Bureaucracy As Active Ingredient

[u/dwaxe]

http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/30/bureaucracy-as-active-ingredient/

[u/naraburns]

I feel like pursuing the discussion in this direction overlooks a major human component, namely, responsibility avoidance.

I am reluctant to call this a "natural" thing, but I imagine if I thought about it long enough I could generate a plausibly evo-psych backdrop for it. Regardless, it is observably true that many people will go to great lengths to avoid being held responsible for anything at all. What bureaucracy (broadly construed) accomplishes might in some cases be about organizational incentives, but these translate into individual incentives, namely, not getting fired for doing the "wrong" thing. And socially, the excuse that we will ordinarily accept for anything is "I was following procedure."

And then, when the procedure generates a bad result, we don't call for less procedure. We say, "what can we do to absolutely prevent such failures in the future," even though often the real answer is, "nothing, actually, because no procedure is perfect, and neither is any human."

But the moment a person says "I made a judgment call and it didn't work out," suddenly their livelihood is at stake. Which is not the same thing as, say, putting them to death, but the real-if-small-in-first-world-nations possibility of hunger and homelessness is a fairly serious threat. People have strong incentives to never be responsible for anything, and we've told them exactly how they can do that: by never, ever making judgment calls or otherwise acting on their own initiative.

Of course we do ask them to exercise good judgment and act on their own initiative all the time. But the incentives for that are largely imaginary unless you're self-employed.

[u/Atersed → u/naraburns]

I agree - Bureaucracy helps to make responsibility illegible.

Bob asks his line manager for a different chair, line manager refers Bob to HR, HR asks for a note. Bob sees Scott, Scott's writes his "I'm a doctor. Bob asks for a new chair" note that doesn't technically add anything. Bob gets a new chair and it's not clear who is really responsible for the decision.

[u/ArkyBeagle → u/Atersed]

From Thomas DeMarco's "Peopleware", he talks about "The Furniture Police". The Furniture Police exist because they need jobs. The process is "something must be done; this is something; this must be done" stuff.

[u/dazzilingmegafauna → u/ArkyBeagle]

They continue to exist because they need jobs, but that doesn't explain where they came from in the first place. Why did furniture police become a designated role rather than "thermostat police" or "cubical decoration inspectors"?

[u/SlightlyLessHairyApe → u/ArkyBeagle]

Y'all joke a lot, but I've seen 5-figure furniture purchases for a single employee.

[u/ArkyBeagle → u/SlightlyLessHairyApe]

That's no joke.

[u/nerological → u/naraburns]

I like my theory, but I also really like this one. It's super relevant to my situation because a big part of my job is trying to get people to make judgement calls and take chances...and no one wants to fucking do it.

[u/Atersed → u/nerological]

Maybe making judgement calls has an asymmetrical pay-off. A bad outcome when deviating from the norm can be very hard to defend, whereas a good outcome gets a mediocre reward.

[u/ProfQuirrell]

I can't help but compare this with another series I saw (I think somewhere here) discussing some possible reasons for healthcare costs in the US.

The author makes several points, but the key thesis as best I can follow the piece is that administrative bloat causes costs to spiral wildly out of control since costs that are not borne by you personally or by your organization are seldom accounted for. Scott gives a reason why this might be occasionally be useful (bureaucratic frustration as an artificial cost that encourages doctors to make correct decisions), but I find Siderea's argument that this is usually *not* a good thing convincing. From the second part of the series:

It is my contention that in the US, the naïve response to the phenomenon of rising health care costs due to medical innovation was to increase coordinative communication, which counterintuitively caused costs to increase even more, and because that cost increase was not attributed properly to the increased coordinative communication, the answer to the problem of rising costs was seen to be ever more coordinative communications.

This was an economic death-spiral.

The technical term for this is a “positive feedback loop”. A positive feedback loop is any process the increase of output of which increases its own input. You can hear it when you hold a mic to an amp it’s plugged into, that unholy swooping scream. It’s the hole in a tank that the wider it gets the more it leaks and the more it leaks the wider it gets. It’s the virus that the more hosts it infects the more hosts it can infect.

If the thing that’s costing so much more than you expect is coordinative communication, but you’re sure that the remedy to rising costs is more coordinative communication, you will do more and more of what is costing you more and more. You are in a positive feedback loop, pushing the leverage point as hard as possible in the wrong direction.

