{"id":70758,"date":"2025-07-26T01:00:03","date_gmt":"2025-07-26T05:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=70758"},"modified":"2025-07-25T10:06:07","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T14:06:07","slug":"qotd-the-accumulated-friction-of-bureaucratic-growth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/07\/26\/qotd-the-accumulated-friction-of-bureaucratic-growth\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The accumulated friction of bureaucratic growth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Bureaucracies all succumb very quickly to some kind of “Malthusian progression”. I’m not sure what to call it, I suck at naming stuff (please take your shot in the comments), but you all know what I mean: A bureaucracy’s tasks<\/em> increase arithmetically, but the amount of effort<\/em> each task requires increases geometrically.<\/p>\n

[…] In the early Republic, raising a legion was as simple as a patrician calling his clients to service, or the Senate issuing a conscription decree. One task: the summoning of free men, with their own equipment, and there you go \u2014 Legio I Hypothetica<\/em>.<\/p>\n

By the late Empire, though, all those freeholds had been turned into slave-worked Latifundia<\/em>, so the effort of raising a legion increased enormously. Now the bureaucracy had to go out and hire freemen (if it could even find them), equip them at State expense, train them (again at State expense), and so on. In itself, the number of tasks isn’t that large \u2014 we’ve identified three \u2014 and they only increase at the rate of n+1.<\/p>\n

But the effort each task requires increases to the power of n, such that if you could somehow express the effort expended in physical terms \u2014 joules or kilowatts or whatever \u2014 you’d see that the creation of Legio I Hypothetica<\/em> under Scipio Africanus took 10 kilowatts, while raising the same legion under Diocletian took 10,000,000.<\/p>\n

This isn’t (just) corruption. Sure, everyone at every level of the Imperial Bureaucracy was getting his beak wet, that goes without saying, but it’s the nature of bureaucracy itself that’s most to blame.<\/p>\n

Severian, “Collapse II”, Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2021-12-09.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bureaucracies all succumb very quickly to some kind of “Malthusian progression”. I’m not sure what to call it, I suck at naming stuff (please take your shot in the comments), but you all know what I mean: A bureaucracy’s tasks increase arithmetically, but the amount of effort each task requires increases geometrically. […] In the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,25,62,84,7,5,41],"tags":[31,313,363,1343,1345,1462,605],"class_list":["post-70758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-economics","category-europe","category-government","category-history","category-military","category-quotations","tag-army","tag-conscription","tag-corruption","tag-romanempire","tag-romanrepublic","tag-severian","tag-slavery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-ipg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70758"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96766,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70758\/revisions\/96766"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}