When I consider management and leadership performance I think of Bastiat's work "That which is seen and That which is not seen"
A thing often not seen in an institution is the evolution of its culture. A hallmark of a successful organization is the culture embodies principles that promote success. An organization with a good culture can enjoy success for a while even when the caliber of leadership and management has declined.
But then the organization starts to fail and this leads to questions and demotions and firings and the organization is in upheaval. The most recent leaders are blamed. And they likely share some blame. But actually the organization began to fail much earlier when it took for granted positive cultural inertia would persist on its own.
Fixing a broken culture is extremely difficult. The effort is guaranteed to hurt feelings and test everyone involved. It is better to preserve a successful culture. However, appreciating what makes a culture successful requires leaders to notice the things that are not seen, but are indications of the organization's health and strength.
One of the ways Wokeness destroys organizations is it causes leaders to rationalize a policy is good and so there is no need to consider negative consequences. The culture begins to slide but since there is no reward for noticing the decline, there is no correction. Only when the rot is evident - only after the iceberg is hit - do officials acknowledge a problem.
To me, aligning authority with responsibility means that your vote should be proportional to your net tax paid to the government. Furthermore you should be able to delegate and undelegate your vote to whom you choose on a per-question or per-topic basis.
That assumes that your value to the government can be measured by your income. I'm a big fan of income and success, but a citizen has many other duties, such as abiding by the social contract to conduct interactions by consent rather than violence, and to band together with other to corral those who break the contract. For instance, you wouldn't want to give extra votes to a successful bank-robbing team.
Thank you for your reply, I have been thinking about this idea for a long time.
You wrote “your value to the government”. To me, this is a backwards statement. Our Constitution supposes a government whose legitimacy derives from a sovereign people. Thus, the question of an election is: “what value is this government to the sovereign people?”
“Taxes paid” is a legible and neutral metric that indicates how much skin the voter has in the game.
To a reasonable approximation, I would say a person who pays zero tax yet votes anyway is not exercising that power in a responsible way - they are usurpers.
Someone who acts in a pro-social way in other areas of life yet pays zero tax should be ashamed to lend legitimacy to government spending in their own name when they know they have not contributed to the common purse. The honorable course would be to leave it to those who paid tax to set the policy.
I seriously doubt that there is a large population of tax-paying criminals (pro-social sociopaths), so I am not concerned about them.
You make several excellent points. I definitely don't define citizens by their value to the government, though my comment was a careless step in that erroneous direction. I agree that skin in the game is crucial, and that taxes paid are a pretty decent proxy for that most of the time. I also agree that the overlap between taxpayers and sociopaths at present is small, but I would still worry that a system that rewards any and all high-income-earners with extra votes is lacking a feedback loop and will lead to trouble. Many psychopaths might be happy to contribute a lot of taxes if it gave them automatic control over lots of votes and disenfranchised their victims.
"Skin in the game" is a great way to proceed, as long as we don't create incentives for theft or violence in the pursuit of wealth. Maybe the answer is to cancel the extra votes of anyone convicted of fraud or violence in the pursuit of taxable income. I'm all for valorizing income from any pursuit in every other context. We can say that fraud and violence in the pursuit of income will be handled by the usual law enforcement mechanisms, but that assumption can be placed in doubt over time if the very targets of this effort get outsized voting rights.
One more quibble: whenever some can vote more than others, we have to worry about the limits on majoritarian power. It's already a problem now that 51% of voters can agree to confiscate the wealth of anywhere from 1-49%.
I did enjoy Elon Musk's brutal putdown when Sen. Warren criticized his contributions to the public fisc.
"The combination of strong authority and weak accountability is the one that troubles me the most. " Today, strong authority comes both from government and from Big Companies that are Too Big To Fail.
I don't believe any single COO/CA new "top bureaucrat" position would be effective, neither much short term nor long term. I'd more believe two top bureaucrats whose main job is to fire other gov't bureaucrats, with each being partisan majority in House of Reps, and minority in House of Reps. We need more honest criticism and much higher personnel turnover.
The most imbalance now is in the top Deep State bureaucrats. We need ways of getting rid of more of those bureaucrats.
