The blunders of bureaucracy

How stacks of paper do much more than kill trees

By Jessica Mintz and Deaglan Halligan
From the October 2006 Print Edition

"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office." — Aesop

Aesop’s magnanimous thieves devised the concept of bureaucracy to imbue society with a hierarchical structure with the bold intention of organizing, classifying, and processing each and every aspect of our lives. A bureaucracy is a non-elective government body that is characterized by officialism, red tape, and proliferation. Today, this mindless, self-perpetuating cancer of society has become inescapable while it squanders resources, ruins accountability, stifles creativity, and inhibits productivity on virtually every level of our lives.

One need not look far to see the plague of bureaucracy at work. Chancellor Robert Birgeneau recently created a new senior university position which, in his own words, will ensure that students and faculty are "fully respected for their individuality" and diversity. Because diversity is such a complex and pressing issue, it is no surprise that the vice chancellor will have a "large organization" at his or her disposal and a $4.5 million office budget. To top it off, the genius at the head of this revolutionary department will receive at least $182,000 in annual compensation. But with such ample resources at its disposal to search far and wide for a fig leaf of relevance, the Ministry of Diversity will doubtless be able to "prove" its great and everlasting value, at least to the legion of the endlessly gullible so ubiquitous here at Berkeley.

Other students will, however, find it hard to justify recklessly allocating substantial funds for such a nebulous mission. Perhaps it is because we have a hard time finding a chair or desk that isn’t broken in some lecture halls. Or maybe it is because some buildings on campus look worse than condemned housing projects. No, that’s no cause for upset; diversity should be the first thing on our minds. While it would be nice to sit at a working desk, such minor inconveniences are a trivial sacrifice to this latest bureaucratic monument, the great Temple of Diversity.

Numerous examples of the decadence of bureaucracy surround us. The Berkeley City Council is too busy passing pointless symbolic resolutions criticizing President George W. Bush or supporting opportunists who refuse to serve in Iraq to bother themselves with silly things like fixing roads, building parking structures, and creating a welcoming economic atmosphere for small businesses. In fact, it probably costs more for the city of Berkeley to file environmental impact reports for its fancy new street sweepers than to buy the machines themselves.

Unfortunately for Telegraph Avenue businesses, the sweepers will not get the dirty vagrants off the street. This highlights the tendency of bureaucracies to ignore real, tangible problems while blindly hurling money at arbitrary, often bizarre projects that — at best — are unproductive. The education establishment is a prime example: Its self-serving agenda of protecting the incompetent at any cost explains why California boasts nearly the highest per-capita funding for K-12 students but still has one of the worst public education systems in the country.

A respectable bureaucracy will never confront an issue directly or quickly. Bureaucracies will always avoid such challenges in favor of the more obscure and ambiguous pseudo-issues in which success and failure are more difficult to define. This strategy practically guarantees a long ride on the gravy train of public financing.

For similar reasons, bureaucracies routinely exaggerate the value of the "service" they provide and undervalue the jobs of people working in the business or other entity that they claim to support. The iconic example of recent decades is what may be termed the "safety culture." Pervasive in industry but especially in government bureaucracies, its guiding principle is that the avoidance of a small degree of risk is worth any cost. And of course the only means of controlling these risks is the creation and continuous expansion of, you guessed it, a giant bureaucracy. The rise and rapid growth of these parasitic organizations is a major drain on the economy and, worse, exerts a chilling effect on the advanced R&D necessary to maintain our standard of living and defend the nation.

The problem of bureaucracy is not limited to government and academia and "safety" is not its only manifestation. Large companies such as Intel and Microsoft also feel the tremendous burden of excessive red tape and stifling procedures to "assure compliance" (read: bureaucratic job protection). Microsoft, once a small and revolutionary company, now has more than 60,000 employees and is losing ground to newer, more nimble companies like Google, which operate with greater efficiency and have more effective communication. The lack of efficient communication in a colossal company like Intel or Microsoft often results in redundant work conducted by groups within the company, and complaints by employees of excessive regulations and a lack of innovation.

Clearly, bureaucracy generates formidable problems for even the greatest governments, companies, and universities. The best remedy, as always, is catching and at least controlling the cancer before it spreads. We must overcome the temptation to obsessively organize, and instead learn to take the measured risks that have defined our prosperity in the past.

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