It's interesting to compare this categorization to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle) which I have found to be fairly accurate. Most of the categorizations above are people who aren't interested in the mission or goals of the organization but in either their own personal goals or promoting the organization.
There are a lot of historical examples of communities, associations, etc. starting out with cultural practices that are, if not exactly "socialist" or "self-government", more like "distributed, participative government". That is, many of the functions of governance were performed by the members of the association themselves as part-time duties and at the acceptable level of competent amateurs instead of that of full-time expert professionals in lifelong careers. Much more committee and subcommittee with lots of deliberation and voting than command-authority hierarchy.
This seems like it would be pretty inefficient, and it definitely is. It's too inefficient to work outside of high-trust, high social-capital contexts. But when it can work, there are major side-benefits to compensate for those costs. In such contexts such functions are seen as unfortunately necessities and either temporary gigs or else distractions from the primary mission of getting some job or project done. Government of, by, and for the members of the association, for instance, the very old way faculty used to run academies.
It is the very act of handing these functions over to full-time professionals that turns out to be a fatal mistake, the institutional equivalent of The Road to Serfdom. One thinks one will be able to spend more time focusing on one's primary mission and benefit from the efficiency gains from division of labor. But there is actually no good market for power once given away and no way to bargain to get it back, and all of a sudden one discovers that instead of a dedicated administration and staff working for them, it now turns out they are forced to take orders from the administration.
“How useful is this typology of personality types?” Not very. Some people who work in large organizations/bureaucracies are risk-averse (and interested in security), some are not (and thus more interested in career advancement), and some are more interested in ideas and advancing new policies and approaches (and are not cut out for a life in a rule-driven bureaucracy). An under appreciated aspect of “life in a bureaucracy” is how many members are first generation college graduates and are from humble backgrounds. Thus, job security is often important; also, they often lack an appreciation for and understanding of the intense political nature of life in a large organization.
My recent experience in government is that family SES background is way down the list of correlates to the revealed preference for job security. On the other hand, with regards to many being naive about how to get a foot in the door, learn the unwritten rules, and successfully play an institution's games, my impression is that family background - in terms of having a parent with actionable connections and direct, intimate knowledge of the institution - matters more and more. This isn't exactly a good fit to the traditional conceptions of privilege or nepotism, but "it rhymes".
My experience in government is from an older generation and perhaps less relevant today. Many of my peers were from first generation and lower middle class backgrounds. A surprising number also grew up in single-parent homes. As a group, they were unaware of how to play the bureaucratic game, or even that there was a game to be played. My own experience with SES is that candidates were selected for conformity to institutional practices and “beliefs,” and to achieve sexual or racial diversity, which allowed other bureaucrats to gain favor or influence.
There has been s sea change in the past 20 years, and another one is starting now. One fact which I used to surprise people with going back a decade at least and until, um, recent events made it slightly more widely appreciated, was that at some agencies a quarter or more of the employees had enough years of service to retire with full pensions and just ... weren't. It woule be intetesting to see the chart of numbers of recognitions for extra-long service over time. Not the "counting the days until retirement" stereotype at all. A lot of the large number of people who recently left government employment were those who could have retired years ago but weren't going anywhere without a hard push, which for many of them was what the "return to office" policy was. That is, the people I told this to were surprised at just how old and stagnant many of the agencies had become at the higher-GS levels (vs what was typical in the 20th century), with people having settled into their likely final position and just hanging out there forever, preventing turnover and blocking opportunities for advancement for younger people, and since that works it's way down the chain like a crash causes a traffic jam, it basically constipating the career pipelines. If you look at government records you'll see the same names over and over for very long periods. Instead of "up or out", it's "rarely up, rarely out, often stuck." Fauci (one position for 38 years) and Andrew Marshall (42 years) and Rickover (kind of) are, well, I recoil at using the term "poster children" for these ancients, but you get what I mean. One sees similar things in life tenure institutions like the Catholic Church, the Judiciary, Academia, but the spread of entrenched-incumbency, de-facto "Personnel-Conservatism", to other institutions and positions that used to change hands more often is a definite major trend.
