Quotulatiousness

February 24, 2025

Rule by bureaucrat, believe it or not, was once considered a better form of government

Filed under: Bureaucracy, China, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the 19th century, the Americans switched from a system where one of the major outcomes of a presidential election was the wholesale replacement of government employees to one where the civil service was “professionalized” to the point that only the very top levels were subject to presidential replacement (Trump 2.0 may mark a significant change in this). Fans of the professional bureaucracy would sometimes gesture toward the venerable Chinese model, which had been run in this way for a very long time until the 20th century. Lorenzo Warby considers the actual performance of these kinds of systems:

Excerpt from the handscroll Viewing the Pass List. Imperial examination candidates gather around the wall where results had been posted. Traditionally attributed to Qiu Ying, but now suspected to be the work of a late-Ming painter with Qiu Ling’s name added.
National Palace Museum via Wikimedia Commons.

Over the course of the C19th, Western states adopted the Chinese notion of appointment by examination for their government bureaucracies. Such appointment-by-merit did have the effect — for about a century and a half — of creating effective and responsive bureaucracies. So much so, that Western democracies gave more and more tasks to such bureaucracies.

This replicates the early stage of the Chinese dynastic cycle — the actual one (see below), rather than the traditional version — where, early in a Dynasty, rule through the bureaucracy is quite effective, even efficient. In modern Western democracies, the legitimacy of democratic action — the demon-in-democracy problem, where the all-trumping legitimacy of the democratic principle tends to overwhelm other ways of doing things — aided the massive expansion in government action, and so in the ambit of government bureaucracy.

The trouble with adopting the Chinese model of appointment-by-merit bureaucracy — including selection-by-examinations — is that folk failed to take a good hard look at the patterns of Chinese government. This despite the fact that the keju, the imperial examination, was introduced under Emperor Wen of Sui (r.581-604) and was not abolished until 1905, so there was quite a lot of history to consider.

The patterns of Chinese government are much less encouraging, because the quite effective, quite efficient, stage of bureaucratic administration does not last. The problem with appointment-by-merit is that it selects for capacity, but not character. Confucianism tries to encourage good character, but it repeatedly turned out to be a weak reed compared to incentive structures. (Almost everything is a weak reed, compared to incentive structures.)

The actual dynastic cycle was:

  1. Population expands due to peace and prosperity in a unified China. This pushes against resources — mainly arable land — creating mass immiseration, an expanding underclass with no marriage prospects, peasant revolts and falling state revenues.
  2. The number of elite aspirants expand — a process aggravated by elite polygyny — but elite positions do not, leading to disgruntled would-be elites who provide organising capacity for peasant revolts (including through sects and cults).1
  3. Bureaucratic pathologies multiply, leading to a more corrupt, less responsive, less functional state apparatus, eroding state capacity and increasing pathocracy (rule by the morally disordered). Late-dynasty imperial bureaucracies could be astonishingly corrupt and dysfunctional.

In contemporary Western societies, mass migration interacting with restrictive land use, and other regulation (e.g. “net zero”), so that:

  1. housing supply is blocked from fully responding to demand for housing—thereby driving up rents and house prices; while also
  2. inhibiting infrastructure supply from responding to demand—increasing congestion and other (notably energy) costs

is creating immiseration pressures. Figures about the “macro” health of the US economy, for instance, are misleading as much of the growth is either not reaching people further down the income scale or is failing to compensate for rising rents.

Western commercial societies are sufficiently dynamic that elite over-supply is much less of a problem than in pre-industrial societies. There is, however, very much a problem of toxic parasitism — the entire (Diversity Equity Inclusion) DEI/EDI apparatus to start with. What we might call malign elite employment or bureaucratic parasitism.

    1. NR: I’ve read that the Taiping Rebellion in China was led by a man who’d failed the Imperial Examination and raised the banner against the entire system as a form of revenge. By the time the rebellion was quashed, somewhere up to 30 million people were killed in the fighting or as an indirect result of the conflict. (Traditional note of caution about any statistics from pre-20th century China … well, any Chinese statistics at all, really.)

Update: Fixed broken link.

February 1, 2025

QotD: In a centrally planned economy, all that matters is meeting or exceeding the Gross Output Target

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, History, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The mobbed-up oligarchs currently running Russia, for instance, were almost all members of an informal class whose name I forget, which translates as “brokers” or “wheeler-dealers” or something. They learned how best to manipulate the Soviet system of “gross output targets”. Back when he was funny, P.J. O’Rourke had a great bit about this in Eat the Rich, a book I still recommend.

When told to produce 10,000 shoes, the shoe factory manager made 10,000 baby shoes, all left feet, because that was easiest to do with the material on hand — he didn’t have to retool, or go through nearly as many procurement processes, and whatever was left over could be forwarded to the “broker”, who’d make deals with other factory managers for useful stuff. When Comrade Commissar came around and saw that the proles still didn’t have any shoes, he ordered the factory manager to make 10,000 pairs of shoes … so the factory manager cranked out 20,000 baby shoes, all left feet, tied them together, and boom. When Comrade Commissar switched it up and ordered him to make 10,000 pounds of shoes, the factory manager cranked out one enormous pair of concrete sneakers …

So long as Comrade Commissar doesn’t rat him out to the NKVD — and why would he? he’s been cut in for 10% — nobody will ever be the wiser, because on the spreadsheet, the factory manager not just hit, but wildly exceeded, the Gross Output Target. That nobody in Krasnoyarsk Prefecture actually has any shoes is irrelevant.

Severian, “The Finger is Not the Moon”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-14.

January 27, 2025

QotD: The bureaucratization of university administration

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Education, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

On the consolidation of power within the administrative bureaucracy:

    The character of the college as a micro-community of academics is being doubly subverted: from within, by the rapid growth of bureaucratic roles taken up by professional administrators, and from without, by a university seeking to centralise control and elide differences among the colleges. The more uniform the overall environment becomes, the more rapidly it will suffer from the bad decisions inevitably yet to be made.

