Steve writes: < Is the only/primary problem that individual human people can be wrongheaded/selfish/thoughtless and thereby get in the way of rightheaded/generous/thoughtful intentions? And is the "share" of these people (holding positions?) in the government an over-abundance? More than found in *any* institution? >
The main problem I have encountered with middle management is that they proliferate staff. A manager needs to manage, and so that implies they also have to hire. Eventually some fraction of the people that hire also want to be managers, and this causes the organization to deepen. A deep, large organization that has many managers is mostly concerned with politics and not with doing work. Every decision becomes about isolating the unfriendly who are not consensus-oriented. Indeed, there can be toxic staff. They get that way because they are so disgusted with the preoccupation with non-work goals that they eventually say so and upset people who expect to move up in the organization for nothing more than being nice and making their manager look good. The sidelined unfriendly staff in effect become cautionary tales. In this sense I understand why some (Bannon) would want to dismantle the administrative state. But I think the remedy is harder than just sabotaging the machine. It requires an devotion to values so that the group health is measured against those values. For technocratic things, that means that the group has an appreciation of why some things are hard, so that they can actually admire the people involved in solving them. You could call this against “wrongheadedness”, I suppose, but even a devil’s advocate can be understood to be arguing in good faith. In a consensus-oriented organization, the devil’s advocate is just rocking the boat. It is the obedient and agreeable people that are a problem. They amplify bad decisions until no one can tell the difference. I have a better view of people in government. I think the kind of person that wants to solve the big problems (that government is well positioned to solve) are slightly enriched for arguing in good faith. For one thing, they generally accept less money than their counterparts in business. I have no problem with the middle managers in government that spend much of careers wrangling ever more spending for NIH/NSF/DOE science. Because science builds a base of evidence and theory and a framework for communication that can be less self-centered. I would rather see bigger investments in fewer people, but the proliferation of people problem seems to be an unfixable people. (Modulo climate catastrophes, severe pandemics, etc.) Pulling back the money and forcing small organizations doesn’t address the problem, it just mitigates some waste. Marcus
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