“This is actually a quirk, and in some respects a weakness, of the venture capital model. The rest of us have the good sense to resist propositions that sound too good to be true. VC’s look for them.”
This (zealotry) is not actually a weakness in the VC model. It’s a feature and a strength for VCs and their returns.
Partly because of the nature of massively asymmetric returns (5 strikeouts and one grand slam pays *hugely* for VCs), and partly because such devotion in the face of long odds (surely not portfolio-optimal for the individual’s sweat equity) by the entrepreneurs increases the (low in the first place) odds that they succeed in their quest and deliver those outsized returns.
"conserver mindset is being confronted by zealots like Elon Musk and RFK,"
already having gotten comfortable with Navarro and Rubio and annoyances like the 5th and14th Amendments
Imagine the consternation if DOGE actually went after wasteful expenditures like farm subsidies and Medicare Advantage! That would require a Dune Messiah. :)
According to what I hear, I coud be wrong, the private companies get people on Medicare by actually proving more services (but still less than the “average” cost they are paid), in effect arbitraging cost of the relative young/health and the the older less healthy that eventually wind up back with plane vanilla Medicare
I see a Yuval Levin angle - if using the institution only as a platform, maybe at some point they shade from a climber or zealot into something outside this typology, like an institutional nihilist.
Whatever one thinks of Levin's claims, in reality extremely few people are in a position to exploit their membership in weak institutions (that is, those failing to exercise strong internal control on selection or discipline on behavior) for major publicity with significant personal benefit and at the expense of the interests of the institution. For most orgs, that kind of institutional nihilist is just not an important phenomenon.
On the other hand, many people at the helm of many institutions did not just introduce mission creep but mission subordination or even substitution to other political goals, and recently thought it was so morally obligatory that they went Full Kamikaze and piloted whatever was left of the public trust, goodwill, and presumptive legitimacy of their institutions right through anti-aircraft fire for even a small chance of ramming through the sides of the enemy carriers, with the only certain consequence being the ruination of their reputations for years, at least. The institutional jihadist has proven to be the real threat.
Perhaps you want to add a dynamic element. The types primarily describe static roles. Power is a category one might focus on, as a rather small network will steer the organization at the beginning and might grow into a sclerotic organization ("court"-phenomenon). Then there is, closely connected, politics. There are theories dealing with political processes, also called micropolitics, within organizations that can be applied to bureaucracies (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/economics-econometrics-and-finance/micropolitics). Then there are of course external interactions with politicians and with other bureaucracies, but hardly any dynamic ones with the citizens.
Iron Law: org folk & mission folk -- the latter found the org, which eventually gets taken over by org folk
AK: proceduralists & rebels << tho I think the mission oriented are not really rebels, but more interested in getting the mission job done, while the proceduralists are the org folk
Downs: conservers, for security & climbers, for power, prestige, money [already 3 types]
plus 3 mixes of self & mission oriented: zealots, passionately committed (like a rebel); advocate, higher level org supporter/ lobbyist; statesman a visionary or wannabee about the role of the org in society.
How did Freddie Mac change? Thru a "combination of climbers who saw opportunity for personal advancement in leading new initiatives and statesmen who thought that Freddie was helping “under-served” segments of the home-buying market."
Seems a reasonable set of descriptions for types of people in orgs, but also a bit of the roles that most bureaucrats fit into.
As usual, I don't see Dark Triads here, nor Big 5 nor HEXACO, nor (my own fav) Myers-Briggs. But like MBTI, the categories are given labels so as to be descriptive and somewhat memorable. Because simplicity is so important for usefulness, the Org vs Mission axis, from Iron Law, remains most useful. Arnold's zealous support for credit scoring would clearly fit into a "Mission" category, and all the the climbers are more org oriented. Probably those pushing him aside the most were among those with more Dark Triad traits.
I don't see how this categorization explains the apparent evolution of incompetence in monopoly institutions—think Bureau of Indian Affairs or state DMVs.