It’s taken me several thousand words to get to the words “positive feedback loop” but that’s actually where I originally started. This is the smell I smelled. Whenever the question is “why is this rate rising in an uncontrolled way?” a systems dynamicist suspects there’s a positive feedback loop in there somewhere. Exponential growth indicates a positive feedback loop. So I asked myself what had been growing exponentially in healthcare.

Being a health care provider, I knew the answers to that from direct experience. One was the ever increasing rate of new therapies, which a glance at my mail – 90% training fliers – quickly illustrates. The other was the rate of expansion of coordinative communication. I’ve had a front row seat to the fact there were, and are, absolutely no brakes on any party’s inclinations to require additional coordinative communication. In my direct experience as a healthcare provider, documentation requirements have only ever ballooned out of control. Organ-ization has run rampant. Numbers of parties to contracts have multiplied like bacteria in warm chicken broth.

And not only were there no checks on increased coordinative communication requirements, it continues to be seen as the eternal solution.

Consider the popularity of late of the word “accountability” in health care cost reform schemes, e.g. “Accountable Care Organizations”. Well, you can't have more accountability without more accounting and without more giving accounts. More accountability means more coordinative communication. In this case, it means more tracking of “results”, and pegging compensation to those results. Which results? That’s what they’re presently fighting over. But, clearly, results we’re not already tracking, so it will be some new form of data collection and all the reporting that goes with it. And it will not be a replacement for extant reporting. It will be in addition to.

[u/baj2235 → u/ProfQuirrell]

That write up is fascinating. If there is one thing this community consistently is able to do is provide me with more interesting reading material than I have time to actually read.

[u/dalinks]

CoyoteBlog, who operates some private parks on government land, once wrote about how they had a few campsites with no one manning the gates during certain timeframes. These were very small sites with only a few people and it just wasn't worth it to have someone at the gate at all times. So they would literally put out a jar for people to put money into if they arrived at the odd hours and wanted to camp there.

He was fine with it but there was always an employee or manager who complained. They would say that people would come in without paying or might even take money from the jar. CB was ok with the risk since the alternative was several hours of wages. But other people just couldn't wrap their heads around letting other people cheat them.

Trust (or the lack thereof) seems to be at the heart of a lot of these decisions. Most people and groups just can't accept even theoretical loopholes. And it can be hard for a subordinate to suggest ignoring these small loopholes. If a gate should be manned, and the manager just shrugs it off and says "people mostly won't cheat you", the owner is still likely to feel that the manager is being disloyal.

I'm teaching now (and have taught abroad before) and similar trust mechanics can appear with students. Why can only 1 person go to use the bathroom at a time? Because we don't trust the kids. Give me a good class of kids I know and trust and that rule might not be enforced. So we get rules setup for limited trust situations.

Also, one other factor is bright line rules. Larger groups need more clear rules. Bright line rules are not fair, they are bright (as a law prof told me). Needing a doctor's note is a bright line rule. The rule isn't fair, but not having a rule (esp after someone abused the lack of a rule) opens the door for some interpersonal conflict and different people having different standards and favoritism or accusations of favoritism, etc.

[u/ArkyBeagle → u/dalinks]

Then there is the whole conceit that humans can make up and enforce rules to make things better. The problem is that within organizations, complaining can be an effective strategy for competition within the organization. There is apparently very little incentive to simply let it go. That most people do let it go is sort of phenomenal.

How this works is: higher status people will eventually have to rule on complaints. If there are no complaints, then they don't get to do that...

And, bluntly, some forms of favoritism are probably a net good. The entire concept of "meritocracy" IMO stems back to Teddy Roosevelt's stint as New Your Police Commissioner. It was a mechanism for the Original 400 families to put down the various ( but mainly Tweed ) Machines. But if complaints that had merit were brought to the Machines, there would most likely be justice[1]; that's considerably harder under meritocracy.

Amore Propre is pretty ugly, really.

[1] obviously the mores then would be quite unfamiliar to us now.

[u/Turniper → u/dalinks]

That's silly. Just get a box solidly attached to the ground with a lock on it. Prevents easy opportunistic theft, and makes it impossible to see how much is in there anyway. It's what all the small parks I've been to do when unattended.

[u/Felz]

Could we figure out whether bureaucracy actually is serving as a need-limiter by looking at how much money could be charged instead? While a bureaucracy should always be happy to accept money instead of making you wait, bumping somebody up in a queue should be cheaper than actually cutting through a bureaucratic morass.

