too will be subjects of discipline, constantly evaluated, scrutinized, regimented, and regulated. At least they will feel as though they possess some power and some dignity. The non-college group, by contrast, will stroke many fewer keys and see that their lives are being run, though they will think they are being run by those goddam liberals, not by the disciplinary regime. They will not recognize the power that expands for its own sake and functions, finally, for nothing and no one. Its only interest is its own blind growth.

This is the problem. And this harks back to Brooks and the death of 1000 papercuts.

The real problem is that DIE is embedded in bureaucratic administration. Administration makes regulations, some of which (e.g. DIE discrimination ones) are bad and most of which are merely questionable, but which end up making it harder to get things done. See the rant above about documenting whether your job helped the DIE cause. DIE is just the cherry on the cake of red tape that is strangling productivity and creativity. But the key point is the thing that various UK Tory ministers called the blob is in charge. It’s the administrative stuff, some of it government bureaucrats, some of it NGOs/charities, some of it organizational HR departments and so on. Each one of them come up with an idea that adds just a little more straw to the camel’s back. DIE edicts are just the last few straws before the poor camel collapses.

Then there’s Richard Hanania’s recent post² on why DIE wokism won’t kill safety, which is, IMHO, overoptimistic but in the middle recounts an incident where bureaucracy gratuitously makes things worse and no one can fix it. This is what happened when in the mid Obama era the FAA decided to unilaterally make a change in pilot hours required to qualify as a commercial airline pilot:

In this particular case, we have if anything too much “merit” when it comes to hiring pilots. The US used to require only 250 flying hours before an individual could earn their license. After a crash in 2009 that doesn’t appear to have had anything to do with the amount of training the pilots involved had received, they upped that number to 1,500, making the US a global outlier.

And this has of course had all sorts of bad effects. As the Forbes article he linked to points out, prior to the 1500 hour rule, pilots typically had about 500 hours when they first sat behind the controls on a commercial flight and they were mentored over the next 1000 or so by more experienced pilots. This system worked just fine, and is in fact the system still used everywhere except the US and commercial airliners do not fall out of the sky on a regular basis. But now, in the US, would-be pilots need 1500 hours before they can start which radically limits the pool of potential applicants and raises the cost because if not military they have pay for that 1500 hours of flight time out of their own pockets.

The problem is that the effects of this rule change take years to be noticed (most of a decade I believe in this case) by anyone outside of a few subject matter experts who get blown off because “it’s for the children” or whatever.

This is all, IMHO, an expansion of Parkinson’s Law of Bureaucracy

DIE in fact meets one of the related laws too - the triviality one:

Parkinson’s Law of Triviality, also known as “bikeshedding,” is a phenomenon that occurs in organizations when a group of people spend a disproportionate amount of time discussing and making decisions about minor or insignificant details, while neglecting more important issues.

DIE is a classic bikeshed. It allows people of low competence and limited knowledge about the major subject manage to take up the time of others doing nothing of relevance. But because it is something even low competence people can have a viewpoint on they can argue about it, while decisions about the actual function of the organization require rather more knowledge and competence so they shut up. See for example the Afrochemistry chick

Or the Johns Hopkins HR chick, though she may be just evil (or stupid, or both). Having said that she actually has a significant academic publishing record (far more significant than that of Gay, C - to pick a diversity hire at random) and many of them are about diabetes and seem (at a quick skim) to be reasonable. Mind you some appear to be less high quality:

Measuring Structural Racism and Its Association With BMI

Structural racism has attracted increasing interest as an explanation for racial disparities in health, including differences in adiposity. Structural racism has been measured most often with single-indicator proxies (e.g., housing discrimination), which may leave important aspects of structural racism unaccounted for. This paper develops a multi-indicator scale measuring county structural racism in the U.S. and evaluates its association with BMI.

etc. ad nauseam

I haven’t read the paper, but I’m pretty sure it’s blaming racism for African Americans being fat. Probably because African Americans are poor wittle children with no agency who are forced by the ebil white patriarchy to eat a poor diet and not get any exercise. I may be exaggerating, though I’m not sure because how else do we read the original explanation of ‘privilege’ that said that it was something white, male, cisgender, middle class people had. In other words male normies.

For the most part these people contribute nothing of value to their organization, but they need to justify their salaries and existence somehow so they attach themselves to the DIE bandwagon and play the RACISS card in order to show their power and authority.

