Question: Have Moral Mazes been getting worse over time?
Could the growth of Moral Mazes be the cause of cost disease?
I was thinking about how I could answer this question. I think that the thing that I need is a good quantitative measure of how “mazy” an organization is.
I considered the metric of “how much output for each input”, but 1) that metric is just cost disease itself, so it doesn’t help us distinguish the mazy cause from other possible causes, 2) If you’re good enough at rent seeking maybe you can get high revenue despite you poor production.
This is still a bit superficial/goodharty, but I think “number of layers of hierarchy” is at least one thing to look at. (Maybe find pairs of companies that output comparable products that you’re somehow able to measure the inputs and outputs of, and see if layers of management correlate with cost disease)
Question: Have Moral Mazes been getting worse over time?
Could the growth of Moral Mazes be the cause of cost disease?
I was thinking about how I could answer this question. I think that the thing that I need is a good quantitative measure of how “mazy” an organization is.
I considered the metric of “how much output for each input”, but 1) that metric is just cost disease itself, so it doesn’t help us distinguish the mazy cause from other possible causes, 2) If you’re good enough at rent seeking maybe you can get high revenue despite you poor production.
What metric could we use?
This is still a bit superficial/goodharty, but I think “number of layers of hierarchy” is at least one thing to look at. (Maybe find pairs of companies that output comparable products that you’re somehow able to measure the inputs and outputs of, and see if layers of management correlate with cost disease)