ETA: I should have said this before diving into an object-level response. Congratulations on writing an interesting first post with an important question on a neglected topic.
I’ve been asking myself the same question about bureaucracies, and the depressing conclusion I came up with is that bureaucracies are often so lacking incentives that their actions are either based on inertia or simply unpredictable. I’m working from a UK perspective but I think it generalises. In a typical civil service job, once hired, you get your salary. You don’t get performance pay or any particular incentive to outperform.[1] You also don’t get fired for anything less than the most egregious misconduct. (I think the US has strong enough public sector unions that the typical civil servant also can’t be fired, despite your different employment laws.) So basically the individual has no incentive to do anything.
As far as I can see, the default state is to continue half-assing your job indefinitely, putting in the minimum effort to stay employed, possibly plus some moral-maze stuff doing office politics if you want promotion. (I’m assuming promotion is not based on accomplishment of object-level metrics.) The moral maze stuff probably accounts for tendencies toward blame minimisation.
Some individuals may care altruistically about doing the bureaucracy’s mission better, eg getting medicines approved faster, but unless they are the boss of the whole organisation, they need to persuade other people to cooperate in order to achieve that. And most of the other people will be enjoying their comfortable low-effort existence and will just get annoyed at that weirdo who’s trying to make them do extra work in order to achieve a change that doesn’t benefit them. So the end result is strong inertia where the bureaucracy keeps doing whatever it was doing already.
You get occasional and unpredictable exceptions to this dynamic if 1) there’s some exceptional cause that produces a ‘war effort’ mentality such that lots of people will voluntarily put in effort to achieve the same goal eg fast approval of Covid vaccine or 2) someone very senior wants to accomplish real change and puts in effort toward that. And in the case of 2) it probably still needs to be change that can be accomplished by something like writing new rules, because if the change requires large numbers of employees to actually change the way they work, they may successfully resist it. (See every large government IT project ever.)
I don’t like my conclusions. And I haven’t ever worked in an actual government bureaucracy, although I have been part of corporate ones, so this is very much a case of the outsider looking in. I hope that my speculation is wrong. But this is the best model I have of how government bureaucracies work.
[1] If there were such incentives you could at least start talking about Goodharting but I don’t think there are.
I would also expect some combination of: putting in the minimum effort, playing it safe, and optionally moral-maze behavior, and some form of rent seeking (e.g. taking bribes).
Pure blame minimization would motivate bureaucracies to reduce their jurisdiction, but expanding the jurisdiction provides more opportunities for rent seeking… if there is a standard way to make decisions about many things and yet carry no responsibility for their failure, I would expect bureaucracy to optimize for this.
Something like: Someone else is responsible for the success, but at every step they need to ask the bureaucracy for a permission; if the project fails because they didn’t get the permission, the person responsible is fully blamed regardless, because they should have found another solution.
(Now that I wrote this, it kinda reminds me of education, where the teachers are blamed for everything, and yet if they try to do anything differently, it is not allowed. Or rather, people complain about how private schools have unfair advantage because some of the rules do not apply to them, e.g. they are allowed to fire disruptive students, but the reasoning never goes towards relaxing the rules for public schools, too.)
I think the UK and other Western European countries have relatively little direct rent-seeking behaviour, but I agree with your hypothesis for any country that doesn’t have a strong anti-corruption culture. (Here, the rent-seeking goes more through political parties rather than non-political bureaucracies.) And I think the analogy with education is a very good one.
I’ve been asking myself the same question about bureaucracies, and the depressing conclusion I came up with is that bureaucracies are often so lacking incentives that their actions are either based on inertia or simply unpredictable
This ‘unpredictable’ - I think that it might be possible to get a better idea on a case by case basis.
ETA: I should have said this before diving into an object-level response. Congratulations on writing an interesting first post with an important question on a neglected topic.
I’ve been asking myself the same question about bureaucracies, and the depressing conclusion I came up with is that bureaucracies are often so lacking incentives that their actions are either based on inertia or simply unpredictable. I’m working from a UK perspective but I think it generalises. In a typical civil service job, once hired, you get your salary. You don’t get performance pay or any particular incentive to outperform.[1] You also don’t get fired for anything less than the most egregious misconduct. (I think the US has strong enough public sector unions that the typical civil servant also can’t be fired, despite your different employment laws.) So basically the individual has no incentive to do anything.
As far as I can see, the default state is to continue half-assing your job indefinitely, putting in the minimum effort to stay employed, possibly plus some moral-maze stuff doing office politics if you want promotion. (I’m assuming promotion is not based on accomplishment of object-level metrics.) The moral maze stuff probably accounts for tendencies toward blame minimisation.
Some individuals may care altruistically about doing the bureaucracy’s mission better, eg getting medicines approved faster, but unless they are the boss of the whole organisation, they need to persuade other people to cooperate in order to achieve that. And most of the other people will be enjoying their comfortable low-effort existence and will just get annoyed at that weirdo who’s trying to make them do extra work in order to achieve a change that doesn’t benefit them. So the end result is strong inertia where the bureaucracy keeps doing whatever it was doing already.
You get occasional and unpredictable exceptions to this dynamic if 1) there’s some exceptional cause that produces a ‘war effort’ mentality such that lots of people will voluntarily put in effort to achieve the same goal eg fast approval of Covid vaccine or 2) someone very senior wants to accomplish real change and puts in effort toward that. And in the case of 2) it probably still needs to be change that can be accomplished by something like writing new rules, because if the change requires large numbers of employees to actually change the way they work, they may successfully resist it. (See every large government IT project ever.)
I don’t like my conclusions. And I haven’t ever worked in an actual government bureaucracy, although I have been part of corporate ones, so this is very much a case of the outsider looking in. I hope that my speculation is wrong. But this is the best model I have of how government bureaucracies work.
[1] If there were such incentives you could at least start talking about Goodharting but I don’t think there are.
I would also expect some combination of: putting in the minimum effort, playing it safe, and optionally moral-maze behavior, and some form of rent seeking (e.g. taking bribes).
Pure blame minimization would motivate bureaucracies to reduce their jurisdiction, but expanding the jurisdiction provides more opportunities for rent seeking… if there is a standard way to make decisions about many things and yet carry no responsibility for their failure, I would expect bureaucracy to optimize for this.
Something like: Someone else is responsible for the success, but at every step they need to ask the bureaucracy for a permission; if the project fails because they didn’t get the permission, the person responsible is fully blamed regardless, because they should have found another solution.
(Now that I wrote this, it kinda reminds me of education, where the teachers are blamed for everything, and yet if they try to do anything differently, it is not allowed. Or rather, people complain about how private schools have unfair advantage because some of the rules do not apply to them, e.g. they are allowed to fire disruptive students, but the reasoning never goes towards relaxing the rules for public schools, too.)
I think the UK and other Western European countries have relatively little direct rent-seeking behaviour, but I agree with your hypothesis for any country that doesn’t have a strong anti-corruption culture. (Here, the rent-seeking goes more through political parties rather than non-political bureaucracies.) And I think the analogy with education is a very good one.
This ‘unpredictable’ - I think that it might be possible to get a better idea on a case by case basis.