Un-Sustainable Rise Of Complexity and Bureaucracy
Date Sat 16 Aug 2008 | Leave a Comment
“Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.”
– Albert Einstein
Bureaucracy irritates me, I mean REALLY <blanky> irritates me. All my friends hate bureaucracy. All my family hates bureaucracy. In fact, everyone I’ve ever mentioned the word bureaucracy to hates bureaucracy! If so many of us (seemingly all of us) hate bureaucracy, then why is it thriving? What is really going on here?
I believe the answers are critical elements to us building a better future with a sustainable economic system and hanging onto an atmosphere that you can actually breathe.
Increasing bureaucracy is not some benign quirk we should simply tolerate. Increasing bureaucracy is a tell-tale sign of bloated, inefficient systems (economies) that are simply not sustainable.
It’s worse than it looks… We’re not just talking about your classic text-book definition of bureaucracy here. What we’re seeing today is the momentous rise of an unproductive sector which I loosely categorize as “bureaucracy” and define as the parasitic drag affecting the REAL production and distribution of REAL essential goods.
My list of parasites includes administrators, accountants, salespeople, middle-men, traders, speculators, bankers, marketers, lawyers, CEOs and all those employed in non-essential government sectors. Basically if you don’t actually produce anything of value you’re on my list as a parasite!
Right now, some readers are nodding their heads in agreement while others are taking offense. That’s where it gets complicated. What is “essential”? What is “value”? As a society, we don’t really know anymore. It’s become a subjective matter because the issue has become incredibly complex. A couple of hundred years ago, to determine whether or not someone was a parasitic drag, we would have asked the simple question, “Did you contribute to putting food on the table or building the barn or fixing the wagon?”. With the exception of entertainers (for which we’ve always had a soft spot), if you answered no, then you hadn’t “earned your keep”.
Today that simplicity is gone. Mechanization, fueled by cheap, non-renewable fossil fuels has freed us from productive manual labor, allowing us to increase in complexity (specialization), pursue consumerism and wallow in the creation of non-sustainable, non-productive jobs! (See consumerism and sustainable job creation). Critically, it is that cheap energy which has allowed us to “afford” bureaucracy and tolerate the inefficient use of labor.
“Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one.”
– John Maynard Keynes
The Double-Whammy Of Bureaucracy, Complexity And Centralization
The “growth of complexity” is a recognized phenomenon of evolving systems like societies. Biological evolutionists describe blind variation and selective retention as tending to produce increases in both structural and functional complexity of evolving systems.
The trouble with societal evolution is that there is someone guiding the process. There is questionable “intelligence” manipulating things. The bureaucrats are at work. The “blind” variation is not so blind, the selective retention is skewed. Both forces have been railroaded by narrow self interest that ultimately leads to more centralized bureaucracy and more poor decisions. It’s a cancerous rot that is difficult to combat.
Here’s a true case that illustrates why bureaucracy thrives and why it’s so hard to combat… Selective retention at it’s worst…
Karen owned her own business. Gradually the profit margins dwindled under the ever-increasing administrative loads, taxes, and costs of compliance with new rules and regulations dreamed up and imposed by centralized bureaucracy.
She sold out (in more ways than one). And quickly landed a fairly cushy government job. Her thinking was, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” Ambitious, she climbed the ladder within her department until she reached managerial status with a great perks package.
One day the news filtered down that the bloated department was to be rationalized. The razor gang was trimming all dead wood. Karen’s ENTIRE branch was earmarked for pruning. What does a bureaucrat do in that situation? One finds a palatable solution!
Karen immediately contacted a few close confidantes in adjacent branches and on the main trunk. A plan was hatched and Karen was able to quietly reassure her underlings that all was not lost - accept your massive redundancy packages - We have a plan…
The generous redundancy packages were quickly tucked away and phase two kicked in… Karen’s public service buddies began pulling the required strings, nodding, winking and lobbying the appropriate people. In no time at all it was determined that a new branch should be created.
Of course, the new branch wouldn’t do exactly the same things as the old branch (nobody was too sure what that was anyway). What they did know for sure was that the new branch presented new challenges and the rates of pay would need to be adjusted upwards! The new branch is now thriving at great expense to the taxpayer and society in general.
The story is unfortunately all too common and illustrates the vicious circle behind expanding bureaucracy; Bureaucrats naturally don’t want to give up their jobs so will do anything in their power to keep them (forget efficiency and ideals like the collective good - it’s every man for himself!) and secondly, crushed by the sheer weight of bureaucracy everyone on the “outside” sees “joining ‘em” as an attractive option.
