I appreciate the post, it raises an interesting and important question. Long story short, I am significantly more sympathetic to Jennifer’s position than to Dominic’s. In the interest of saving some time, I’ll focus primarily on the US here, and write out a couple of bullet points explaining my current beliefs:
Dominic believes that bureaucrats being appointed instead of elected and not having “skin in the game” is a big problem because it prevents genuine accountability for their actions. In general, I think feedback loops are absolutely critical, and accountability of those in power is indeed one of the critical benefits of democracy over an authoritarian system. But I think there are well-established instances of when governmental institutions not being accountable to politicians is an absolutely critical aspect of why they function well. The standard example of this is the central bank (in the US case, the Federal Reserve). Central bank independence is almost universally considered by economists as having resulted in much more stable unemployment and inflation numbers, because politicians no longer have the ability to force the bank to stimulate the economy now and thus create inflation later.[1] I think something similar, although less clear, is also true in the case of governmental bureaucracies. Do you really want RFK Jr. to staff the entire FDA, CDC, etc. with sycophants and anti-vaxxers? More broadly, do you really want elected officials to control what kind of science and analysis is being done?
Something along the lines of When money is abundant, knowledge is the real wealth. Say a politician wants bureaucrats that will accomplish something (the “what”), not follow a set of rules (the “how”). So… how exactly does he do that? How does he even find these workers? And, as an aside, how does he convince them to join in the first place? The way private industry does it is by offering a ton of money and great compensation packages to the most productive and knowledgeable workers. Governments… don’t do that. People already (unfortunately and wrongly, IMO) think governmental workers get too much money; lowering compensation is one of the most popular proposals floated in public discourse. If you take away job security as a perk, what precise reason would anyone have to work for the government? All you’ll get are those who are either so rich they don’t need any compensation (but then why not do something more fun like starting a business?), or the actual True Believers who are so radical and extremist that they will sacrifice their own material well-being at the altar of the True Ideological Goal. Is that really who you want in power?
My reading of history, confirmed by experts in the relevant areas, is that Civil Service Reform in the late 19th century was an absolutely critical step on the path to increasing state capacity, reducing quid-pro-quo corruption, and preventing tragedies and strife. To the extent Dominic wants to reverse this and make apolitical bureaucratic workers fire-able by politicians simply due to the politician disagreeing with what the bureaucrats are doing,[2] that seems terrible for the same reasons things were terrible prior to the Pendleton Act.
Dominic believes that bureaucrats are “focused on self-preservation rather than on solving real problems.” This seems true. What’s less clear is how making the political branches more involved in this would make things better. If you want an example of powerful people focused on self-preservation instead of solving real problems, it’s hard to pick a better example than the political class. To the extent they are incentivized to focus on solving “real problems,” those are typically the Current Thing, or in any case something that will become irrelevant past the date of the politicians re-election to office.
I think Dominic’s overall analysis underrates the extent to which having the system be focused on procedure and not outcomes was an intentional design choice by progressives starting around the 1970′s. This is an important but slightly tangential point, so I’ll stop here (for now, at least).
I think it also underrates how much structural changes in the relative powers of the three branches have resulted in the outsized influence and power of the executive bureaucracy. As per Secret Congress, the filibuster and other structural background components (such as the rise of social media, increased polarization, and the unintended consequences of sunshine laws and the banning of pork spending) have changed the incentive structure for elected officials in the legislative branch. No longer are they rewarded for making compromises; instead, quite the opposite: they get acclaim and support and likes on social media for opposing anything but the most radical plans. This has made getting important, non-budgetary bills through Congress basically impossible. So now all major policy changes happen inside the Executive (where the party not in power has ~ no control) or by the Judiciary. This has empowered bureaucracies more than anything else, in my view.
In general, politicians have significantly greater discount rates than experts or even regular citizens because their terms in office are very short. This is a principal-agent problem: politicians are incentivized to sacrifice the future at the altar of the present, while politically unaccountable bureaucrats generally are not.
