Bureaucracy has been getting worse for years. Bigger, more complex, more self-referential, self-justifying, self-absorbed. More impenetrable. The language of bureaucracy has been changing as some sort of linguistic mirror of the organisation itself. It has happened in the public service at all three levels and in the private sector. It has happened in every industry. Why? My current thoughts, in three slightly overlapping points:
Point 1) The distribution of demand across skills and abilities has been changing. As we’ve moved away from agriculture, through manufacturing and towards services and office work, the need for administrative, bureaucratic tasks has increased.
Point 2) The distribution of task-related ability across the population has not changed, or at least has not changed much. There might be more people going to university, but there are limits to how much education can enhance a person’s innate ability.
Point 3) (a) A high-ability person will get more done than a low-ability person, irrespective of their coworkers.
Point 3) (b) The productivity of a person is influenced by the ability of their co-workers, so that high-ability coworkers will raise your productivity and low-ability coworkers will lower your productivity.
Point 3) (c) There is an optimal size to a team. Even if everyone is of equal ability, per-person productivity will (initially) rise with the size of the team, peak, and then start to fall.
Points 1 and 2 mean that the need for bureaucratic work is increasing, but the number of people needed to do that work is increasing faster because the ability of the marginal (new) bureaucrat is less than the average ability of the existing bureaucratic workforce. Point 3 means that the gap between these two growth rates increases as the demand for bureaucratic work increases. As an illustration, I imagine the demand for bureaucratic tasks increasing linearly, but the size of the bureaucracy (and the inner complexity of it) needed to provide this service increasing exponentially.
How do we fight this? I see three ways:
a) Try harder to shift the distribution of ability over the population. The Aust/UK governments are aware of this, but have unfortunately settled for simply lowering the bar for getting into university. A generous commentator might acknowledge that they had the best intentions at heart, but the end result is one set of numbers going up, the value of those numbers going down and the problem remaining the same. Seriously working to address the problem via this tack — if it can be done from this angle at all — could only be done over a timeframe of 20+ years.
b) Work to slow (or, ideally, reverse) the increasing demand for bureaucratic work in the first place. Cut red tape. Stop trying to watch, record, register and regulate everything. Remove overlap.
c) Decrease bureaucratic team sizes. Make them specialise. Specifically link bureaucratic teams to the end-consumers that they are nominally serving.