[FRIAM] Future Generating Machines...

[Chris Feola]

uǝlƃ wrote: I'd argue that any surviving bureaucracy works *most* of the time, almost by definition.

One scholar who has taken a serious look<https://arxiv.org/abs/0804.2202> at Parkinson’s Law is Stefan Thurner, a professor in Science of Complex Systems at the Medical University of Vienna. Thurner says he became interested in the concept when the faculty of medicine at the University of Vienna split into its own independent university in 2004. Within a couple years, he says, the Medical University of Vienna went from being run by 15 people to 100, while the number of scientists stayed about the same. “I wanted to understand what was going on there, and why my bureaucratic burden did not diminish – on the contrary it increased,” he says.

He happened to read Parkinson’s book around the same time and was inspired to turn it into a mathematical model that could be manipulated and tested, along with co-authors Peter Klimek and Rudolf Hanel. “Parkinson argued that if you have 6% growth rate of any administrative body, then sooner or later any company will die. They will have all their workforce in bureaucracy and none in production.



Parkinson pointed to two critical elements that lead to bureaucratisation – what he called the law of multiplication of subordinates, the tendency of managers to hire two or more subordinates to report to them so that neither is in direct competition with the manager themself; and the fact that bureaucrats create work for other bureaucrats.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191107-the-law-that-explains-why-you-cant-get-anything-done

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From: uǝlƃ ↙↙↙<mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, March 29, 2021 12:09 PM
To: friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Future Generating Machines...

That's a bold assertion. I'd argue that any surviving bureaucracy works *most* of the time, almost by definition. Of course, *new* bureaucracies probably fail most of the time. Then it would be important to be able to talk about bureaucratic novelty. E.g. the ACA (ObamaCare) was not a *new* bureacracy. And it didn't really fail. There were various stalls and hiccups. Now that that bureaucracy is up and running, it's "working" ... maybe not optimally. But optimality is persnickety.

In any case, only data would resolve the disagreement. And in order to gather data, you'd have to be explicit about measuring "work", as well as novelty and bureaucracy.

On 3/29/21 9:41 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>
> Bureaucracies barely work most of the time.

--
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

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