Daryl Fairweather’s book, Hate the Game, is new. She applies economic concepts to life decisions. Those decisions are pretty much in the past for me, but she would make a valuable friend or mentor to a young person.
She spends most of the book talking about how to play the games of life—at work, at home, and so on. A lot of her advice, as well as her personal anecdotes, seem to me to point in the direction of “Focus on what you really want,” as opposed to “Play to beat the other person.”
But the book’s title indicates that, beneath the breezy conversational surface, she carries some dissatisfaction or even anger with the games as they present themselves. Perhaps she has another book that she wants to write in which she spells that out.
Anthony Downs’ book, Inside Bureaucracy, is not new at all. I had to buy a used copy. I was enticed by Claude’s summary, as reported by Lynne Kiesling. The book seems quite dense. Downs concludes with a summary consisting of listicles that goes on for twenty pages.
Downs spends some time wrestling with the definition of bureaucracy. He says that a bureaucratic organization must be large, because otherwise it could operate informally. I agree.
He says that a bureaucracy consists of workers who commit significant effort to the organization.
Bureaucrats must be chosen for their roles, not elected or chosen at random. At the Fed, staff economists fit the definition of bureaucrats. Fed Governors, who are selected by politicians and serve for only a fixed term, presumably would not be counted as bureaucrats by Downs.
He says that the outputs of a bureaucracy are not tested in the market.
He says that those four characteristics are sufficient to define a bureaucracy. I do not think that those characteristics get at the role-oriented and rule-oriented nature that I see as essential to bureaucracy. He might have said that being role-oriented and rule-oriented follows from bureaucracy as defined.
My reaction is to push back against his attempt to define bureaucracy as a noun, because I doubt anyone’s ability to draw a line between what is or is not a bureaucracy. Instead, I prefer to define bureaucratic as an adjective, a continuum along which an organization can be more or less.
I can define bureaucratic to mean relying on well-defined formal roles, procedures, and rules. How strictly does the organization chart determine who does what? How much of the organization’s procedures are documented in writing? How extensive and binding are the organization’s rules?
When roles and rules are really inflexible, to the point where they result in clearly undesirable outcomes, the organization is very bureaucratic. When roles and rules can be bent in order to produce better outcomes, the organization is less bureaucratic.
I will not go along with Downs and insist that the definition of bureaucracy (or bureaucratic) includes having a non-market-priced output. I will say instead that it is difficult for profit-seeking firms, and especially for employees at the tip of the spear generating revenue for such firms, to lose sight of results due to focus on roles, procedures, and rules. So I think that one can expect to see non-profits, government agencies, and overhead departments within large firms to behave more bureaucratically.
I hope to have more to say about his book when I have done more than just scan it.
Interesting selections, Thank You. I just re-read Kim by Kipling as well as Inside the Criminal Mind by Samenow (In my gimlet eye, the best, non-business business book.). Also, some other great selections in the comments - Thanks all, and Thank You, Arnold.
What I'm reading...or read...
"The New China Playbook, Beyond Socialism and Capitalism" by Keyu Jin. If one is trying to understand bureaucracy that works, one would do well to study the Chinese system, and how it applies to the modern world.
I'm revisiting "Seeing Like A State" by James C. Scott.... It's not about bureaucracy as such, but it touches on everything that forms bureaucratic and State sanctioned policies. In a roundabout but unmistakable pattern, it blows up the idea of central planning and socialist policy narratives.
If one wants to understand Chinese pattern thinking, the foundation of understanding is worked over in the brilliant "From The Soil" by Fei Xiaotong. He was "the first" Chinese post revolution to describe Chinese sociological patterns, and he took serious heat from the Party for the audacity of describing his own society. It's a short, albeit dense read that requires focus, but if you can stick with it, you'll come out the other side with your eyes opened up to see what a monumental pile of non-contextualized nonsense nearly all Western descriptions of China are.