I also now favor Term Limits of 10 years for all such gov't employees - after 10 years you leave. Good performers or bad. The lack of accountability is encouraged by the lack of turnover.
One type of organization that doesn't seem to appear in Arnold's taxonomy is what I call "operating nonprofits." These are nonprofit organizations that sell services and/or products (collectively, "services" for sake of brevity). To survive and thrive, these nonprofits have to provide services that their consumers want to buy, and they need to operate at least to break even (including whatever donations they are able to attract). Although operating nonprofits have no shareholders, they do have boards of directors (which are typically self-perpetuating) and professional staffs to run the operation day-to-day. Operating nonprofits that don't operate reasonably efficiently and that don't sell desirable services start to run losses and eventually fail, unless some benefactor keeps it afloat. Examples of operating nonprofits are nursing homes, hospitals, National Geographic (which earns a lot of revenue from its magazines and TV shows), private K-12 schools (although private schools increasingly appear to have been overrun by their bureaucracies and faculties, like many colleges).
All organizations evolved towards the primary mission being "growth and survival". Without that mission they cease to exist, which is why it is the same mission as life and natural evolution. This mission means more authority and less responsibility especially if that responsibility can result in bankruptcy.
In the private sector we have bankruptcy to keep the institutions focused on their stated missions. What makes capitalism work is the real probability of failure and that is why the DMV and Public Schools can go on expanding their resource use while failing on a grand scale. Their failures always result in more resources, not less.
"The combination of strong authority and weak accountability is the one that troubles me the most. It concerns me that so many people seem to want that combination. And even worse, our society seems to be creating positions for them. Bureaucrats. Non-profit workers. Activists."
Thinking about open source. It’s true that open source for consumers didn’t happen in any meaningful way. But open source is a tremendously important part of how most software is written today. Many of the fundamental building blocks of any piece of software are pulled from open source projects. This has created huge improvements in efficiency and quality because the industry shares investment into the non-differentiated parts of their software products. It serves a function more like a standards organization (perhaps without as much of the politicking, though).
I’m not sure that has anything to do with the authority/accountability problem. But I thought it was wrong to leave the statement as if open source “failed” in any way. It just turned out to succeed in a very different way than what people imagined at its inception.
Linux as a desktop OS remains something for professional experts, special purpose, or hobbyists. Linux kernel as something which in my impression has apparently become the backbone of, not 'everything' but it seems easier these days to list the exceptions, is dominant enough that to say it 'won' in the end isn't far off. This is the second hand understanding of a non-expert, so I invite people who actually really know what they're talking about to chime in and correct my impression where it is wrong.
I have done work on some of the kinds of systems you are writing about Handle and you are pretty much correct about the ubiquity of Linux and open source software in “infrastructure” applications
Authority comes from history. Accountability comes from feedback loops — which are quite long at the societal level. When we condemn every past generation for failing to meet the standards of ultra-modern “morality,” we unmoor our sources of authority from multigenerational feedback loops. We are thus deservedly ruled by idiots, cowards, and con artists.
What are key mechanisms that might increase accountability?
a) competition (exit & entry)
b) voice (scandal, recall, elections, protest)
c) audit
My intuition is that competition is the most effective mechanism. There is a puzzle: Many not-for-profit orgs operate in competitive markets, depend heavily on customer revenues, and lack large endowments to shield them from competition, but exhibit weak accountability. Examples might be many empty churches and many private colleges.
Insofar as governments have monopoly jurisdiction, government accountability depends on voice and audit. The quality of voice mechanisms is beset by voter ignorance, fickle attention, innumeracy, emotion, and characteristics biases (for example, do-something bias and social desirability bias). Audit seems prone to capture by bureaucracy and/or by executive interest.
Unions in the auto industry c. 1970 blunted competition and imposed a kind of bureaucracy across the industry.
Gov't regs increase bureaucracy in firms and orgs via HR.
New laws could incorporate the promises their proponents forwarded during their advocacy as conditions of their own continuance. "If within 5 years X is not greater than Y according to Z, then this law and all regulations issued under its granted authorities terminate and auto-repeal."
I appreciate Arnold's COO/CA proposal because it grapples with operationalized accountability. Too often we equate accountability with scrutiny, the latter being necessary but insufficient. Our ongoing information revolution heightens scrutiny but magnifies the difficulty in translating that scrutiny into accountability.