On the metastasis of overpaid, officious administrators:

    “The content of this letter is extremely important, so please read it carefully.” It isn’t often that the university speaks to its employees in this way. This was a follow-up email from the former pro-vice-chancellor for strategy and planning, David Cardwell. He wanted academics to complete his Time Allocation Survey by tabulating how many hours were spent across a vast suite of possible activities. It is characteristic of contemporary Cambridge that the strongest rhetoric it can muster is directed toward this self-serving bureaucratic exercise. Cardwell rubbed shoulders with four other pro-vice-chancellors, all enjoying a salary that is several multiples of the typical university academic, and surpasses the Prime Minister’s.

This administrative overgrowth is, by the way, a historical novelty:

    All of this is new: until 1992, the role of vice-chancellor was covered in short stints by the Heads of House, who paused their college governance while the rest of Cambridge got on with what they were here to do. Now we have not only career administrators at the helm, but their five deputies, for an annual cost of around £1.5 million. All the while, the university fails to find the money to keep important subjects alive, such as the centuries-old study of millennia-old Sanskrit.

I’ve been pointing this out for years. Until very recently, administrative functions in universities were largely filled by senior academics: you got bullied into shouldering the unwelcome burden because somebody had to do it, and you drew the short straw. There is nothing that a serious person despises more than paperwork, especially a scholar, who would much rather be happily buried in whatever esoterica he has made his field of study. Forcing academics into administrative roles ensured that the people filling those offices were incentivized to keep the paperwork to an absolute minimum; the last thing they wanted was to create more of the hateful stuff.

Enter, some decades ago, the professional administrators. Initially, these usually had some sort of academic qualification, and still largely do – albeit typically in fake non-disciplines, “public administration” or what have you – but they were not in any sense scholars. They were managers. Give us your burden, they said; we’ll do all the annoying paperwork for you, and you can concentrate on your very important research, you very important scholars, you. Thus the professoriate, like gullible fools, handed over the keys to the kingdom.

Unlike professors, managers are incentivized to create as much administrative complexity as they can: the more administration there is to perform, the more administrators the institution needs, and the larger the fiefdoms senior administrators can command. Since admin typically has control of the budget, they were easily able to appropriate the necessary funds. The result has been the explosive proliferation of useless eaters with lavish salaries and ridiculous titles like Senior Vice Assistant Dean for Excellence or Junior Associate Student Life Provost. At many universities, administrators now exist in a 1:1 ratio with the student body.

Admin have sucked shrinking university budgets dry, with real intellectual consequences: they aren’t going to fire themselves, and they sure aren’t taking a salary cut, so to make up budget shortfalls academic programs with low enrolment get the axe. Butterfield’s reference to the closure of the Sanskrit program is an example of this; there are many such examples, and they are increasingly common. To brains built out of buzzwords and spreadsheets, everything is either a marketing technique or a revenue stream, and if a program isn’t popular enough to subsidize their summer vacations in Provence or social-justicey enough for them to brag to their beach friends about how progressive they are, it serves no purpose.

This ability of university administrations to close down programs illustrates something else, which is that they are the real power on campus. The academics are mere employees: they will teach whichever students the admin decides to admit, will teach those students whatever the admin says to teach them, will not teach what the admin tell them not to teach, will teach in whatever manner admin decides is best, and will evaluate the results of that instruction in whatever fashion admin mandates they be evaluated.

As members of the managerial class, university administrators are drones of the global managerial hive mind, and instinctively exert a homogenizing influence. Old, parochial practices must be jettisoned in favour of standardizing the institutions they manage.

    As for our age-old titles – of lecturer, senior lecturer, reader and professor – these were replaced with American titles so as to be “more intelligible” to a global audience. … To conjure up a world of “assistant professors” and “associate professors”, who in fact have no supporting relationship to “the professors”, makes a mockery of that venerable system.

Administrators dislike horizontal social relationships amongst faculty. Peer-to-peer network architectures are hard to control; they prefer a server-terminal model, with management as the server through which all communications pass, and professors as the terminals, who can be regulated through systems of permissions. Thus, they set about dissolving those institutions that facilitate conviviality amongst the faculty:

    It was telling that a few years ago the authorities silently closed down the University Combination Room, the 14th-century hall in which academics could freely convene outside their individual colleges.

Administration is also sneaky, adopting governance practices that minimize whatever legacy powers the professoriate still possesses:

    Although in theory Cambridge academics are self-governing, the move to online voting, with minimal announcement, allows for many university policies to be driven through by those who want them enacted.

Butterfield understands full well that the problems are hardly unique to Cambridge:

    All this I say of Cambridge. But these issues go right across the university sector … The public need to trust and respect the elite academic institutions they fund; but that respect is waning, as stories continue to reveal politicised teaching, grade inflation, authoritarian campus policies and lurid, even laughable, research grants. The ambitions of our whole education system are ultimately pegged to the achievements at the very pinnacle of academia. If Cambridge can’t resist decline, who can?

The obvious answer is: no one can resist this. Not Cambridge, not Oxford, not University College London, not Harvard, not Princeton, not MIT, and not Whittier College. The problem is too systemic; the rot too deep. Decades of administrative consolidation of power has subsumed the ivory tower into an appendage of the global asset management system. Generations of ideological infection by the mind virus of cultural Marxism, wokeism, critical social justice, gay race communism, whatever you want to call it, has poisoned the minds of too many of the faculty. Generations of steadily declining standards, an inevitable consequence of massively increased enrolment which of unavoidable necessity heavily sampled the fat middle of the IQ distribution, has thinned out the influence of the bell curve’s rarefied tail to statistical irrelevance. After all of this, the only way to save the university is to purge it, of the great mass of low-performing affirmative action students, of the diversity hire academics who substitute clumsy sermonizing for the scholarship they can neither understand nor perform, and most especially of the great tumorous mass of useless administrators.

