Drunkard's Walk Forums

Hello
Over in "Other peoples fiction" in a thread
http://drunkardswalkforum...Non-serviam-A-plot-bunny
I mention the "Iron Law of Bureaucracy" and use a rant based around the "iron Law" because it takes the fanfic idea in a direction most people familiar with the movie aren't looking.
Here is a Link(Thanks  Necratoid)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle

It was science fiction movie with an implied rant about mob rule or that humanity couldn't make good decision and added a rant with the opposite view using Bureaucratic examples from personal experience and the real world to show the direction a fanfic writer could take it.
That led to a reply with Unions being mentioned in less than 5 post so I thought I'd create a thread here.
Cattynebulart mentioned citation and that sounds like it would be fun both for and against Bureaucracy.
Cattynebulart mentioned the Roman Bureaucracy lasting for 1000's of years

I'll mention China if I'm not mistaken they had a Bureaucracy that beat the Romans in lifespan and ability.
Necratoid mentioned unions and a current Law
Robkelk pointed out some things about the tendency to make it the unions fault.
Edit
Just saw CattyNebularts 2:15 post and he wanted citation of my 50 year rant statement not the "Iron Law". I was treating the 50 years as a exaggeration, but I think I can scare up a few examples that argue for a 50 year life cycle more or less at least as a modern state of affairs for modern computer driven Bureaucracies.
Also does anyone else have the occasional problem of yuku sometimes losing all formatting information and putting up a wall of text, thought I had that solved, but my recent surge of post has had it happen a couple of times..
hmelton

.

Quote:Robkelk pointed out some things about the tendency to make it the unions fault.

For clarification, I pointed out that it isn't always the union's fault.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

I know there's been enough high-profile cases of unions screwing over the people they supposedly represent that I will never willingly give a union any money until they've proven themselves to me... and I know with absolute certainty that they don't make political contributions.

-Morgan.

Did a little research after church came up with some links and a scifi idea that might be interesting.
First a set of links to Mr. Pournelle's personal website and forum.
Main or home page.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/index.html
next this gives a overview of his website
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/whatis.html
now for the iron law theory in his own words.
http://www.jerrypournelle...reports/jerryp/iron.html
something I read years ago(1990's) and probably able to fuel another set of threads in the politics and other fun forum.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/science/voodoo.html

Below is a rather quickly collected group of links that came out of my attempt to cite some source, there were a large number of answers for companies, but none really seemed trust worthy.
I am curious just how long a bureaucracy goes on average before it starts to show signs of the "Iron Law", for me the signs would be the sudden explosion of paperwork and the sudden growth of people within the company not directly doing what the bureaucracy was set up to do.  For example a police force who's bureaucracy has reached the stage where it has started to use a very high percentage of it's resources to hire additional employees, such as clerks and janitors that have nothing to do with directly enforcing the laws or in a budget pinch lays off police officers first instead of clerks and janitors.
I did a search for Bureaucracy with various words attached like lifespan, problems, efficiency and cycles and was surprised at how hot a potato the word was, it was making it hard to quickly find any useful information.
I decided to use something I remembered from the several economic textbooks I've read back in the 1980's and 1990's and looked up links for business life cycles instead and had much better list or at least less politically motivated list of links that aren't quite what I was wanting.
Most of the links below lead to short web pages with graphs and short discussions, but the last PDF is very large and I'm still working my way through it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w...rganizational_life_cycle
http://www.legacee.com/FastGrowth/OrgLifeCycle.html

http://www.inc.com/encycl...zational-life-cycle.html

http://books.google.com/b...ats.html?id=S63Mkn0LdK8C
http://www.lmmiller.com/a...nization-Life-Cycles.pdf
http://www.thesecondcycle.com/t2c/winning.php
http://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/0472113178-ch1.pdf

I firmly believe that Mr. Pournelle's Iron Law is a fairly good theory of why Bureaucracy's can develop the way they do and why most Bureaucracy end up insane by human standards.
That said I also believe that Bureaucracies like politics are better than the alternatives assuming  an alternative even exist for expanding an organization beyond what a single individual can handle.

Thinking about Cattynebulart's mentioning of the Roman empire Bureaucracy and my own mentioning of the long lived Chinese Bureaucracy perhaps the duration of a Bureaucracy isn't a good measure, after all the Iron Law mentions that any Bureaucracy is slowly taken over by the people most willing to advance within the Bureaucracy itself leaving those individuals that want to perform the actual task at a disadvantage.
If Mr. Pournelle's Iron Law is valid then it should be possible for steps to be taken that keep or at least slow down a Bureaucracy's fall into a internally focused self serving state.
Playing with this as a science fiction idea perhaps Bureaucracies should be considered a new life form that is a emergent property of the organization needed to run a large company or nation.  I do know the Law for many purposes will treat companies as a person or a living being that is not the individuals that make up the corporation, perhaps the lawyers were seeing more than they realized.
 
I've heard politicians state that nations aren't individuals and shouldn't make national decision or set national policy like it is a individual. Perhaps the Bureaucratic insanity I mentioned isn't so insane if you consider the Bureaucracy a living organism, which has goals totally divorced from the original purpose of the nation or company that created the Bureaucracy. 
CattyNebulart you mentioned UFO's that would make a good story idea, perhaps aliens arrive and they refuse to see humanity as individuals or even as a species instead they respond, speak and react not to humanity but to the Bureaucracies of humanity as if they were the life form worthy of interstellar contact..
hmelton
God Bless
 

A beurocracy can go crazy, but for the most part it's fairly rare, and it tends to be more related to the external factors acting on the organization than anything else though internal culture and leadership also matters.

the notion that bureaucracies inevitably go insane is quite seductive, but the facts don't bear it out. Instead the important thing is how it's self correcting mechanism work, as the environment and policies change remains of old, ill though out and otherwise bad policies and procedures start to accumulate, there must be some way of correcting and removing these.

A good example of a bad bureaucracy is the TSA, which seems more concerned with kickbacks and expansions than anything else, and it is also a very young bureaucracy. Meanwhile the much older NIH works fairly well, whatever you may think of the policies it has been tasked with implementing. This would seem to tropedo your iron law argument quite nicely.

As for unions in america unions are quite bad, but that is a function of how hard they have had to fight. It kind of reminds me of those vicious sled dogs they raise in greenland, they do live a very brutal life and so they are ferocious and dangerous. In europe meanwhile the unions are much more able and willing to work with management since they didn't have to fight nearly as hard. As a result the system works much better, though it has it's own share of faults.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

Morganni Wrote:I know there's been enough high-profile cases of unions screwing over the people they supposedly represent that I will never willingly give a union any money until they've proven themselves to me... and I know with absolute certainty that they don't make political contributions.

-Morgan.

Having been personally screwed over by a union once before, I can say that this is rather mild and moderate compared to my feelings on the subject.
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.