Which, in practice, will mean the bureaucrats don’t agree entirely with the political views of the elected official, as opposed to there being any objective dereliction of duty.
The way private industry does it is by offering a ton of money and great compensation packages to the most productive and knowledgeable workers
And then often suffer from the same problems anyway because in many places management keeps simply pursuing goals based on “what the investors need to hear” or “what I think is good for business” rather than a synthesis with what their hired experts think is feasible to do in time and with good quality.
Focusing on the US seems like a mistake, since Dominic Cummings worked in the UK, yet the situation seems to be substantially worse, despite, eg, there being no separation of powers.
How to find workers that will do with Dominic Cummings wants? He found it quite easy to recruit from people already employed by the Department. He didn’t need a lot. He couldn’t manage a lot. If the masses had ignored him, it would have been fine, but they actively sabotaged. And lots of people he found productive left because it was too difficult.
Maybe. I know relatively little about the functioning of the UK government, so I focused on areas where I thought I had some useful contributions to share.
I will note Jennifer Palkha has primarily been involved with the US government and bureaucracy, and in any case Martin has talked about bureaucracy topics in the context of the US before here on LW. So there is still some value in figuring out what is going on in America.
You say he “found it quite easy to recruit from people already employed by the Department.” That doesn’t seem do have been true for Musk when he tried to get DOGE to work in the US, in my understanding (he brought in young workers and programmers from the private sector).
Britain seems to be suffering from serious economic sclerosis in a way similar to most of Europe (though perhaps more intense), while the complete opposite seems to be true for the US. Nevertheless, bureaucracy, inefficiency, and red tape are still critical constraints on abundance, infrastructure building, state capacity, renewable energy acquisition, etc. This signals the fundamental nature of the problem may be very different across the Atlantic.
As per the discussion in Martin’s previous post, much of bureaucratic inefficiency in other countries is direct corruption and flows from it, to a significant extent. This does not appear to be the case in the US.
There are many other points to be raised. And I certainly do believe that what I mentioned with respect to the US has wide applicability and reflects important arguments that need to be kept in mind regardless of where the country we’re discussing is located. But I think the fundamental nature of the problems is quite different in different states, and we need to be cognizant of that instead of painting with too broad a brushstroke. Answers unique to America may (and, I claim, do) well explain why the situation in America is as it is, and why it differs from what goes on in other places.
I don’t know how the US system works at all, and have only a shallow understanding of the UK one (mostly from watching Yes Minister), but I think in the US a lot of posts that in the UK would be civil service are instead political posts. For example, I think US politicians directly pick which ambassadors to send, which is not the UK system.
As a New Zealander we see the same general problems, unaccountable and sclerotic bureaucracy that politicians are finding that they have less and less actual executive control over due to all sorts of inserted regulatory and other mechanisms to restrict govt ability to control them, as well as internal cultures that venerate the in-group bureaucrats consensus on How Things Should Be™ and practice subtle and unsubtle methods of resistance against any outside agency that seeks to change that policy. What Cummings et al call ‘the blob’, the US call ‘deep state’.
NZ public sector has increased in size by 100% in last 25 years, with population growth of 50% and typical white collar productivity increases around 50% it would be reasonable to expect that same level of government function could be accomplished with around half the current numbers. Most private sector people I associate with would not say that governance has improved in last 25 years, in fact in many easily viewable metrics it has clearly deteriorated with worse performance in health and education, higher regulatory burdens etc. The cost and lost-productivity costs on NZ (and lost revenue that would arise from those workers paying tax in productive jobs rather than spending it as civil servants) amount to a few % of GDP, and would probably be the difference between the deficits we currently run and having no deficits—a big drain on our future prosperity.
It’s not a new problem, having been an issue ever since the city-state came into being, bureaucrats and people in positions of power will almost always care more about maintaining and growing their power than about providing any utility to others. UK “Yes Minister” comedy series lampooned it in the 1980′s, Parkinson wrote a best selling book on in the 1950′s: Parkinson’s Law And Other Studies in Administration and Parkinson’s Law: Or The Pursuit of Progress, and we even have the term ‘Byzantian’ to describe excessive bureaucracy from an empire dead for 1000 years.