Such a purge, to be effective, would need to be thorough. To be thorough, it would remove almost everyone in the system. This would be the same as destroying the system. To save the patient, one would have to kill the patient.

Therefore no such purge will take place.

Instead, the system will crumble, buckle under its own weight, and eventually collapse.

As, in fact, it is doing.

John Carter, “Crumbling DIEvory Towers”, Postcards From Barsoom, 2024-10-25.

January 22, 2025

“Do not give institutional power to activists” or “moral projects to bureaucrats”, but “Progressivism systematically does both”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Lorenzo Warby on the dangers of enabling totalitarians and suffering the useful idiots in any political system:

The overthrow of Robespierre in the National Convention on 27 July 1794, Max Adamo (1870),
Wikimedia Commons.

Do not give institutional power to activists, as activism — being power without responsibility that readily lauds bad behaviour — attracts manipulative “Cluster B” personalities. Moreover, activism degrades realms of human action by imposing pre-conceived outcomes and constraints on them. We can see this is in all the entertainment franchises whose internal logics of story and canon have been debauched in the service of political messaging.1

Do not give moral projects to bureaucrats, as such projects elevate the authority of the bureaucrats who become moral masters, devaluing the authority of the citizens turned into moral subjects, and so undermines any ethic of service to said citizenry. Such projects also frustrate accountability, as the grand intentions can, and will, be used to shield the bureaucrats from scrutiny. Indeed, moral projects rapidly become moralised projects, whose grand intentions protects, even aggrandise, the self-interest of the bureaucrats.2

Progressivism systematically does both — give institutional power to activists and moral projects to bureaucrats. Hence progressivism has so often proved disastrous for human flourishing. Indeed, it has a powerful tendency to use the grandeur of its moral intentions to free itself from moral constraints: to be moralised, rather than moral.

As various folk “walk away” from what left-progressivism has become, a common sentiment is some version of “this is not the Left I remember” or “this is not what the Left used to stand for”. Yet, one of the striking things about Post-Enlightenment Progressivism (aka “wokery”) within contemporary societies is how thoroughly it is replicating mechanisms of social control familiar to any student of Communism, of Marxist Party-states.

This “not the Left I joined” is typically a notion of “the Left” that does not include Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Ceausescu … So it is an historically illiterate, “wouldn’t-it-be-nice”, Leftism. Yet it is precisely the Left that does include Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Ceausescu and so on whose echoes are being played out in our societies.

When we look around our contemporary societies, we have commissars/political officers (aka DEI officers, intimacy consultants, sensitivity readers, bias response teams, etc); Zhdanovism, in the remarkable ideological conformism in the arts, entertainment and gaming (usefully discussed here); Lysenkoism in science journals, especially the genderwoo sex-is-non-binary nonsense, though genetics research and male-female differences also have aspects of it; and censorship that was originally paraded as stopping “hate speech”, now being purveyed as anti-dis/mis/mal-information. Critical Pedagogy — which has become influential in Education Faculties and teacher training — is explicitly about replicating Mao’s Cultural Revolution model of permanent revolution. We have the same, disastrous, patterns of institutional power to activists and moral projects to bureaucrats.

    1. There is a large difference from the “we want to be included, we want a say” activism that abolished first the slave trade and then slavery, that abolished laws against Jews and Catholics, that gave us universal male and then female suffrage — what I have called the Emancipation Sequence. Such political movements included previously excluded folk in freedoms and political processes that already existed. They did not give institutional power to activists nor moral projects to bureaucrats.

    2. The institutional shrinkage of the Church has not abolished the meaning-and-morality role it used to play, it has just shifted it into academe and the welfare state apparat, making both simultaneously more arrogant and less functional.

January 18, 2025

Incentives matter even to “objective” scientists

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Politics, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A 2019 Canadian “study” ideally illustrates that scientists are just as human as anyone else where they are incentivized to provide “desired” outcomes:

“The Beer Store” by Like_the_Grand_Canyon is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Earlier this year, a major Canadian study on alcohol policy provided an excellent illustration of this. As news headlines across the country reported, 16 scientists and researchers at various universities and institutions had, through their Canadian Alcohol Policy Evaluation, shown that provincial governments are “failing to address alcohol problems”.

The scientists evaluated provincial government policies and assigned a grade in the “D” range to seven of Canada’s 13 provinces or territories, while five received an “F”. The policy evaluation, however, was a curious one. Strangely, the policy evaluation did not evaluate whether government policies were beneficial to those who want to buy or sell alcohol.

Instead, provincial governments were evaluated more favorably if they devoted greater efforts toward afflicting buyers and sellers of alcohol through punitive taxes, price controls, heavy restrictions on the sale and marketing of alcoholic beverages, higher minimum legal drinking ages, and so on.

Even in the most restrictive markets, the researchers found that alcohol was too cheap, or that its purchase was too convenient, or that governments did not do enough to discourage or restrict its sale and consumption.

Predictably, and perhaps exemplifying Berlinski’s point on scientists grasping for government funds, the report authored by 16 scientists whose livelihoods involve raising public alarm about alcohol consumption concluded that there ought to be more government funding for public education on the dangers of alcohol consumption.

The report also advocated more government funding for bureaucracies to discourage drinking, more government funding for a lead organization to implement restrictive alcohol policies, more government funding for independent monitoring of such implementation, and more government funding to track and report the harm caused by alcohol consumption.

Like the CEO of a domestic automobile company insisting that tariffs against car imports — which would cause a massive wealth redistribution from consumers’ wallets into his own and those of the company’s shareholders — are in the national interest, the anti-drinking scientists insisted in the name of public health and wellness upon income redistribution from taxpayers and consumers to their own industry.