This tension isn't new (how well does popular voting disentangle policy from outcome ... maybe badly but maybe outcomes are the best practical measure ... but election cycles are shorter than outcome cycles ... oh well, it's the worst system except for all the others).
But the current flood of information, hyper-partisanship, and lack of trust seem to amplify the tension.
I wonder if today's power grabs are rationalized (to a greater extent than usual) as defensive rather than offensive, i.e. a response to a breakdown in accountability rather than an attempt to undermine accountability.
I know that most conservatives rationalize power grabs defensively, "since they do it" - but Woke folk also claim to be defensive because the Trump and/or Republicans or Christians are being "deliberately offensive & harmful".
-If OUR (good) side is accountable, but they're not, they win, which is terrible; so we can't be more accountable than them - This comes from every side which is a "side".
I think you are right that we need to be a bit careful about how we think of decentralization. Typically decentralization results in lowering authority and increasing accountability, and the goal is to decentralize until those hit a nice balance we like. The trouble is that they don't always do so, because one changes faster or slower than the other, or perhaps just can't ever balance nicely based on the institutional constraints. Blockchain is probably a good example, where extreme decentralization limits authority but accountability grows so slowly that you are still at just about the same point as "huge faceless bank that doesn't care" type institutions.
The biggest worry is that the curve is horse shoe shaped, where say decentralization lowers authority for a bit, then at some point starts to increase it again, and/or the opposite for accountability. An example around accountability might be taking on debt: for a small business there is a lot of accountability since you can lose the firm entirely, but for a single person just declaring bankruptcy can erase it all.
All that said, it is probably safe to say that the vast majority of US institutions, governmental or private, could stand to decentralize and be a bit smaller. We seem to have a lot of rules in place that limit accountability and encourage authority, both legally and through incentivizing larger organizations than would otherwise be optimal.
When I consider management and leadership performance I think of Bastiat's work "That which is seen and That which is not seen"
A thing often not seen in an institution is the evolution of its culture. A hallmark of a successful organization is the culture embodies principles that promote success. An organization with a good culture can enjoy success for a while even when the caliber of leadership and management has declined.
But then the organization starts to fail and this leads to questions and demotions and firings and the organization is in upheaval. The most recent leaders are blamed. And they likely share some blame. But actually the organization began to fail much earlier when it took for granted positive cultural inertia would persist on its own.
Fixing a broken culture is extremely difficult. The effort is guaranteed to hurt feelings and test everyone involved. It is better to preserve a successful culture. However, appreciating what makes a culture successful requires leaders to notice the things that are not seen, but are indications of the organization's health and strength.
One of the ways Wokeness destroys organizations is it causes leaders to rationalize a policy is good and so there is no need to consider negative consequences. The culture begins to slide but since there is no reward for noticing the decline, there is no correction. Only when the rot is evident - only after the iceberg is hit - do officials acknowledge a problem.
To me, aligning authority with responsibility means that your vote should be proportional to your net tax paid to the government. Furthermore you should be able to delegate and undelegate your vote to whom you choose on a per-question or per-topic basis.
That assumes that your value to the government can be measured by your income. I'm a big fan of income and success, but a citizen has many other duties, such as abiding by the social contract to conduct interactions by consent rather than violence, and to band together with other to corral those who break the contract. For instance, you wouldn't want to give extra votes to a successful bank-robbing team.
Wendy,
Thank you for your reply, I have been thinking about this idea for a long time.
You wrote “your value to the government”. To me, this is a backwards statement. Our Constitution supposes a government whose legitimacy derives from a sovereign people. Thus, the question of an election is: “what value is this government to the sovereign people?”
“Taxes paid” is a legible and neutral metric that indicates how much skin the voter has in the game.
To a reasonable approximation, I would say a person who pays zero tax yet votes anyway is not exercising that power in a responsible way - they are usurpers.
Someone who acts in a pro-social way in other areas of life yet pays zero tax should be ashamed to lend legitimacy to government spending in their own name when they know they have not contributed to the common purse. The honorable course would be to leave it to those who paid tax to set the policy.
