The Bureaucratization of Everyday Life

David Brooks has identified a major problem in American life. That is, invasive bureaucracy.

Kudos to him. His concept-- death by a thousand papercuts-- suggests that we are being bled dry by bureaucracy. 

Bureaucrats issue edicts. The get in the middle of more and more transactions. They produce forms that everyone is obliged to fill out. They cause a huge amount of wasted time and energy. They are killing initiative and even the work ethic. 

If work produces goods and services, filling out forms to placate a voracious bureaucracy should be considered the enemy. 

Apparently, the thrust toward paper work is built on a moral foundation. We do not like the results of free competition and therefore we believe that we must manage competition. We do not like the results of standardized tests or final exams and therefore we believe that we must send an army of bureaucrats to re-engineer it all, so that the results will fulfill our idealistic vision of what society ought to look like.

Last week the president of Argentina, one Javier Milei, told a group of assembled grandees in Davos that the West was in the process of dispensing with free market competition, in the name of social justice and altruism. We were following a path that Argentina had been trying for decades. Imposing our moral sense on the marketplace. It wrecked Argentina; hopefully it will not do the same here.

However much history has told us that free enterprise is the best way to produce wealth and sustenance, wild-eyed idealists continue to insist that bureaucrats need to take control of the market. 

We must mention the following. The products of America’s educational system are more qualified to push paper than to contribute to wealth production and poverty reduction.

Brooks understands well the cost of casting a bureaucratic pall over all economic and social activities.

It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.

Those who have put a number on it have found that bureaucracy costs the nation $3 trillion in economic output per year.

Brooks writes:

The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review. That was about 17 percent of G.D.P. According to their analysis, there is now one administrator or manager for every 4.7 employees, doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.”

Take the example of health care. How much of the average health care dollar goes to health care? And, how much of it goes to government and insurance industry bureaucrats. 

Over a third of all health care costs go to administration. As the health care expert David Himmelstein put it in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.” All of us who have been entangled in the medical system know why administrators are there: to wrangle over coverage for the treatments doctors think patients need.

Surely, Obamacare has not helped the situation. It has placed another few layers of bureaucracy between each individual and a physician. 

Worse yet, is the glut of administrative bureaucrats in universities. As long as universities insist on admitting students or largely disparate abilities they will need to hire more bureaucrats to cover up their mistake.

Brooks does not quite identify the reason, but surely everyone now knows that the educational bureaucracy is condemning students to mediocrity. 

This situation is especially grave in higher education. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology now has almost eight times as many nonfaculty employees as faculty employees. In the University of California system, the number of managers and senior professionals swelled by 60 percent between 2004 and 2014. The number of tenure-track faculty members grew by just 8 percent.

Apparently, this has extended even into administrative control over student sexual encounters. Quoting Prof. Mark Edmundson, Brooks offers this tidbit:

In a recent essay in Liberties Journal, he illustrates how administrators control campus life by citing the rules they have devised to govern how members of the campus community should practice sadomasochistic sex: “When parties consent to BDSM 3, or other forms of kink, nonconsent may be shown by the use of a safe word, whereas actions and words that may signal nonconsent in non-kink situations, such as force or violence, may be deemed signals of consent.” Do institutions really need to govern private life this minutely?

One understands that the mass hysteria fomented by the #MeToo movement has something to do with this.

Why is it happening? Brooks offers his own thesis, after Philip K. Howard:

As Philip K. Howard has been arguing for years, good organizations give people discretion to do what is right. But the trend in public and private sector organizations has been to write rules that rob people of the power of discretion. These are two different mentalities. As Howard writes, “Studies of cognitive overload suggest that the real problem is that people who are thinking about rules actually have diminished capacity to think about solving problems.”

Moreover, the need for bureaucracy implies that people need to be protected from themselves. If they are allowed to take initiatives and to take risks, they might do something that appears to be sinful, that is, bigoted. And when we have to choose between letting the market work its will and producing a Heavenly City where we have erased all traces of bigotry, our moral souls, bless them, often chooses the latter.

Organizations are trying to protect themselves from lawsuits, but the whole administrative apparatus comes with an implied view of human nature. People are weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid. They need administrators to run their lives. They have to be trained never to take initiative, lest they wander off into activities that are deemed by the authorities to be out of bounds.

Administrators do not produce anything. Sometimes they correct errors, but more often than not they make work for themselves by gumming things up.

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