January 2, 2025

DOGE has a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Patrick Carroll selects some of the least-defendable ways the US government has been spending taxpayer money from Senator Rand Paul’s 2024 Festivus Report, including pickleball courts, $10B in unused office space, DEI initiatives for birdwatchers, crop fertilizer in foreign countries, and literal circus performances:

Rand Paul by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Why does such government waste persist year after year? A significant part of the explanation traces back to the concept of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. Essentially, the beneficiaries tend to be a small, concentrated group, so they lobby hard for these outlays because they stand to gain a lot from them. Taxpayers, on the other hand, tend to be dispersed and only minimally affected by any single expense, so it’s not usually worth it for them to lobby against the spending, or even learn about it in the first place.

Economist Gordon Tullock famously illustrated this concept with his fictional Tullock Economic Development Plan. The plan “involves placing a dollar of additional tax on each income tax form in the United States and paying the resulting funds to Tullock, whose economy would develop rapidly”.

Think about the incentive Tullock would have to advocate for this plan, compared to the incentive that an ordinary taxpayer would have to look into it and voice their objections. With campaign contributions and votes to be gained from the special interest beneficiaries, is it any wonder politicians often go for these kinds of wealth transfers?

The ubiquity and stubborn persistence — year after year — of all this waste, combined with the economic theory that explains why it happens, suggests that there is a fundamental problem with the process of government as we know it. This is not, as many are itching to believe, a “Democrat” problem or a “Republican” problem. The degree of government waste changes very little with changing administrations. No, this is a problem with the government as such.

To solve this problem, we need to ask not just who should run the government, but what the government should be allowed to spend money on in the first place, given what we know about its entirely predictable and repeatedly demonstrated propensity for waste and dysfunction.

Milei has already started that conversation in Argentina. Let’s hope that with the new Trump administration and DOGE, that’s a conversation we can have here as well.

December 28, 2024

How the H1B visa argument follows an earlier political struggle

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Politics, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, ESR points out that the arguments over US work permits for foreigners might well have been prefigured by the now-receding tide of attempts to gut the second amendment:

    alexandriabrown @alexthechick
    It is difficult to overstate how caustic this is to public debate and public acceptance of legislation. If you give us X, we will accept restriction Y is the basis of all compromise. When a party gets X on the basis of accepting Y, then immediately undermines Y, the deal is void.

This was part of a thread about H1B abuse, correctly pointing out that the companies who lobbied for H1B didn’t hold up their end of the deal, leaving many Americans feeling betrayed — especially tech workers who were fired in favor of an imported hire, then told their severance pay would be denied if they didn’t train their replacements.

I am, however, irresistibly reminded of another betrayal. One I’ve written about before — but maybe at least part of this story needs to be told again.

Today in the 21st century most of the American gun culture is bitterly, even fanatically opposed to more “gun control” laws, and howling for all of them clear back to the National Firearms Act of 1934 to be repealed. Donald Trump earned huge support with his promise to get national concealed-carry reciprocity pushed through Congress.

We weren’t always like that. Long ago, before 1990, many of us were less resistant to new gun control measures. Sometimes major gun-rights organizations would even help lawmakers draft legislative language.

(Yes, I was a gun owner then. So I’m not going by legends, but by lived experience.)

What changed?

The quid-quo-pros we were offered were many variations of “If you will accept this specific restriction X, we will stop pushing. We will stop trying to undermine your Second Amendment rights in general. Help us save the chilllldren!”

That promise was never kept. Gradually, we noticed this. It always turned out that the minority of angry suspicious people who said “This won’t be enough, they’ll come back for another bite!” were right.

Eventually, some documents leaked out of one of the major graboid organizations that revealed a conscious strategy of salami-slicing — instead of challenging gun rights directly, they intended to gradually make owning personal weapons less useful and more onerous until the culture around them collapsed.

So nowadays we’re pretty much all angry and suspicious. Even restrictions that do little harm and might be objectively reasonable (bump stocks, anyone?) touch off tsunamis of protest.

People offering us more “deals” (just give up this one little thing, mmmkay?) now have negative credibility.

Are you paying attention, Big Tech? (Particularly you, @elonmusk, and you, @VivekGRamaswamy.) Because you’re almost there, now. Too many people see that H1B has become an indentured-servitude fraud that victimizes both the workers it imports and the Americans it displaces.

You credibility isn’t as shot as the gun-banners’ yet. You still have some room for recovery on “high-skilled immigation” in general, but it’s decreasing.

Your smart move would be to sacrifice H1B so you can keep the O-1 “genius” visas. I advise you to take it, because if you dig in your heels I think you are likely to lose both.

And on the reason so many Americans have become angry about blatant and exploitive H1B visa abuse:

Today’s big beef is between tech-success maximizers like @elonmusk and MAGA nationalists who think the US job market is being flooded by low-skill immigrants because employers don’t want to pay competitive wages to Americans.

To be honest, I think both sides are making some sound points. But I’d rather focus on a different aspect of the problem.

When I entered the job market as a fledgling programmer back in the early 1980s, I didn’t have to worry that some purple-haired harpy in HR was going to throw my resume in the circular file because I’m a straight white male.

I also didn’t have to worry that a hiring manager from a subcontinent that shall not be named would laugh at my qualifications because in-group loyalty tells him to hire his fourth cousin from a city where they still shit on the streets.

It’s a bit much to complain that today’s American students won’t grind as hard as East Asians when we abandoned meritocracy more than 30 years ago. Nothing disincentivizes working your ass off to excel more than a justified belief that it’s futile.

Right now we’re in and everybody-loses situation. Employers aren’t getting the talent they desperately need, and talent is being wasted. That mismatch is the first problem that needs solving.

You want excellence? Fire the goddamn HR drones and the nepotists. Scrap DEI. Find all the underemployed white male STEM majors out there who gave up on what they really wanted to do because the hiring system repeatedly punched them in the face, and bring them in.

Don’t forget the part about paying competitive wages. This whole H-1B indentured-servitude thing? It stinks, and the stench pollutes your entire case for “high-skill” immigration. You might actually have a case, but until you clean up that mess Americans will be justified in dismissing it.

These measures should get you through the next five years or so, while the signal that straight white men are allowed to be in the game again propagates.

