Bureaucracy exists in the public sector because the government has certain duties to the public which must be fulfilled, and the process of fulfilling them is inherently complex, difficult, and expensive.
It is also quite labor-intensive. Many people are required to facilitate the government’s administrative efforts. From court clerks to prison guards to the person who snaps your driver’s license photo, public service requires a lot of grunt work, and the direct impact of their performance upon everyone’s individual lives necessitates constant meta level analysis. This is further complicated by conflicting interests, disagreements over priorities, the prevalence of logistical errors, funding and informational deficiencies, social fads, internal ambivalence about the institutional mission, efforts to eliminate corruption and waste, corruption and waste period, and many other variables. Managing all of this at the federal, state, and local levels is mind-bogglingly convoluted and inconvenient, and I think necessarily bureaucratic.
In other words, the enormous difficulty of sustaining a functional society more or less justifies the existence of bureaucracy. The point of having a society is to increase the collective fitness of its members in the interest of improving their overall quality of life. Of course, sustaining a somewhat coordinated social framework is not a perfect solution to the problem of trying to be alive correctly, but it’s probably better than not doing it.
So you might say that bureaucracy in the public sector is, broadly speaking, an “efficiency-maximizer” with regard to public administration (at least in theory, although in practice bureaucracy is widely associated with inefficiency, which indicates that it’s simply failing to achieve its goal); or, even more broadly speaking, a “fitness-maximizer” that doesn’t happen to work very well, yet persists in the absence of anything better that could reasonably be expected to overcome entrenched resistance to reform efforts.
Whatever variable bureaucracy exists to maximize, its failures to do so are obviously not a reflection of its goals. All corporations are profit-maximizers, including those that eventually file bankruptcy.
Everything would be easy if only it weren’t so damn hard, etc.
Bureaucracy exists in the public sector because the government has certain duties to the public which must be fulfilled, and the process of fulfilling them is inherently complex, difficult, and expensive.
It is also quite labor-intensive. Many people are required to facilitate the government’s administrative efforts. From court clerks to prison guards to the person who snaps your driver’s license photo, public service requires a lot of grunt work, and the direct impact of their performance upon everyone’s individual lives necessitates constant meta level analysis. This is further complicated by conflicting interests, disagreements over priorities, the prevalence of logistical errors, funding and informational deficiencies, social fads, internal ambivalence about the institutional mission, efforts to eliminate corruption and waste, corruption and waste period, and many other variables. Managing all of this at the federal, state, and local levels is mind-bogglingly convoluted and inconvenient, and I think necessarily bureaucratic.
In other words, the enormous difficulty of sustaining a functional society more or less justifies the existence of bureaucracy. The point of having a society is to increase the collective fitness of its members in the interest of improving their overall quality of life. Of course, sustaining a somewhat coordinated social framework is not a perfect solution to the problem of trying to be alive correctly, but it’s probably better than not doing it.
So you might say that bureaucracy in the public sector is, broadly speaking, an “efficiency-maximizer” with regard to public administration (at least in theory, although in practice bureaucracy is widely associated with inefficiency, which indicates that it’s simply failing to achieve its goal); or, even more broadly speaking, a “fitness-maximizer” that doesn’t happen to work very well, yet persists in the absence of anything better that could reasonably be expected to overcome entrenched resistance to reform efforts.
Whatever variable bureaucracy exists to maximize, its failures to do so are obviously not a reflection of its goals. All corporations are profit-maximizers, including those that eventually file bankruptcy.
Everything would be easy if only it weren’t so damn hard, etc.