I would concur that it is absolutely a function of lack of accountability and inability to effectively censure poor performance or subtle intransigence/sabotage of political masters in the public service, and has grown worse with the growth of a distinct self-reinforcing in-group civil service tribalistic identity, perhaps stoked by the homogeneity of elitist educational backgrounds of those that seek government jobs with beliefs that don’t mirror or even respect those of the general public they effectively rule over. And it is creating an extreme crisis in governance in democracies around the world, potentially to the point of violence in Europe as populations get incensed at their electorally signaled preferences being ignored by civil servants with growing social problems that seems to be rising as a result.
“You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing”—Thomas Sowell
I’m a bit confused (more than a bit, actually). I read Cochrane’s post and the linked ECB blogpost written by the president of the ECB. The latter is a bit disappointing to look at, partly for reasons Cochrane mentioned.[1]
But I don’t really understand what (if anything) the ECB has done to overstep its mandate. As far as I can tell, the linked writing is a blog post written by the president of the ECB. In so far as it reveals poor and biased thinking on an important policy matter, it’s disappointing. But “the ECB has a mandate to make decisions on the basis of [X]” does not mean “the ECB cannot or even should not express opinions about [Y, which is different from X]” or “the ECB should not lobby governments to provide specific forms of [in this case climate-focused] fiscal stimulus.”[2]
Are there specific actions that reveal the way the ECB’s thinking has changed its behavior?
It’s O’Sullivan’s law at play, really: any organization not explicitly designed to be right-wing will eventually trend left-wing over time. When you overlay on top of this the crank realignment and its associated degradation of left-of-center epistemology, I guess this is what you get.
I appreciate the post, it raises an interesting and important question. Long story short, I am significantly more sympathetic to Jennifer’s position than to Dominic’s. In the interest of saving some time, I’ll focus primarily on the US here, and write out a couple of bullet points explaining my current beliefs:
Dominic believes that bureaucrats being appointed instead of elected and not having “skin in the game” is a big problem because it prevents genuine accountability for their actions. In general, I think feedback loops are absolutely critical, and accountability of those in power is indeed one of the critical benefits of democracy over an authoritarian system. But I think there are well-established instances of when governmental institutions not being accountable to politicians is an absolutely critical aspect of why they function well. The standard example of this is the central bank (in the US case, the Federal Reserve). Central bank independence is almost universally considered by economists as having resulted in much more stable unemployment and inflation numbers, because politicians no longer have the ability to force the bank to stimulate the economy now and thus create inflation later.[1] I think something similar, although less clear, is also true in the case of governmental bureaucracies. Do you really want RFK Jr. to staff the entire FDA, CDC, etc. with sycophants and anti-vaxxers? More broadly, do you really want elected officials to control what kind of science and analysis is being done?
Something along the lines of When money is abundant, knowledge is the real wealth. Say a politician wants bureaucrats that will accomplish something (the “what”), not follow a set of rules (the “how”). So… how exactly does he do that? How does he even find these workers? And, as an aside, how does he convince them to join in the first place? The way private industry does it is by offering a ton of money and great compensation packages to the most productive and knowledgeable workers. Governments… don’t do that. People already (unfortunately and wrongly, IMO) think governmental workers get too much money; lowering compensation is one of the most popular proposals floated in public discourse. If you take away job security as a perk, what precise reason would anyone have to work for the government? All you’ll get are those who are either so rich they don’t need any compensation (but then why not do something more fun like starting a business?), or the actual True Believers who are so radical and extremist that they will sacrifice their own material well-being at the altar of the True Ideological Goal. Is that really who you want in power?
My reading of history, confirmed by experts in the relevant areas, is that Civil Service Reform in the late 19th century was an absolutely critical step on the path to increasing state capacity, reducing quid-pro-quo corruption, and preventing tragedies and strife. To the extent Dominic wants to reverse this and make apolitical bureaucratic workers fire-able by politicians simply due to the politician disagreeing with what the bureaucrats are doing,[2] that seems terrible for the same reasons things were terrible prior to the Pendleton Act.