I’m not going to overclaim here. This will probably solve your need for top 10% coders and engineers, but not your need for the top 0.1%. For those you probably do have to recruit worldwide.

But if you stop overtly discriminating against the Americans who could fill your top 10% jobs, your talent problem will greatly ease. And you’ll no longer get huge political pushback from aggrieved MAGA types against measures that could solve the rest of it.

Doesn’t that seem like it’s worth a try?

November 30, 2024

The mission of DOGE

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

One of Donald Trump’s more interesting announcements shortly after winning the federal election early in November was that he was going to give Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy a formal position to do to the US government’s vast array of bureaucratic organizations what Javier Milei did to Argentina’s bloated national government. Here, scraped from the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, is Devon Eriksen‘s thoughts on how to go about pruning back the “fourth branch” of government:

Since the framers of the Constitution created a federal government with three branches, not four, there are no Constitutional checks on the emergent fourth branch.

Currently, the fourth branch is in many ways the most powerful, and certainly the most destructive, arm of the government.

– It has the privilege of targeting individual citizens on its own initiative, which is forbidden to the three other branches.

– It can interfere their lives in any way it wishes by making a “ruling”.

– The only recourse against a “ruling” is to take the bureaucracy in question to court.

– But the process is the punishment, because this takes months if not years and costs tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

– Until recently, courts have deferred to bureaucrats as a matter of legal precedent. Now they merely do so as a matter of practice.

– But should the bureaucracy lose anyway, the only punishment the court inflicts is that they are told they have to stop doing that specific thing.

– Any fines or legal costs imposed on them punish the taxpayer, not the agent or even the agency.

– And the next, closely related, thing the bureaucracy thinks of to do is once again fair game, until the courts are once again brought in, at further cost, to tell it to stop.

All of this creates a Red Queen Effect.

Citizens must establish their own organizations, and raise donations to engage in constant lawfare, just to retain the rights they haven’t lost yet. And they must win every time to maintain the status quo.

Bureaucrats, on the other hand, can fight endless legal battles using money taken from their victims by the IRS, at no cost to themselves. Any victory they claim, they may keep permanently, while any loss may be refought endlessly simply by a slight variance of the attack.

Obviously, if this system is not changed, all power will accrue to the bureaucracy over time. They will constitute a totalitarian authority over every aspect of the life of every citizen.

This is why the name “DOGE” (Department of Government Efficiency) is a serious mistake.

Look, Elon, I like a joke as much as the next guy, and I do think irreverence is a load-bearing component of checking the bureaucracy, because a false aura of gravitas is one of their defenses against public outrage.

But words mean things.

When you create a check on the bureaucracy and call it the department of government efficiency, you focus the attention, and the correction, on the fact that the bureaucracy is stomping on people’s lives and businesses inefficiently, not on the fact that they are doing so at all.

But the name isn’t my decision. The power of the vote isn’t that granular. I can only elect an administration, not protect it from tactical errors by weighing in on individual policy decisions.

Unless someone with direct power happens to read this.

So, regardless of the name, here’s how an organization might be set up to effectively check federal bureaucracies.

1. DOGE must be responsive, not merely proactive.

Being proactive sounds better in the abstract, but it is much easier for a federal agency to gin up some numbers to fight a periodic overall audit, than it is to fight an investigation of a specific case.

2. DOGE must have direct oversight.

If it must take agencies to court, it is merely a proxy for the citizens whose money is being wasted, and whose rights are being trampled.

Imagine the level of inefficiency, waste, and delay, if your process for addressing bureaucratic abuse simply results in one part of the federal government pursuing an expensive court case against another.

Instead, DOGE must have the power to simply make a ruling, via its own investigation hearing process, which is binding on federal agencies.

Any appeals to the court system must be allowed to trigger their own DOGE investigation (for wasting taxpayer fighting a ruling).

3. DOGE must have the power to punish the agent, not just the agency.

“You have to stop that now” is not a deterrent. Neither is fining the agency, because such fines are paid by the American taxpayer.

DOGE must follow Saul Alinsky’s 11th rule: target individuals, not institutions.

Why?

Because agencies are agencies. They consist of agents.

An agent is someone who acts on behalf of a principal — someone whose interests the agent is supposed to represent.

When the agent is incentivized so that his interests diverge from those of the principal, he will be increasingly likely to act in his own interest, not the principal’s.

This is the Principal-Agent Problem.

An agency is a construct, a theoretical entity. What Vonnegut would call a “granfalloon”.

Agencies do not act, they do not make decisions, they do not have incentives they respond to. Any appearance to the contrary is an emergent property created by the aggregate action of agents.

Every decision, whether we admit it or not, has a name attached to it, not a department. It is that person who responds to incentives.

Agents will favor their own incentives over those of their principal (the American people) unless a counter incentive is present for that specific person.

For this reason, DOGE should, must, have the power to discipline individual employees of the federal agencies it oversees.

This doesn’t just mean insignificant letters of reprimand in a file. It means fines against personal assets, firing, or even filing criminal charges. No qualified immunity.

Yes, you read that right. DOGE must be able to fire other agencies’ staff. I recommend that anyone fired by DOGE be permanently illegible for any federal government job, excluding only elected positions.

4. DOGE investigations must be triggerable by citizen complaints.

This is self-explanatory. It gives DOGE the practical capability to redress individual injustices, and it crowdsources your discovery problem.

Establish a hotline.

5. DOGE must have sufficient power to protect and reward whistleblowers, and punish those who retaliate against them.

6. Bureaucrats must be held responsible for outcomes, not just for following procedure.

Often, procedure is the problem. The precedent must be established, and clearly enforced, that because agents have agency, agents are responsible for using their discretion to ensure efficient, just, and sane outcomes, not just for doing whatever departmental policy allows.

7. DOGE must have an adversarial relationship with the bureaucracies is oversees.

This eliminates the phenomenon of “we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing”.

Following the previous recommendation is almost sure to make this happen.