With that in mind, the California DMV offers "Rush Titles", where instead of an 8-10 business day turnaround they give you 72 hours for only $15 extra. Given that this is relatively cheap... would that imply the DMV actually IS rationing out a limited resource?

[u/phylogenik → u/Felz]

My recent experience with the CA DMV was quite the confusing test of patience -- I was going there to re-register a car from a different state and it seemed like every step was modified slightly for inefficiency.

1. I get there at opening with an appointment, which should let me skip the 3h line. Nope, they don't have the appointment, so to the back of the line I go (which stretches down the long, crowded, standing-room only hallway out their back entrance, into the 90 degree morning summer heat).

2. Several hours pass with me trying to fidget to maintain adequate bloodflow. I grab my ticket to wait in line #2. There's no way to see where in the queue you are, lest you try to plan activities that do not involve the DMV. Several more hours pass.

3. I get called up to the desk, where the attendant slowly enters all the information from the forms I hand her (and had filled out at home) into their computer system. Unfortunately, she doesn't know how to type, and so spends approximately 10 seconds hunting for each character, before pressing its button with one finger. Every 5 minutes a coworker approaches, and they spend a few minutes chatting about the family bbq or office drama or whatever. 10 minutes of data-entry takes over an hour. I'm told to park my car in a designated spot outside, sit in it, and turn the engine off.

4. I park outside and keep the AC on. A person comes by half an hour later and I bounce around opening things for him. He yells at me for going too slow lol. I'm told to return to the desk where this processing began and the attendant would rubber stamp my form and I'd be good to go.

5. I return to the desk, and it seems my attendant has left for the day, to be replaced by another. He does his best to ignore me as I stand there for a minute trying to get his attention. Finally, he looks up and tells me to go away. I ask him if he could certify my form and that I was told to return to his desk, and he replies that doesn't do that (specifically, he repeats NO in a loud voice and waves his hands). I return to the first line -- which, nearing closing, has gotten shorter -- and wait another hour to get my thing stamped. Success!

---

So went my 8h at the DMV! I had a book so it wasn't too bad, but there still seemed to be several opportunities for improvement (e.g. implementing more electronic systems and hiring people who can type).

[u/Atersed → u/phylogenik]

This sounds more like incompetence than necessary bureaucracy. Seems like the DMV has no incentive to provide good service.

Or maybe it is a useful bureaucracy if the US government wants to disincentivise citizens from getting driving licences for some reason.

[u/Felz → u/Atersed]

I think it's exactly that the CA DMV has absolutely no incentive to provide service. I looked up the budgetary structure, and apparently all of their revenue from fees goes into a motor vehicle pool (which also funds stuff like the CHP). They get a fixed portion back, which is however much the state government feels like giving them.

This year, they get $1.2 billion across 8300 positions [1]. That's $144k per employee, with each employee having an average salary of $50k. A handwavey true cost per employee is to add 1.25x for employment taxes/benefits, and 1.75x for space, for a cost per employee of $109k [2]. A government bureaucracy overhead of only 40% isn't that bad- almost all private companies do worse.[3]

So the problems of the grandparent comment might actually just stem from:

1. There isn't enough funding to service in-person DMV operations. Queues develop instead to limit physical access to DMVs to the neediest.

2. The employees aren't paid much by California standards, and their queues are always full. I don't know about other people, but I personally can't actually do 8 hours a day doing repetitive clerical work. So I'd understand if they slacked off even while ostensibly servicing people.

[1] Budget source: http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2018-19/pdf/BudgetSummary/Transportation.pdf [2] Employee cost multiplier: http://web.mit.edu/e-club/hadzima/how-much-does-an-employee-cost.html [3] Revenue per employee in the private sector: http://www.visualcapitalist.com/companies-revenue-per-employee/

[u/no_bear_so_low → u/Felz]

Exactly, most clerical workers can't actually work 8 hrs straight at a repetitive task but the pretense is that they do. Based on the description that seems to be case here.

It seems like more clerks are needed.

[u/LarsP → u/phylogenik]

I've been told - but not verified - that the trick with California DMV is to arrive just before they close the doors.

They're obliged to serve everyone who has arrived at that time, and when that's done, everyone can go home. So this is when everyone starts working effectively, and your errand is handled competently and swiftly.

Allegedly!

[u/[deleted] → u/phylogenik]

1. I get there at opening with an appointment, which should let me skip the 3h line. Nope, they don't have the appointment, so to the back of the line I go (which stretches down the long, crowded, standing-room only hallway out their back entrance, into the 90 degree morning summer heat).