I seriously doubt that there is a large population of tax-paying criminals (pro-social sociopaths), so I am not concerned about them.
You make several excellent points. I definitely don't define citizens by their value to the government, though my comment was a careless step in that erroneous direction. I agree that skin in the game is crucial, and that taxes paid are a pretty decent proxy for that most of the time. I also agree that the overlap between taxpayers and sociopaths at present is small, but I would still worry that a system that rewards any and all high-income-earners with extra votes is lacking a feedback loop and will lead to trouble. Many psychopaths might be happy to contribute a lot of taxes if it gave them automatic control over lots of votes and disenfranchised their victims.
"Skin in the game" is a great way to proceed, as long as we don't create incentives for theft or violence in the pursuit of wealth. Maybe the answer is to cancel the extra votes of anyone convicted of fraud or violence in the pursuit of taxable income. I'm all for valorizing income from any pursuit in every other context. We can say that fraud and violence in the pursuit of income will be handled by the usual law enforcement mechanisms, but that assumption can be placed in doubt over time if the very targets of this effort get outsized voting rights.
One more quibble: whenever some can vote more than others, we have to worry about the limits on majoritarian power. It's already a problem now that 51% of voters can agree to confiscate the wealth of anywhere from 1-49%.
I did enjoy Elon Musk's brutal putdown when Sen. Warren criticized his contributions to the public fisc.
"The combination of strong authority and weak accountability is the one that troubles me the most. " Today, strong authority comes both from government and from Big Companies that are Too Big To Fail.
I don't believe any single COO/CA new "top bureaucrat" position would be effective, neither much short term nor long term. I'd more believe two top bureaucrats whose main job is to fire other gov't bureaucrats, with each being partisan majority in House of Reps, and minority in House of Reps. We need more honest criticism and much higher personnel turnover.
The most imbalance now is in the top Deep State bureaucrats. We need ways of getting rid of more of those bureaucrats.
I also now favor Term Limits of 10 years for all such gov't employees - after 10 years you leave. Good performers or bad. The lack of accountability is encouraged by the lack of turnover.
One type of organization that doesn't seem to appear in Arnold's taxonomy is what I call "operating nonprofits." These are nonprofit organizations that sell services and/or products (collectively, "services" for sake of brevity). To survive and thrive, these nonprofits have to provide services that their consumers want to buy, and they need to operate at least to break even (including whatever donations they are able to attract). Although operating nonprofits have no shareholders, they do have boards of directors (which are typically self-perpetuating) and professional staffs to run the operation day-to-day. Operating nonprofits that don't operate reasonably efficiently and that don't sell desirable services start to run losses and eventually fail, unless some benefactor keeps it afloat. Examples of operating nonprofits are nursing homes, hospitals, National Geographic (which earns a lot of revenue from its magazines and TV shows), private K-12 schools (although private schools increasingly appear to have been overrun by their bureaucracies and faculties, like many colleges).
All organizations evolved towards the primary mission being "growth and survival". Without that mission they cease to exist, which is why it is the same mission as life and natural evolution. This mission means more authority and less responsibility especially if that responsibility can result in bankruptcy.
In the private sector we have bankruptcy to keep the institutions focused on their stated missions. What makes capitalism work is the real probability of failure and that is why the DMV and Public Schools can go on expanding their resource use while failing on a grand scale. Their failures always result in more resources, not less.
"The combination of strong authority and weak accountability is the one that troubles me the most. It concerns me that so many people seem to want that combination. And even worse, our society seems to be creating positions for them. Bureaucrats. Non-profit workers. Activists."
Police?
Thinking about open source. It’s true that open source for consumers didn’t happen in any meaningful way. But open source is a tremendously important part of how most software is written today. Many of the fundamental building blocks of any piece of software are pulled from open source projects. This has created huge improvements in efficiency and quality because the industry shares investment into the non-differentiated parts of their software products. It serves a function more like a standards organization (perhaps without as much of the politicking, though).
I’m not sure that has anything to do with the authority/accountability problem. But I thought it was wrong to leave the statement as if open source “failed” in any way. It just turned out to succeed in a very different way than what people imagined at its inception.