The point is not for DOGE to address every instance of waste or wrongdoing, it is to make bureaucrats act responsibly because they fear an investigation.

In essence, I am imagining DOGE (or some superior name that better reflects the mission) as an entity with a license to treat bureaucrats the way bureaucrats currently treat citizens.

November 6, 2024

Running out of minerals means we’re all going to dieeeeeeeeee!!

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall responds to another pants-wetting panic attack that we’re running out of atoms and that means we’re all going to die unless we do this thing I wanted you to do anyway:

“Artisanal cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo” by The International Institute for Environment and Development is licensed under CC BY 2.5 .

There’s a guy working up in Finland who keeps trying to tell us that we’re all about to run out of lovely metals. Therefore — as with the Club of Rome beforehand, Blueprint for Survival and all those guys — we’re all gonna die.

Aiee, eh?

Now it is possible to work through all his assumptions and nip at them in detail. For example, he assumes we need about 20 million tonnes of lithium in order to replace the global internal combustion engine fleet with battery powered. Not a bad assumption. The Tesla Master Plan 3 comes to the same answer. But if we want to have weeks and weeks of battery power for the whole of society we’re going to need much more than that. Which is a problem, mineral resources are only around 90 million tonnes, so, we’re stuffed.

And, well. Here’s the problem. We’re all — including Michaux — using United States Geological Survey Numbers. In 2023 lithium:

    Owing to continuing exploration, identified lithium resources have increased substantially worldwide and total about 98 million tons.

In 2024:

    Owing to continuing exploration, measured and indicated lithium resources have increased substantially worldwide and total about 105 million tons.

Wait, what? We can get more mineral resources if we go looking for them? Well, if that’s true then the size of mineral resources cannot be the limitation on how much is out there, right?

This then brings us to the basic mistake that has been made here. We’ve been through this here a number of times.

It’s this:

    Figures 28 & 29 shows the needed quantity of metal to phase out fossil fuels (assuming all four power storage buffer capacities) is compared against the total metal content in the whole planetary environment, including the deep ocean polymetallic nodules under sea resources (Hein et al. 2020). So, Figure 28 shows reported mineral reserves plus estimated mineral resources on land plus estimated undersea mineral resources. This is the summation of mineral reserves, resources, on land and under the sea, in the planetary environment. Even with this extreme summation of conventional and unconventional sources, there was not enough copper, nickel, lithium, cobalt, or vanadium to manufacture even just the first generation of renewable technology to replace the existing fossil fuel industrial system.

That’s on page 240 and yes, I had to read (OK, speed read/skim) to get to his simple statement of his mistake. You owe me guys, 239 pages worth.

He’s right that mineral resources can be converted into mineral reserves by the application of time and effort — capital, really. But he thinks that mineral resources are the definition of the mineral deposits that exist. Which just ain’t true — mineral resources are mineral deposits that people have applied time and effort — capital really — to defining. That’s how mineral resources, as defined by our common source at USGS, can increase year on year.

October 26, 2024

Our solar energy future – “In September alone, Germany paid 2.6 billion Euro to renewables producers for electricity that had a market value of a mere 145 million Euro”

Filed under: Economics, Germany, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Checking in with what’s been happening in Germany, eugyppius explains why solar power is far from the cost-free energy source that politicians and scam artists try to claim:

Photovoltaic panels on a roof, 28 April, 2015.
Photo by Antonio Chaves, via Wikimedia Commons.

Climatism in Germany is attended by all manner of naive ideas and bright pink fairytale slogans. Among the latter is a dubious proverb proclaiming that “The sun doesn’t send any bills” (in German: “Die Sonne schickt keine Rechnung“). Such proverbs always seem initially plausible (is there anything freer and more democratic than sunshine?) while proving to be basically the opposite of the truth. In fact, the energy transition has landed German taxpayers in the position of paying billions of Euros for the sun to shine. It is becoming an unmitigated disaster, and what is worse, the more we expand solar capacity, the more we will have to pay. For something that does not send any bills, sunshine has sure become very expensive here in the Federal Republic.

Welt calls it “the solar trap,” and it works like this: Our Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) pledges to pay renewables producers fixed tariffs for every kilowatt hour of electricity their installations feed into the grid. Whether you are an ordinary climate-conscious person with solar panels on your house or you run massive solar farms, the EEG entitles you to receive these fixed “feed-in tariffs” for a period of twenty years. The EEG also requires grid operators to accept your electricity regardless of demand and to sell it on the electricity exchange.

Now the sun, although it may not charge for its services, turns out to have this naughty habit of shining in many places all at once. When this happens, electricity supply often exceeds electricity demand and exchange prices fall. They can fall all the way to zero, or in extreme situations of excessive sunshine they can even go negative. Negative prices mean that you have to actually pay “buyers” to take the excess power off your hands. Whether the prices are merely very low, or zero, or negative, the German taxpayer has obligated himself, via the EEG, to pay these producers of unwanted if extremely green and climate-friendly electricity their fixed feed-in tariffs anyway. That is, we are on the hook for the difference between the actual exchange value of excess electricity and the feed-in tariffs promised to producers. In this way we have ended up literally paying for the sun to shine.

In September alone, Germany paid 2.6 billion Euro to renewables producers for electricity that had a market value of a mere 145 million Euro. Our sunny autumn is destroying our already-fragile government budget. Federal number-crunchers had originally allocated 10.6 billion Euros for feed-in tariffs in 2024, but already the government owes 15 billion and the year is not yet over. Scholz’s cabinet are thus trying to allocate an additional 8.8 billion Euro for the rest of the year. The parliament have yet to approve the additional funds, though, and also the damned sun will just not stop fucking shining, and so probably even this supplementary allocation won’t be enough. We’re bleeding money, all for a sun that doesn’t send any bills.