And I have a slight tangent to insert here. A lot of the useless bureaucrats, both inside government and outside in corporate HR, NGOs etc., are “minorities” or “women” or were otherwise affirmative action/diversity hires picked for their original job mostly on the basis of their skin color, gender etc. with less concern for their ability to do a proper job. Originally there may have been a decent excuse for this, back in the 1960s/70s - which is, I remind you, HALF A CENTURY AGO - but that excuse should have been tossed some time in the 1980s or 90s. I don’t have statistics or indeed much beyond anecdata but I find it noteworthy that we are seeing the issue now as the affirmative action hires of 20-30 years ago, probably hired back then by other older affirmative action hires, now bubble up to the top of their organizations and then cock everything up in ways that cannot be swept under the carpet because they are the visible face of the organization (see Gay, C as the perfect example).

The other problem is that these people, who are in fact generally of less than stellar competence, have found that they can’t get jobs designing bridges or aircraft or computer games or indeed much else that requires actual intelligence and knowledge. Neither can their children [and yes ladies and gentlemen and little furry creatures from Alpha Centauri, IQ and executive function are in large part heritable characteristics, with another critical influence (not) being in a female single parent household]. This, they assume, has to be due to “structural racism” and/or “the patriarchy” because they can think of no other reason why precious darlings can’t get intellectually stretching jobs.

May also apply to other diverse characteristics

But returning to Brooks, DIE is just the visible tip of the iceberg that is the problem. The real problem is bureaucracy in general, the fact that people who have a real job to do must jump through pointless hoops of (electronic) paperwork before (or after) they can do what they need to do and they have to attend meetings and training sessions that at best waste their time and at worst actively assume they are all bigots in the process. Those who have a real need to solve have to navigate pointless levels of semi-automated phonetree or level 1 customer support people before they can talk to an actual human who has the power to fix their issue.

Or perhaps just the knowledge to tell them that the issue cannot be fixed with the current product because some idiot government efficiency mandate has made it at best semi-functional.

And going back to Hanania, the corrosion of woke may not have yet showed up in the statistics but it is certainly present in everyday life. I know, for example, of a number of people (some of them probably readers of this) who deliberately choose older white doctors as their primary care physician. Who likewise search for (generally older) male tradesmen for repairs and the like. And so on. They have made choices that mean they avoid the dangers of a woke diversity hire being involved in their life and harming them through incompetence (or malice). They tend to buy used older stuff or commercial stuff to evade idiotic energy etc. mandates that make their dishwashers at best semi-functional. Likewise many now fail to have flight cancellation issues or to be groped by the TSA because they no longer fly commercial airlines. Who no longer work for large corporations with DIE HR policies. Who no longer watch woke TV or read woke magazines. And so on.

The blob of bureaucracy is there and growing and it is absolutely making things worse. See dishwashers. And DIE.But DIE is as much a symptom of a bureaucracy that wants an excuse to expand as it is a cause.

Japan is different

In many ways Japan has skipped the general encrudification. Japan has a reputation as a pretty bureaucratic place and that is true, but the bureaucracy in Japan has not grown like it has in other places. Just as prices in yen have barely increased in 30 years, so too the bureaucratic load. Indeed in certain respects Japan has actually decreased the bureaucratic load - various pointlessly low speed limits have been removed, for example, and (after some teething troubles) the entry process at airports has been significantly streamlined post wuflu with everything done via a website/app that you show to the nice immigration or customs agent.

[Note that you still need to queue but that’s due to the volume of tourists seeking to enjoy Japan as a cheap, safe tourist destination. Also as someone who once bought the most expensive beer of his life in Tokyo I find putting the words cheap and Japan in the same sentence to be bizarre, though it is true.]

Flying domestically in Japan is not as good as it was in the US in the 1990s when you could board your plane 15 minutes after parking your car, but it’s also not the hour plus long gropathon that is the current TSA experience - unless you fly at peak periods but then proportionally the time is less than US equivalent peak periods. Moreover you don’t have to show photo ID, you don’t need to take your shoes off and you can carry bottles of booze (or microphone stands) in your carry on bags.

In healthcare there has been no Obamacare and thus no requirement that your health insurance support this or that fashionable thing. You get to choose your own doctor or hospital and for the most part you and your doctors determine your treatment plan without having healthcare bureaucrats - either government or corporate - arguing over whether it is appropriate. The price will generally be clear too, as is what you will be expected to bear as copay, and if you don’t like it you can ask another clinic if they’ll do it for less.