Dominic believes that bureaucrats are “focused on self-preservation rather than on solving real problems.” This seems true. What’s less clear is how making the political branches more involved in this would make things better. If you want an example of powerful people focused on self-preservation instead of solving real problems, it’s hard to pick a better example than the political class. To the extent they are incentivized to focus on solving “real problems,” those are typically the Current Thing, or in any case something that will become irrelevant past the date of the politicians re-election to office.
I think Dominic’s overall analysis underrates the extent to which having the system be focused on procedure and not outcomes was an intentional design choice by progressives starting around the 1970′s. This is an important but slightly tangential point, so I’ll stop here (for now, at least).
I think it also underrates how much structural changes in the relative powers of the three branches have resulted in the outsized influence and power of the executive bureaucracy. As per Secret Congress, the filibuster and other structural background components (such as the rise of social media, increased polarization, and the unintended consequences of sunshine laws and the banning of pork spending) have changed the incentive structure for elected officials in the legislative branch. No longer are they rewarded for making compromises; instead, quite the opposite: they get acclaim and support and likes on social media for opposing anything but the most radical plans. This has made getting important, non-budgetary bills through Congress basically impossible. So now all major policy changes happen inside the Executive (where the party not in power has ~ no control) or by the Judiciary. This has empowered bureaucracies more than anything else, in my view.
In general, politicians have significantly greater discount rates than experts or even regular citizens because their terms in office are very short. This is a principal-agent problem: politicians are incentivized to sacrifice the future at the altar of the present, while politically unaccountable bureaucrats generally are not.
Which, in practice, will mean the bureaucrats don’t agree entirely with the political views of the elected official, as opposed to there being any objective dereliction of duty.
And then often suffer from the same problems anyway because in many places management keeps simply pursuing goals based on “what the investors need to hear” or “what I think is good for business” rather than a synthesis with what their hired experts think is feasible to do in time and with good quality.
Focusing on the US seems like a mistake, since Dominic Cummings worked in the UK, yet the situation seems to be substantially worse, despite, eg, there being no separation of powers.
How to find workers that will do with Dominic Cummings wants? He found it quite easy to recruit from people already employed by the Department. He didn’t need a lot. He couldn’t manage a lot. If the masses had ignored him, it would have been fine, but they actively sabotaged. And lots of people he found productive left because it was too difficult.
Maybe. I know relatively little about the functioning of the UK government, so I focused on areas where I thought I had some useful contributions to share.
I will note Jennifer Palkha has primarily been involved with the US government and bureaucracy, and in any case Martin has talked about bureaucracy topics in the context of the US before here on LW. So there is still some value in figuring out what is going on in America.
There is value figuring out what is going on in America. But since the same thing is going on elsewhere, answers unique to America are incorrect.
Is the same thing going on elsewhere?
You say he “found it quite easy to recruit from people already employed by the Department.” That doesn’t seem do have been true for Musk when he tried to get DOGE to work in the US, in my understanding (he brought in young workers and programmers from the private sector).
Britain seems to be suffering from serious economic sclerosis in a way similar to most of Europe (though perhaps more intense), while the complete opposite seems to be true for the US. Nevertheless, bureaucracy, inefficiency, and red tape are still critical constraints on abundance, infrastructure building, state capacity, renewable energy acquisition, etc. This signals the fundamental nature of the problem may be very different across the Atlantic.
As per the discussion in Martin’s previous post, much of bureaucratic inefficiency in other countries is direct corruption and flows from it, to a significant extent. This does not appear to be the case in the US.
There are many other points to be raised. And I certainly do believe that what I mentioned with respect to the US has wide applicability and reflects important arguments that need to be kept in mind regardless of where the country we’re discussing is located. But I think the fundamental nature of the problems is quite different in different states, and we need to be cognizant of that instead of painting with too broad a brushstroke. Answers unique to America may (and, I claim, do) well explain why the situation in America is as it is, and why it differs from what goes on in other places.