This problem will get worse before it gets better. The more solar panels we install, the greater oversupply we’ll face when the sun shines, and the larger the spread between the fixed feed-in tariffs and the actual market value of this green electricity. In 2024, as I said, the government projected that feed-in tariffs would cost 10.6 billion Euros, but they’ll probably end up costing 20 billion at least. Next year, the costs are projected to be even higher, and the year after that, they will be higher still. As Welt report, the German government plans to triple our solar capacity to 215 gigawatts over the next six years – “the equivalent of 215 nuclear power plants” every time the sun emerges from behind a blessed cloud.

The energy transitioners know they messed up. The new plan is to change the rules for solar subsidies. When prices go negative, larger producers won’t receive their fixed tariffs, and they’ll also have to sell their electricity themselves. In this way, they will become newly sensitive to market demand and stop overproducing electricity when nobody wants it. It is almost like creating a blind system totally oblivious to market incentives was a bad idea. Unfortunately, the new rules will apply only to new solar installations. The German government will still have to honour its insane agreement to pay the operators of older solar plants for years to come. We will light billions on fire for nothing.

September 26, 2024

Glimmers of hope for lower taxes on US taxpayers

Filed under: Business, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

J.D. Tuccille welcomes the discussion among the Presidential candidates about lowering the taxes Americans have to pay, and points out that the economic distortions of the current tax code (including “temporary” measures introduced during WW2) make everyone less well-off:

Three months after proposing to end federal taxing of tips — an idea promptly confiscated without compensation by Kamala Harris’s campaign — Donald Trump doubled down by saying “we will end all taxes on overtime” if he’s elected president. Without a doubt, millions of Americans who resent government’s ravenous bite out of their paychecks immediately began contemplating just how much of their income they could shield from the tax man that way.

Tips and Overtime for Everybody!

“Can someone get paid in primarily tips and overtime?” quipped the Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome. “Asking for a few million friends.”

On a more serious note, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Sean Higgins thought exempting overtime pay “wouldn’t necessarily be a bad idea … but, overall, it is not likely to make that much of a difference to most workers because overtime isn’t that common”. He’d been more strongly supportive of exempting tips because that “would put more money directly in the pockets of working Americans without either costing employers more or raising prices for customers”. He also liked that freeing tips from taxation would “keep tipping out of the reach of the regulatory state”.

But what if overtime pay becomes more common precisely because it’s not taxed?

The people at the Tax Foundation expect that’s exactly what will happen, just as Lincicome joked. Thinking through the implications of exempting overtime pay from taxation, Garrett Watson and Erica York warned that “exempting overtime pay from income tax would significantly distort labor market decisions. Employees would be encouraged to take more overtime work, and hourly or salaried non-exempt jobs may become more attractive if the benefit is not extended to salaried employees who are exempt from Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) overtime rules.”

The Tax Foundation’s Alex Muresianu had a similar reaction to the proposals to exempt tips from taxes from both Trump and Harris. He thinks “the proposal would make more employees and businesses interested in moving from full wages to a tip-based payment approach”. He foresaw “substantial behavioral responses, such as previously untipped occupations introducing tipping”.

Of course, a world in which more Americans receive their pay beyond the reach of the tax man is a welcome prospect to many of us. If politicians want to phase out income taxes, even unintentionally, who are we to complain? Hang on a minute while I set up my virtual tip jar. In fact, there’s precedent for government policy around wages to cause major unintended consequences. Take, for example, employer-provided healthcare coverage.

Government Policy Has Distorted Compensation Before

“One of the most important spurs to growth of employment-based health benefits was — like many other innovations — an unintended outgrowth of actions taken for other reasons during World War II,” according to the 1993 book, Employment and Health Benefits: A Connection at Risk. “In 1943 the War Labor Board, which had one year earlier introduced wage and price controls, ruled that contributions to insurance and pension funds did not count as wages. In a war economy with labor shortages, employer contributions for employee health benefits became a means of maneuvering around wage controls. By the end of the war, health coverage had tripled.”

Given that health benefits became a substitute form of compensation to escape a wage freeze, it’s not difficult to imagine the United States moving toward a situation in which a lot more people receive the bulk of their pay from untaxed tips and overtime pay.

September 16, 2024

Anger sells – “Words like ‘wrong’, ‘bad’, ‘awful’, ‘hate’, ‘sick’, ‘fight’, and ‘scary’ each predict a 2.3% increase in click-through rates”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Rob Henderson explains the incentives that lead to provoking as much anger as possible among readers (and especially voters):

It seems like people are angrier than ever. According to a poll by CBS News, 84 percent of Americans believe we are angrier than previous generations. Another survey recently found that nine in ten Americans can name either a recent news event or something about American politics that made them angry, while only half could identify a recent news event or something about American politics that made them proud.

What explains this feeling of rage? One noteworthy reason is that exploiting anger is politically convenient.

The strategic use of anger in politics has transformed it from a natural human emotion into a weapon of division, with far-reaching consequences for our social cohesion and democratic governance.

According to Steven Webster, author of “American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics” and assistant professor of political science at Indiana University, “Anger provides ample benefits to those politicians who are able to use it most skillfully”.

Indeed, across political settings, angry people are more likely to vote than those who are not angry. In other words, politicians who can stoke anger can use it to motivate their base. The angrier voters are at the opposing party, the more likely they are to show up to the polls to support their own party. As Webster puts it, “angry voters are loyal voters”.

Political anger has consequences that extend beyond how Americans view their governing institutions or the opposing political party. When American voters are angry about politics, they are inclined to avoid social interactions or social events where they are likely to come into contact with those whose political leanings differ from their own.

In a chapter titled “Emotions in Politics” published last year, the psychologists Florian van Leeuwen and Michael Bang Peterson suggest that along with other emotions, anger “seems to be a distinct strategy for increasing what one is entitled to in the minds of others”.

Provoking rage against selected groups is an effective way to promote unity in politics. Today, many Americans across the political spectrum are encouraged to feel they are being victimized. It’s no coincidence that one of Donald Trump’s go-to lines on the campaign trail is “They’re laughing at us”. Being laughed at induces humiliation, which often quickly transforms into rage.

