My uni has 2 new layers of management between professor and president (was 2, now it’s 4) since 1998. Recently we noticed a scary budget shortfall. They decided to reorganize. After reorgnization...kept those extra 2 layers.
My doc’s office joined a big corporation. It was ACA (Obamacare). They would have had to hire another clerical worker to handle the extra paperwork.
This blog post is about something else, but buried in it is the number of clergy for various US denominations. Whether the denomination is growing or shrinking, the administrators’ numbers explode. https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/5910/
Many of us have produced dissertations or technical papers that will likely never be used for anything. And there are way more people whose job it is to produce science. Yet scientific innovation continues to decline (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5). I think it’s easy to miss how shocking this is. We have way more people working with way better equipment, with previously unavailable computer support, not just in the West but all over the world. We should have invented flying cars, the Terminator, and the flux capacitor by now. How much of a researcher’s time is spent on innovation, and how much on grants, paperwork, and publicizing?
I don’t know why we have so much work that didn’t need to be done before. My guess is there was always pressure to do this but now we’re rich enough we can afford to pour money into things that don’t produce benefit. But it’s just a guess.
There is also a tremendous amount of make-work.
My uni has 2 new layers of management between professor and president (was 2, now it’s 4) since 1998. Recently we noticed a scary budget shortfall. They decided to reorganize. After reorgnization...kept those extra 2 layers.
My doc’s office joined a big corporation. It was ACA (Obamacare). They would have had to hire another clerical worker to handle the extra paperwork.
This blog post is about something else, but buried in it is the number of clergy for various US denominations. Whether the denomination is growing or shrinking, the administrators’ numbers explode. https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/5910/
Many of us have produced dissertations or technical papers that will likely never be used for anything. And there are way more people whose job it is to produce science. Yet scientific innovation continues to decline (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5). I think it’s easy to miss how shocking this is. We have way more people working with way better equipment, with previously unavailable computer support, not just in the West but all over the world. We should have invented flying cars, the Terminator, and the flux capacitor by now. How much of a researcher’s time is spent on innovation, and how much on grants, paperwork, and publicizing?
I don’t know why we have so much work that didn’t need to be done before. My guess is there was always pressure to do this but now we’re rich enough we can afford to pour money into things that don’t produce benefit. But it’s just a guess.