So I’m asking you. What might be the quantity whose maximization or minimization is the basic general explanation of what bureaucracies do?
Let me try my hand at sketching a theory.
Here’s some background first. Firms are well-modeled as profit maximizers because, although they employ internal bureaucracies to achieve their ends, bureaucracies that are bad at the task of making investors money are either selected out over time due to competition, or are pruned due to higher-up managers having relatively strong incentives to fire people who are not making investors money. This model relies on an assumption that investors themselves are usually profit-maximizers, which seems uncontroversial.
By contrast, government bureaucracies lack the pressures of competitition, though they can (though less commonly) be subject to pruning, especially at the higher levels. I can think of two big forces shaping the motivations of government bureaucracies: the first being internal pressures on workers to “do work that looks good” to get promoted, and the second being a pressure to conform to the desires of the current president’s political agenda (for people at the top of the bureaucracy).
The second pressure mainly acts through a selection effect: the president generally nominates someone to head the CDC, FDA etc. They select this person on the basis of how well they can achieve their broad agenda, which is subject to political constraints. Bryan Caplan’s work on voter theory and irrationality is the primary workhorse in this part of the theory.
Since arguably the main way a president acts in their role as a politician is by nominating people to lead bureaucracies, we should expect them to take special care in ensuring that any potential nominee will conform to the values/biases of the general public. These values/biases include all the ones that Bryan Caplan mentions, plus a few more that are relevant for our purposes: pro “doing something” even if there’s not much we can do, and pro doing “feel-good” measures.
The first pressure is where the blame-minimization theory plays its largest role. Each person in the chain doesn’t want to be blamed for a big disaster, and the worst thing any one of them could do is make some maverick judgement completely out of line with conventional wisdom in the field, only for it to blow up in their face. Thus, we should expect a highly conformist, risk-averse culture within bureaucracies, focused on doing what looks and sounds good to please internal evaluators, at the cost of doing what might in fact be good.
This story doesn’t lend itself to a simple theory like “maximize profit” or “maximize the probability of getting a majority of votes” does. However, we can at least make the following predictions:
If public opinion contradicts expert consensus, government bureaucracies will generally side with public opinion, not expert consensus. Given the strong constraints on the higher-up leadership to please the president, acting against public opinion is essentially a death-wise for any would-be head of the agency. There might be some especially strong internal pressure to side with expert consensus at the cost of losing political points, but these pressures will be selected out over time as people realize it’s more comfortable to simply follow public opinion.
If there’s a short-term internal performance metric that is broadly associated with long-term performance, but far easier to measure than actual long-term success, we should expect people within bureaucracies to maximize this internal performance metric, even in cases where the association breaks down. This is just another way of saying that government bureaucracies Goodhart performance, in contrast to private corporations, which have much stronger incentives to make money even if that requires doing something anti-conformist.
Let me try my hand at sketching a theory.
Here’s some background first. Firms are well-modeled as profit maximizers because, although they employ internal bureaucracies to achieve their ends, bureaucracies that are bad at the task of making investors money are either selected out over time due to competition, or are pruned due to higher-up managers having relatively strong incentives to fire people who are not making investors money. This model relies on an assumption that investors themselves are usually profit-maximizers, which seems uncontroversial.
By contrast, government bureaucracies lack the pressures of competitition, though they can (though less commonly) be subject to pruning, especially at the higher levels. I can think of two big forces shaping the motivations of government bureaucracies: the first being internal pressures on workers to “do work that looks good” to get promoted, and the second being a pressure to conform to the desires of the current president’s political agenda (for people at the top of the bureaucracy).
The second pressure mainly acts through a selection effect: the president generally nominates someone to head the CDC, FDA etc. They select this person on the basis of how well they can achieve their broad agenda, which is subject to political constraints. Bryan Caplan’s work on voter theory and irrationality is the primary workhorse in this part of the theory.
Since arguably the main way a president acts in their role as a politician is by nominating people to lead bureaucracies, we should expect them to take special care in ensuring that any potential nominee will conform to the values/biases of the general public. These values/biases include all the ones that Bryan Caplan mentions, plus a few more that are relevant for our purposes: pro “doing something” even if there’s not much we can do, and pro doing “feel-good” measures.
The first pressure is where the blame-minimization theory plays its largest role. Each person in the chain doesn’t want to be blamed for a big disaster, and the worst thing any one of them could do is make some maverick judgement completely out of line with conventional wisdom in the field, only for it to blow up in their face. Thus, we should expect a highly conformist, risk-averse culture within bureaucracies, focused on doing what looks and sounds good to please internal evaluators, at the cost of doing what might in fact be good.
This story doesn’t lend itself to a simple theory like “maximize profit” or “maximize the probability of getting a majority of votes” does. However, we can at least make the following predictions:
If public opinion contradicts expert consensus, government bureaucracies will generally side with public opinion, not expert consensus. Given the strong constraints on the higher-up leadership to please the president, acting against public opinion is essentially a death-wise for any would-be head of the agency. There might be some especially strong internal pressure to side with expert consensus at the cost of losing political points, but these pressures will be selected out over time as people realize it’s more comfortable to simply follow public opinion.
If there’s a short-term internal performance metric that is broadly associated with long-term performance, but far easier to measure than actual long-term success, we should expect people within bureaucracies to maximize this internal performance metric, even in cases where the association breaks down. This is just another way of saying that government bureaucracies Goodhart performance, in contrast to private corporations, which have much stronger incentives to make money even if that requires doing something anti-conformist.