In a notable historical illustration of a political movement using anger as a limitless source of ideological fuel, consider the case of the “Recalling Bitterness” campaign in Maoist China. In the 1960s, the communist dictator Mao Zedong grew worried that ordinary Chinese citizens were developing lukewarm attitudes about the socialist revolution. In response, the regime forced people into rituals in which they publicly announced how bad life was before they had been liberated. Mao ordered writers and artists to rewrite history through the lens of class struggle to suit the needs of his political agenda. Regime officials held meetings encouraging peasants to describe how much better life was now compared to pre-liberation, hoping to convince them that the revolution’s successes outnumbered its failures. The “devils” here were reactionaries, landlords, rich farmers, and counterrevolutionaries. Documenting the rituals of the Recalling Bitterness campaign, the historian Guo Wu has written, “Only poor peasants were allowed to speak; former landlords and rich peasants were silenced”.

August 9, 2024

QotD: Celebrity fund-raising for foreign aid

Filed under: Africa, Economics, Government, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Unlike private capital, foreign “aid” enters a country not because conditions there favor economic growth but because that country is poor — because that country lacks institutions and policies necessary for growth. And the more miserable its citizens’ lives, the more foreign “aid” its government receives.

Can you imagine a more perverse incentive? The poorer and more wretched are a nation’s people, the more likely celebrities such as Bono will convince Westerners and their governments to take pity on that country and to send large sums of money to its government. And because that country’s citizens are poor largely because their government is corrupt and tyrannical, the money paid in “aid” to that government will do nothing to help that country develop economically.

The cycle truly is vicious. Aid money naively paid by Westerners to alleviate Third-World poverty is stolen or misspent by the thugs who control the governments there. Nothing is done to foster the rule of law and private property rights that alone are the foundation for widespread prosperity. The people remain mired in ghastly poverty, their awful plight further attracting the attention and sympathy of Western celebrities, who use their star attraction and media savvy to shame politicians in the developed world into doling out yet more money to the thugs wielding power in the (pathetically misnamed) “developing world”.

If I could figure out a way to measure the long-term consequences of this new round of debt relief — a way that is so clear and objective that even the most biased party could not quibble with it — I would offer to bet a substantial sum of money that years from now this debt relief will be found to have done absolutely no good for the average citizens of the developing world.

It’s a bet I would surely — and sadly — win.

Don Boudreaux, “Faulty Band-Aid”, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 2005-06-18.

June 4, 2024

How Wall Street billionaires are reacting to the verdict against Trump

Filed under: Business, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Under normal circumstances, you might think that Trump would find doors closed to him among the big-money folks on Wall Street after his trial ended with 34 guilty verdicts … yet the opposite is reported to be happening and his campaign is being inundated with big financial donations:

My quite strong suspicion is that Leticia James and Alvin Bragg have caused alarm by targeting business records and real estate valuations in corporate borrowing, things that everyone shares in finance, insurance, and real estate, for criminalization and destructive litigation. My bet is that capital is turning hard against lawfare, seeking to disincentivize and punish an attack on the basics of corporate business. People in business are horrified by a flamethrower of a prosecution over old business records.

So Bloomberg’s interpretation is that Wall Street is standing with Trump despite the verdict, but my bet is that Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and other business interests are turning against Democrats because of the verdict — because Democratic prosecutors in New York (and especially Manhattan), America’s financial capital, are doing things like turning seven year-old business record misdemeanors into a long list of Frankenstein felonies.

That interpretation makes capital’s support for Trump self-interested rather than morally outraged, though not over Bloomberg’s explanation of lower taxes, as people who keep business records turn against the party that bizarrely overcriminalizes the handling of business records when the target becomes politically unfashionable. If capital turns against the Democratic Party — if the ATM machine stops spitting out campaign funding — the moment becomes pretty significant, and Alvin Bragg becomes the dog who caught the car.

June 3, 2024

QotD: Economic feedback

Filed under: Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Well, now I think about it, most feedback is annoying.

Economics is full of it — as are other economic systems — and humans find it so annoying they have devised various means of shutting it down, and then become puzzled and do crazy stuff when the system goes out of control.

Take price controls. They deliberately shut down feedback. The idea is “people need to eat and the essentials should be cheap”. We went tons of rounds on this in the seventies in Portugal. It was FUN — not — and responsible for empty grocery shelves and problems getting the essentials. Because when cooking oil was dirt cheap by price control, everyone who had ridden this pony before (with bread, with toilet paper, with …) would buy everything in the grocery shelves. Meanwhile, because it was impossible for merchants to make a profit on the thing, they didn’t stock it. Which was okay, because the factories that made it couldn’t afford to at that price, so they stopped. And all the way down the line.

This is because what the idiot politicians were shutting down was the feedback. Prices are many things — and sometimes annoying when you really want a good pair of noise-cancelling headphones but your bank account is crying, to use a totally random example — but MOSTLY? They’re information. They’re feedback.

Because, yes, people work for profit, and profit — things that Warren and Sanders will never get — is not dirty, it’s what people live on, when prices go up — meaning there’s more demand than supply — people go “hey, you can make a profit in this” and start making more, until the supply and demand match, and you can’t make as much money, so people wander off to do other stuff.

You shut down the signal, and things go insane. You keep it shut down long enough while handing down lists of things that the government wants you to make, and vast famines sweep the land but you have a surplus of size 35 shoes for the left foot only. Because the directive handed the factory made that the easiest thing to do.

But it is not just in economics (though eh, everything is a branch of economics, as my reading in my 30s informed me. Which means that’s probably when I started going insane) that humans love shutting down feedback.

The truth is we don’t like reality very much, and are more or less perpetually at war with it.

We have this image of how things should be, and because we imagine it so clearly we think it’s a moral imperative.

Sarah Hoyt, “Shutting Off Feedback or How We Got Into This Fine Mess”, According to Hoyt, 2019-11-04.

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