It's interesting to compare this categorization to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle) which I have found to be fairly accurate. Most of the categorizations above are people who aren't interested in the mission or goals of the organization but in either their own personal goals or promoting the organization.
"Specialization and Played."
There are a lot of historical examples of communities, associations, etc. starting out with cultural practices that are, if not exactly "socialist" or "self-government", more like "distributed, participative government". That is, many of the functions of governance were performed by the members of the association themselves as part-time duties and at the acceptable level of competent amateurs instead of that of full-time expert professionals in lifelong careers. Much more committee and subcommittee with lots of deliberation and voting than command-authority hierarchy.
This seems like it would be pretty inefficient, and it definitely is. It's too inefficient to work outside of high-trust, high social-capital contexts. But when it can work, there are major side-benefits to compensate for those costs. In such contexts such functions are seen as unfortunately necessities and either temporary gigs or else distractions from the primary mission of getting some job or project done. Government of, by, and for the members of the association, for instance, the very old way faculty used to run academies.
It is the very act of handing these functions over to full-time professionals that turns out to be a fatal mistake, the institutional equivalent of The Road to Serfdom. One thinks one will be able to spend more time focusing on one's primary mission and benefit from the efficiency gains from division of labor. But there is actually no good market for power once given away and no way to bargain to get it back, and all of a sudden one discovers that instead of a dedicated administration and staff working for them, it now turns out they are forced to take orders from the administration.
“How useful is this typology of personality types?” Not very. Some people who work in large organizations/bureaucracies are risk-averse (and interested in security), some are not (and thus more interested in career advancement), and some are more interested in ideas and advancing new policies and approaches (and are not cut out for a life in a rule-driven bureaucracy). An under appreciated aspect of “life in a bureaucracy” is how many members are first generation college graduates and are from humble backgrounds. Thus, job security is often important; also, they often lack an appreciation for and understanding of the intense political nature of life in a large organization.
My recent experience in government is that family SES background is way down the list of correlates to the revealed preference for job security. On the other hand, with regards to many being naive about how to get a foot in the door, learn the unwritten rules, and successfully play an institution's games, my impression is that family background - in terms of having a parent with actionable connections and direct, intimate knowledge of the institution - matters more and more. This isn't exactly a good fit to the traditional conceptions of privilege or nepotism, but "it rhymes".
My experience in government is from an older generation and perhaps less relevant today. Many of my peers were from first generation and lower middle class backgrounds. A surprising number also grew up in single-parent homes. As a group, they were unaware of how to play the bureaucratic game, or even that there was a game to be played. My own experience with SES is that candidates were selected for conformity to institutional practices and “beliefs,” and to achieve sexual or racial diversity, which allowed other bureaucrats to gain favor or influence.
There has been s sea change in the past 20 years, and another one is starting now. One fact which I used to surprise people with going back a decade at least and until, um, recent events made it slightly more widely appreciated, was that at some agencies a quarter or more of the employees had enough years of service to retire with full pensions and just ... weren't. It woule be intetesting to see the chart of numbers of recognitions for extra-long service over time. Not the "counting the days until retirement" stereotype at all. A lot of the large number of people who recently left government employment were those who could have retired years ago but weren't going anywhere without a hard push, which for many of them was what the "return to office" policy was. That is, the people I told this to were surprised at just how old and stagnant many of the agencies had become at the higher-GS levels (vs what was typical in the 20th century), with people having settled into their likely final position and just hanging out there forever, preventing turnover and blocking opportunities for advancement for younger people, and since that works it's way down the chain like a crash causes a traffic jam, it basically constipating the career pipelines. If you look at government records you'll see the same names over and over for very long periods. Instead of "up or out", it's "rarely up, rarely out, often stuck." Fauci (one position for 38 years) and Andrew Marshall (42 years) and Rickover (kind of) are, well, I recoil at using the term "poster children" for these ancients, but you get what I mean. One sees similar things in life tenure institutions like the Catholic Church, the Judiciary, Academia, but the spread of entrenched-incumbency, de-facto "Personnel-Conservatism", to other institutions and positions that used to change hands more often is a definite major trend.