While we’re bagging bureaucracy let’s continue with another quick illustration of the stupidity of centralized governments and bureaucratic bungling…
Nobody really knows the full story because nobody has owned up yet. A few years back, a brand new police station was built in the village of Carinda (population 194) in Walgett shire, NSW. The sheer size of the station mystified locals, after all with a population of just 194 crime was practically non-existent. Somehow, the construction of this “overly large” police station received approval, passed inspection and was put into service in the wrong town! The police station was actually meant to be built at Quirindi, a town of 2500, many miles away. The oversized police station has become a tourist highlight and testament to the stupidity of centralized government.
I could go on with examples of monumental blunders at local, state and federal level; the rainwater tank fiasco, the septic tank fiasco, grey water policy confusion etc. Bureaucrats get it wrong over and over again and expect society to foot the bill.
Our centralized bureaucracies have no “common sense”, they’re inefficient and we can no longer afford them.
Joseph Tainter, in “Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies” points out that while a certain level of complexity is beneficial for the sake of efficiency, at some stage, societies hit the point of diminishing returns on complexity… Further investment in complexity becomes a counter-productive burden and alienates the society it was meant to serve…
“diminishing returns make complexity less attractive and breed disaffection. As taxes and other costs rise and there are fewer benefits at the local level, more and more people are attracted by the idea of being independent. The society “decomposes” as people pursue their immediate needs rather than the long-term goals of the leadership.”
I would say that we reached the point of diminishing returns on increasing complexity a long time ago. It’s my guess we reached that point in the late 1960’s, perhaps the 1970’s. The mind-boggling growth of complexity since then is just pushing on a string. Despite all the gadgetry and “stuff”, I just can’t see the evidence of any real improvement in our quality of life in the last 40 years, in fact, I’d argue that the social dysfunction we’re now seeing is evidence of society “decomposing”.
One thing is clear; complexity, bureaucracy and other non-productive parasitism has grown to unsustainable levels. What happens when cheap fossil fuel energy runs out? And cheap alternatives cannot be found? Again, Tainter speculates…
“One often-discussed path is cultural and economic simplicity and lower energy costs. This could come about through the “crash” that many fear — a genuine collapse over a period of one or two generations, with much violence, starvation, and loss of population. The alternative is the “soft landing” that many people hope for - a voluntary change to solar energy and green fuels, energy-conserving technologies, and less overall consumption. This is a utopian alternative that, as suggested above, will come about only if severe, prolonged hardship in industrial nations makes it attractive, and if economic growth and consumerism can be removed from the realm of ideology”
It’s little wonder that voluntary simplicity and self-sufficiency are gaining popularity. I’m firmly convinced that relocalization - creating self-sufficient communities - and decentralization is the path we need to take to engineer a soft landing.
Patents for DIY Self-Sufficiency Projects
Date Wed 6 Aug 2008 | Leave a Comment
As a fabricator, I’m constantly looking online for input, ideas or even working plans for my self-sufficient living projects. One of the best sources of information I’ve found are the various patent sites.
The other day I downloaded a patent for an efficient wood heater. The drawings were detailed enough to actually build a unit from. For an upcoming home-built vertical axis wind generator I’ve assembled enough information, from airfoils to generator to structure, all from patents available online.
Of course you aren’t allowed to go into production of the “invention” but for the purposes of building your own equipment for self-sufficient living it is quite OK to base your design on patents.
The easiest site I’ve found is freepatentsonline. All you need to do is register and images, drawings and the full patent is made available in PDF which you can easily save to your computer.
The search function at freepatentsonline is a little whacky. If I can’t find what I want I’ll often just use Google for the same search terms and add the word freepatentsonline. Google’s results are often better. Having got some results, be sure to see related patents or “patents that cite this patent”. There is a goldmine of information available.
Consumerism and Sustainable Job Creation
Date Sun 3 Aug 2008 | Leave a Comment
There are very few humans currently living on planet earth that would dare claim that everything is rosy with our system. Yet we’ve had a hundred years - a whole century of rapid developments in mechanization, technological advance and social tinkering which promised to deliver a better world. One of the main promises of mechanization and technological advance was to get the work done easier and faster. The result we expected was increased leisure time - futurists went so far as to speculate as to just what we might do with our time when work was no longer necessary!