I don’t know how the US system works at all, and have only a shallow understanding of the UK one (mostly from watching Yes Minister), but I think in the US a lot of posts that in the UK would be civil service are instead political posts. For example, I think US politicians directly pick which ambassadors to send, which is not the UK system.
They are probably very different systems.
As a New Zealander we see the same general problems, unaccountable and sclerotic bureaucracy that politicians are finding that they have less and less actual executive control over due to all sorts of inserted regulatory and other mechanisms to restrict govt ability to control them, as well as internal cultures that venerate the in-group bureaucrats consensus on How Things Should Be™ and practice subtle and unsubtle methods of resistance against any outside agency that seeks to change that policy. What Cummings et al call ‘the blob’, the US call ‘deep state’.
NZ public sector has increased in size by 100% in last 25 years, with population growth of 50% and typical white collar productivity increases around 50% it would be reasonable to expect that same level of government function could be accomplished with around half the current numbers. Most private sector people I associate with would not say that governance has improved in last 25 years, in fact in many easily viewable metrics it has clearly deteriorated with worse performance in health and education, higher regulatory burdens etc. The cost and lost-productivity costs on NZ (and lost revenue that would arise from those workers paying tax in productive jobs rather than spending it as civil servants) amount to a few % of GDP, and would probably be the difference between the deficits we currently run and having no deficits—a big drain on our future prosperity.
It’s not a new problem, having been an issue ever since the city-state came into being, bureaucrats and people in positions of power will almost always care more about maintaining and growing their power than about providing any utility to others. UK “Yes Minister” comedy series lampooned it in the 1980′s, Parkinson wrote a best selling book on in the 1950′s: Parkinson’s Law And Other Studies in Administration and Parkinson’s Law: Or The Pursuit of Progress, and we even have the term ‘Byzantian’ to describe excessive bureaucracy from an empire dead for 1000 years.
I would concur that it is absolutely a function of lack of accountability and inability to effectively censure poor performance or subtle intransigence/sabotage of political masters in the public service, and has grown worse with the growth of a distinct self-reinforcing in-group civil service tribalistic identity, perhaps stoked by the homogeneity of elitist educational backgrounds of those that seek government jobs with beliefs that don’t mirror or even respect those of the general public they effectively rule over. And it is creating an extreme crisis in governance in democracies around the world, potentially to the point of violence in Europe as populations get incensed at their electorally signaled preferences being ignored by civil servants with growing social problems that seems to be rising as a result.
“You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing”—Thomas Sowell
A thoughtful reply. Just to fuel the discussion, here’s John Cochrane on ECB overstepping it’s mandate: https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/central-bankers-can-be-too-independent
I’m a bit confused (more than a bit, actually). I read Cochrane’s post and the linked ECB blogpost written by the president of the ECB. The latter is a bit disappointing to look at, partly for reasons Cochrane mentioned.[1]
But I don’t really understand what (if anything) the ECB has done to overstep its mandate. As far as I can tell, the linked writing is a blog post written by the president of the ECB. In so far as it reveals poor and biased thinking on an important policy matter, it’s disappointing. But “the ECB has a mandate to make decisions on the basis of [X]” does not mean “the ECB cannot or even should not express opinions about [Y, which is different from X]” or “the ECB should not lobby governments to provide specific forms of [in this case climate-focused] fiscal stimulus.”[2]
Are there specific actions that reveal the way the ECB’s thinking has changed its behavior?
It’s O’Sullivan’s law at play, really: any organization not explicitly designed to be right-wing will eventually trend left-wing over time. When you overlay on top of this the crank realignment and its associated degradation of left-of-center epistemology, I guess this is what you get.
Perhaps as an illustrative example, the Federal Reserve also publishes research and opinion notes (and has for decades). Looking at some topics they’ve covered, I see foreign direct investment, analyses of China’s economic potential and output, the costs of compliance with legal barriers to trade in countries other than the US, etc.