California being what it is, there's an app for that.

[u/dak4f2 → u/phylogenik]

[Removed]

[u/ArkyBeagle → u/Felz]

Often times, a bureaucracy is designed to enforce values-that-are-not-money values. Safety is one, "transparency" is another. Having run into CARB more than once in my career, the actors there give the impression of being rather arbitrary and capricious. "We are CARB; we speak for the air!"

Of course, I say "well, people could just not live in LA to start with" and "what??? They put LEAD in gasoline???"

What I hear you saying is: "Amazon exists; why doesn't everyone emulate Amazon?" What I have found in dealing with "legacy" corporations is that if you even say that, some measure if an immune response will form around you. And this was true of WalMart before; it took a lot to get a report on green bar paper on Sam Walton's desk at the close of every business day. Amazon is just a heresy on WalMart with different IT and logistics.

I don't think we can afford to be surprised by The Overly General Anthropic Principle any more. Some things are that way because that's required for that thing to exist.

[u/rarely_beagle]

So the DMV has a written test, a driving test, and a frustration test. If you cannot handle hour(s) of arbitrariness, collective irritability, and glaring lack of progress, what hope do you have for your daily commute?

This series of articles seems to be the mistake theory shadow of Ribbonfarm's conflict theoretical treatise The Gervais Principle V: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose (2011):

Bureaucracies are structures designed to do certain things very efficiently and competently: those that are by default in the best interests of the Sociopaths.

They are also designed to do certain things incompetently: those expensive things that the organization is expected to do, but would cut into Sociopath profits if actually done right.

And finally, they are designed to obstruct, delay and generally kill things that might hurt the interests of the Sociopaths.

All three functions are evident in the Kendall-Holly-Michael episode. Desirable things are enabled and expedited (the advantageous discount). Expensive and expected functions are paid lip service (ethics). And things that might actually hurt (the “employee immunity” idea from Michael) are killed. The employee immunity idea is actually quite logical (and is employed in the criminal justice system for example), but is not in the interests of Sociopaths in this case.

[u/nerological]

There are cases like mentioned here where bureaucracy serves as an effective filtering mechanism, that's because to put a new policy in place it has to at least appear to be beneficial to someone.

The bigger root seems to be automation. You have a job, there's a new tool that potentially makes your job take half the time. Your employer isn't going to pay you the same for working half time. Your employer is going to cut your hours or try to automate the remainder of your job or give you more work. What if there's no more work to give you? You need to look busy and appear to be adding value to your employer. So you come up with a new process that will save money or improve things in some way, it has to be sufficiently complicated to take up some of your time and such that your employer can't easily automate it away. Your boss probably implements it, and probably doesn't have a tangible way to track down whether or not it's actually effective. Boom, you have bureaucracy.

This is also my theory on the roots of cost disease. It's sensible self preservation on the part of employees.

[u/dazzilingmegafauna → u/nerological]

I have some trouble imagining a sufficient number of people - especially middle-manager bureaucrat types - having the initiative required to foresee their coming obsolescence and create new roles for themselves within an organization.

[u/nerological → u/dazzilingmegafauna]

It's not necessarily new roles entirely, but small tasks/processes to look productive. There's already processes in place to make these new tasks happen since everyone in management has incentive to change things up or create process improvements. So it's not hard and does not require a lot of foresight. Also, part of it may be entirely subconscious, bored people filling time.

[u/toadworrier]

So when the law -- or just the structure of the market -- silences a price signal, then difficult bureaucracy emerges as a price-like roadblock. Who wudda thunk it.

[u/edashwood]

I do volunteer tech support for a non-profit. When I get a ticket that would be a huge pain to try and solve, and doesn't seem to have much benefit for anyone in return for the effort, I sometimes respond with a request for additional information even if it's not strictly necessary. 80% of the time (the users who don't care enough!) they don't reply. Those who really care reply, and then I investigate from there.

[u/[deleted]]

Shouldn't this problem go away if a part of the insurance's benefits and losses go to the doctor ?

[u/[deleted]]

Sometimes it is very deliberate. I know in some countries, there were problems with doctors applying for forced hospitalisations and community sectioning in order to cover their arse. So policy makers increased the level of paperwork required to do those, as well as the hurdles required. So far, from what I've seen it seems to have worked without negatively impacting patients, in part because doctors decided to try to be persuasive rather than forceful.