In some areas - e.g. construction - Japan is actually notably freer than other countries. Zoning rules are much broader, buildings just need to meet safety standards (which is likely one reason why the recent 7.6 magnitude Noto quake killed less than 300 people total) and anyone can turn their home into a shop or other small business (or vice versa) with no way for a government busybody to stop it. Noah Smith had a recent article about the “California Forever” new city project³, where he mentions the zonings for mixed use residential / commercial / light-business as a positive but any Japanese bureaucrat would be scratching his head and wondering why this was special.

It is true that large Japanese companies remain horribly bureaucratic places where mediocre performance does not necessarily lead to lower pay or slower promotion, but they have not got worse, except for a notably increased propensity for wearing face masks post wuflu. If it took a year to make a decision in, say, 1995, it takes a year to make the same decision today. There’s no additional friction and just as in 1995 once the decision has been made it is implemented promptly.

As well as masks there are mutterings about “eshicaru” this and that and “essudeijiizu” (ethical and SDGs) but in general this is froth. In part this is because even government bureaucrats mostly believe in customer service. Yes Japan has plenty of mostly pointless bureaucratic stuff to do but as long as you stay on the track of everyone else the process is clearly documented and you carry bits of paper from bureaucrat A to B to … and end up with the permit to do what ever it was. Indeed if you expect to deviate from the standard track but tell a bureaucrat first, the bureaucrat will likely help you fill in the right forms / provide the right supporting documentation etc. and all will be fine.

Aside: Japanese bureaucracy only gets nasty when you don’t get prior approval and then act all huffy about it. It’s much, much better to ask for permission than forgiveness and if you did fail to get permission, an attitude of deference bordering on groveling will often result in you being let off with a warning as long as you write your apology letter properly.

The Solution

It is unclear how to solve this problem without mass disruption. In fact it may be hard to solve it even with mass disruption. But the key to the solution is to take an axe to the entire bureaucracy not just the twigs that are DIE and ESG. Almost certainly the Milei approach is required. A chainsaw that cuts down branches and all the ivy, brambles and other overgrowth.

The key to recall is that Parkinson’s law is a ratchet on the bureaucracy, so you have to both repeal 80% of the regulations AND fire (at least) 90% of the bureaucrats. Do not reassign them, just fire them. There are almost certainly entire government departments (Education, HUD…) that can be entirely replaced by a small outsourced call center, if that. Others, the EPA comes to mind, need to be pruned radically and have most regulations in the last 25 years revoked. The FDA, FAA, SEC etc. probably need more careful pruning but I’m sure that a significant reduction in regulations and manpower will be easily achieved.

And so on.

How to choose which bureaucrats to remove? Well a simple first wave is everyone that has showed up to the office fewer than three days a week in the last year, call it under 150 days in total. That’s likely to be about 75% of the government bureaucracy. And if that impacts other bureaucracies than the ones that need to be cut then those get more firings as required.

Once the government bureaucrats are fired, the next is to go after the NGOs that get government funding. Simply pass a law that no non-profit can receive government funds. Most of them will be doing useless things like DIE training so there’s no loss. Of course if you word this right that will include most of the universities. That’s probably a positive, but it may be necessary to include carveouts for actual scientific research, but it seems reasonable to require that universities that accept research funds comply with a few rules that will likely remove some of the faculty as well. It is probably beyond the (federal) government to remove administrators but state governments almost certainly can for state funded universities. There probably ought to be a maximum non faculty staff number/ratio to undergraduates that is approximately the number of such staff in 1999.

Some sample rules

1. (Undergraduate) entry requirements must be objective and compliant with US non-discrimination laws, Supreme court rulings etc., with subjective choices only taking place in the case of objective ties.

2. Any researcher who receives government funds and fails to produce sufficient raw data/methods to enable replication shall be required to repay the funds. If the research doesn’t have any raw data/methods it isn’t research and shall also not be acceptable

After that the chainsaw needs to go to corporate HR departments. Almost certainly the lack of required regulations to comply with (thanks to the chainsaw above) will help most organizations decide to remove chunks of HR drones in the interests of larger bonuses for CxOs because of greater profits. But a stick, in the form of a reminder that US non-discrimination laws, Supreme court rulings etc. mean that diversity hiring is generally illegal and could open the company up for prosecution would probably help.

If the US is lucky, the next US president will take a leaf out of the Milei book. In other countries it may be too late.

1. The Bureaucratization of Everyday Life

2. Why the Technocapital Machine is Stronger than DEI

3. The California Forever project is a great idea