But here we are a century later most of us still “working”. And according to workplace studies in Australia, we’re working even longer hours than 20 years ago! Yes, The nature of the work has changed, to be sure. Gone is much of the heavy labor thanks to machinery. And gone too are hundreds of thousands of jobs on assembly lines and factories thanks to robotics. Gone too are thousands of jobs in agriculture and other labor intensive industries.
Mechanization, robotics and computers have without question eliminated jobs.
So it begs the question: how come unemployment is low? As of late 2007, the Australian government was claiming record low unemployment and a dire skill shortage. So dire is our shortage of workers that immigration and special programs for foreign workers have been ramped up. Despite losing hundreds of thousands of jobs to mechanization we’re still all employed! We’re still all commuting to work - gobbling up oil and spitting out smog in the process. Worse, both partners, husband and wife are making the commute, often in two cars - double the trouble for the environment. In Australia, two incomes (jobs) have become “essential”.
All of a sudden we see that things are not adding up… Those futurists were obviously wrong and it’s now clear that we no longer even expect the technological advances to eliminate work. It’s also clear that as a society we still feel that all able-bodied members must have have a job or they’re somehow shirking their responsibility. Here’s proof…
Let’s say you become unemployed and need government unemployment payments (the Dole) to survive, There’s just no way you’re going to get payments without “jumping through the hoops” and documenting your concerted effort to find a job.
Just try this claim at your social security office: “Oh no, I don’t need an actual job. I’ve been displaced by machines so just give me the cash. Where do I sign?” The nice lady behind the counter will smile at your “joke” - it simply must be a joke - nobody in their right mind expects to be paid for NOT working. Clearly, the expectation is that we must have a job.
So eager are we to provide ourselves with jobs that we’ll trash the planet to achieve our goal…
The monumental problem with jobs is this; almost everyone who has a job must commute to work and that commute, whether powered by electricity (unless solar photovoltaic) or internal combustion engine, requires energy and so contributes to environmental degradation. Obviously some modes of powered transport are more planet friendly than others but the bottom line is this: moving vast numbers of people to their place of work is unsustainable.
Consumerism Creating Unnecessary Jobs
The second problem with “jobs” is that many are totally unnecessary. There, I’ve said it. And I just know that some people are going to be offended by this but the fact is there are a number of occupations that are flat out destroying the world and a total waste of human endeavor.
Telemarketing springs to mind as the first obvious example. This particularly annoying form of marketing is intrusive, wastes time, costs the environment resources and drives rampant consumption. Telemarketing does not create food, does not build shelter or essential products. Telemarketing’s primary objective is to make sales, or more accurately, “make money” and nothing more. Telemarketing would receive a big fat zero on my “usefulness” scale. And I must add, zero intrinsic value to society.
At the other end of the spectrum, let’s take an occupation like the growing of staple foods. Imagine a very productive farmer who single-handedly grows enough grain and wholesome vegetables to feed an entire village. On my “usefulness” scale his occupation would deserve a 9.
Now let’s look at an extreme “negative usefulness” occupation by imagining, for example, a “super-telemarketing instructor”. A master salesperson who travels the world teaching telemarketers how to manipulate people’s emotions over the telephone, overcome their target’s reservations and close more sales of useless energy-sucking consumer gadgets. He’s in big demand, regularly flying across the world to train aspiring telemarketers. In doing so he’s not only promoting and perpetuating a business model (occupation) that is practically worthless to society, he is fueling rampant consumption and has an enormous personal environmental footprint in non-essential air travel. His job is an environmental disaster.
Note: our imagined “super-telemarketing instructor” is a fictional character but he is, unfortunately, based on reality. High-powered sales, marketing and advertising people regularly jet-set around our world selling themselves, “selling the sizzle” and driving consumerism. Much of the international diplomatic circus is merely state-sponsored sales, marketing and the promotion of consumerism in disguise.
The Rise of an Unproductive Sector
The blunt, horrible truth is that mankind’s ingenuity - a century of mechanization and technological advances - has displaced workers from productive endeavor and forced us to “invent” new jobs. Growing public service. Growing bureaucracy. Growing government. Growing legal complexity stimulating ever more new specialist occupations to decipher the complexity! (Resulting in increased compliance costs and the need for ever more money). Business (busy-ness) can no longer make a profit providing for our needs - merely meeting demand is no longer enough - business must now create new needs in the minds of the consumer.
Welcome to the world of consumerism - the land of unnecessary, unproductive jobs - welcome to the grand illusion of debt-based money and artificial competition.