“This is actually a quirk, and in some respects a weakness, of the venture capital model. The rest of us have the good sense to resist propositions that sound too good to be true. VC’s look for them.”
This (zealotry) is not actually a weakness in the VC model. It’s a feature and a strength for VCs and their returns.
Partly because of the nature of massively asymmetric returns (5 strikeouts and one grand slam pays *hugely* for VCs), and partly because such devotion in the face of long odds (surely not portfolio-optimal for the individual’s sweat equity) by the entrepreneurs increases the (low in the first place) odds that they succeed in their quest and deliver those outsized returns.
"conserver mindset is being confronted by zealots like Elon Musk and RFK,"
already having gotten comfortable with Navarro and Rubio and annoyances like the 5th and14th Amendments
Imagine the consternation if DOGE actually went after wasteful expenditures like farm subsidies and Medicare Advantage! That would require a Dune Messiah. :)
How is Medicare Advantage more wasteful than plain Medicare?
According to what I hear, I coud be wrong, the private companies get people on Medicare by actually proving more services (but still less than the “average” cost they are paid), in effect arbitraging cost of the relative young/health and the the older less healthy that eventually wind up back with plane vanilla Medicare
I see a Yuval Levin angle - if using the institution only as a platform, maybe at some point they shade from a climber or zealot into something outside this typology, like an institutional nihilist.
Whatever one thinks of Levin's claims, in reality extremely few people are in a position to exploit their membership in weak institutions (that is, those failing to exercise strong internal control on selection or discipline on behavior) for major publicity with significant personal benefit and at the expense of the interests of the institution. For most orgs, that kind of institutional nihilist is just not an important phenomenon.
On the other hand, many people at the helm of many institutions did not just introduce mission creep but mission subordination or even substitution to other political goals, and recently thought it was so morally obligatory that they went Full Kamikaze and piloted whatever was left of the public trust, goodwill, and presumptive legitimacy of their institutions right through anti-aircraft fire for even a small chance of ramming through the sides of the enemy carriers, with the only certain consequence being the ruination of their reputations for years, at least. The institutional jihadist has proven to be the real threat.
Perhaps you want to add a dynamic element. The types primarily describe static roles. Power is a category one might focus on, as a rather small network will steer the organization at the beginning and might grow into a sclerotic organization ("court"-phenomenon). Then there is, closely connected, politics. There are theories dealing with political processes, also called micropolitics, within organizations that can be applied to bureaucracies (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/economics-econometrics-and-finance/micropolitics). Then there are of course external interactions with politicians and with other bureaucracies, but hardly any dynamic ones with the citizens.
Iron Law: org folk & mission folk -- the latter found the org, which eventually gets taken over by org folk
AK: proceduralists & rebels << tho I think the mission oriented are not really rebels, but more interested in getting the mission job done, while the proceduralists are the org folk
Downs: conservers, for security & climbers, for power, prestige, money [already 3 types]
plus 3 mixes of self & mission oriented: zealots, passionately committed (like a rebel); advocate, higher level org supporter/ lobbyist; statesman a visionary or wannabee about the role of the org in society.
How did Freddie Mac change? Thru a "combination of climbers who saw opportunity for personal advancement in leading new initiatives and statesmen who thought that Freddie was helping “under-served” segments of the home-buying market."
Seems a reasonable set of descriptions for types of people in orgs, but also a bit of the roles that most bureaucrats fit into.
As usual, I don't see Dark Triads here, nor Big 5 nor HEXACO, nor (my own fav) Myers-Briggs. But like MBTI, the categories are given labels so as to be descriptive and somewhat memorable. Because simplicity is so important for usefulness, the Org vs Mission axis, from Iron Law, remains most useful. Arnold's zealous support for credit scoring would clearly fit into a "Mission" category, and all the the climbers are more org oriented. Probably those pushing him aside the most were among those with more Dark Triad traits.
I don't see how this categorization explains the apparent evolution of incompetence in monopoly institutions—think Bureau of Indian Affairs or state DMVs.