Linux as a desktop OS remains something for professional experts, special purpose, or hobbyists. Linux kernel as something which in my impression has apparently become the backbone of, not 'everything' but it seems easier these days to list the exceptions, is dominant enough that to say it 'won' in the end isn't far off. This is the second hand understanding of a non-expert, so I invite people who actually really know what they're talking about to chime in and correct my impression where it is wrong.
I have done work on some of the kinds of systems you are writing about Handle and you are pretty much correct about the ubiquity of Linux and open source software in “infrastructure” applications
Authority comes from history. Accountability comes from feedback loops — which are quite long at the societal level. When we condemn every past generation for failing to meet the standards of ultra-modern “morality,” we unmoor our sources of authority from multigenerational feedback loops. We are thus deservedly ruled by idiots, cowards, and con artists.
There is an entire field of study devoted to alignment of authority and accountability - and it is called biology.
There is only one real solution that is long-term effective - nested and interwoven systems at varieties of scales.
What are key mechanisms that might increase accountability?
a) competition (exit & entry)
b) voice (scandal, recall, elections, protest)
c) audit
My intuition is that competition is the most effective mechanism. There is a puzzle: Many not-for-profit orgs operate in competitive markets, depend heavily on customer revenues, and lack large endowments to shield them from competition, but exhibit weak accountability. Examples might be many empty churches and many private colleges.
Insofar as governments have monopoly jurisdiction, government accountability depends on voice and audit. The quality of voice mechanisms is beset by voter ignorance, fickle attention, innumeracy, emotion, and characteristics biases (for example, do-something bias and social desirability bias). Audit seems prone to capture by bureaucracy and/or by executive interest.
Unions in the auto industry c. 1970 blunted competition and imposed a kind of bureaucracy across the industry.
Gov't regs increase bureaucracy in firms and orgs via HR.
Let's hope that entrepreneurs are a hardy weed!
New laws could incorporate the promises their proponents forwarded during their advocacy as conditions of their own continuance. "If within 5 years X is not greater than Y according to Z, then this law and all regulations issued under its granted authorities terminate and auto-repeal."
I appreciate Arnold's COO/CA proposal because it grapples with operationalized accountability. Too often we equate accountability with scrutiny, the latter being necessary but insufficient. Our ongoing information revolution heightens scrutiny but magnifies the difficulty in translating that scrutiny into accountability.
This tension isn't new (how well does popular voting disentangle policy from outcome ... maybe badly but maybe outcomes are the best practical measure ... but election cycles are shorter than outcome cycles ... oh well, it's the worst system except for all the others).
But the current flood of information, hyper-partisanship, and lack of trust seem to amplify the tension.
I wonder if today's power grabs are rationalized (to a greater extent than usual) as defensive rather than offensive, i.e. a response to a breakdown in accountability rather than an attempt to undermine accountability.
I know that most conservatives rationalize power grabs defensively, "since they do it" - but Woke folk also claim to be defensive because the Trump and/or Republicans or Christians are being "deliberately offensive & harmful".
-If OUR (good) side is accountable, but they're not, they win, which is terrible; so we can't be more accountable than them - This comes from every side which is a "side".
I think you are right that we need to be a bit careful about how we think of decentralization. Typically decentralization results in lowering authority and increasing accountability, and the goal is to decentralize until those hit a nice balance we like. The trouble is that they don't always do so, because one changes faster or slower than the other, or perhaps just can't ever balance nicely based on the institutional constraints. Blockchain is probably a good example, where extreme decentralization limits authority but accountability grows so slowly that you are still at just about the same point as "huge faceless bank that doesn't care" type institutions.
The biggest worry is that the curve is horse shoe shaped, where say decentralization lowers authority for a bit, then at some point starts to increase it again, and/or the opposite for accountability. An example around accountability might be taking on debt: for a small business there is a lot of accountability since you can lose the firm entirely, but for a single person just declaring bankruptcy can erase it all.
All that said, it is probably safe to say that the vast majority of US institutions, governmental or private, could stand to decentralize and be a bit smaller. We seem to have a lot of rules in place that limit accountability and encourage authority, both legally and through incentivizing larger organizations than would otherwise be optimal.
Authority without accountability is tyranny. Accountability without authority is slavery.