Todd Suomela's Library tagged bureaucracy →  View Popular, Search in Google

"In the meantime, we need to reinvent our rulemaking processes. Currently we make laws and regulations like oysters make pearls, except instead of starting with a tiny grain of sand and covering it with precious nacre, we start with a tiny pearl of sensible principles and cover it with layer upon layer of sand, grit, and detritus. This makes for ugly pearls, and lousy legislation."

government regulation failure regulatory-capture bureaucracy rule-making rules pragmatism

"This is a musing on large bureaucratic organizations. I have noticed that some people get frustrated because they do not understand that law, economics, and politics are distinct things and they are not equally persuasive as arguments."

bureaucracy decision politics law economics

Comments on Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.

legibility modernism social control bureaucracy state government rationality

"It isn't hard to see why a bureaucracy, entrusted with spending billions of taxpayer dollars, is more concerned with minimising losses than maximizing gains. And the NIH approach does have its place. The Santa Fe complexity theorists Stuart Kaufman and John Holland have shown that the ideal way to discover paths through a shifting landscape of possibilities is to combine baby steps and speculative leaps. The NIH is funding the baby steps. Who is funding the speculative leaps? The Howard Hughes Medical Institute invests huge sums each year, but only about one-twentieth of 1 percent of the world's global R&D budget. There are a few organizations like the HHMI, but most R&D is either highly commercially focused research, the opposite of blue-sky thinking, or target-driven grants typified by the NIH. The baby steps are there; the experimental leaps are missing."

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bureaucracy computer-science metaphor humor

"Everywhere the words of bureaucrats, ministers and presidents are sick, cynical, passionless and self-interested jokes designed largely to secure the authority of political classes through the tired rehearsal of well-worn gestures, and everywhere populations know those performances as perverse and unamusing pantomimes. Everywhere the nation-state tends towards bloat, corruption, inflexibility, paralysis. "

politics nation-state institutions failure bureaucracy