> Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
> First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
> Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
> The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
This (and other organizational failures and technological innovations) is why there will always be startups and small businesses eventually where there was once a big entrenched business or two (or sometimes three).
There is also, of course, whole new industries and niches to be created out of nothing, value and wealth is never a finite pile. It's mostly a matter of human effort to find and break out these new areas. Sometimes just reinventing things as the old talent grows old and dies off, providing value in learning history.
What we have to note is that the 2,000 Admiralty officials of 1914 had become the 3,569 of 1928; and that this growth was unrelated to any possible increase in their work. The Navy during that period had diminished, in point of fact, by a third in men and two-thirds in ships. Nor, from 1922 onwards, was its strength even expected to increase, for its total of ships (unlike its total of officials) was limited by the Washington Naval Agreement of that year.
That sounds like an ironclad law. But is there empirical evidence for it? And a rational explanation behind it? I mean it's very strict as a rule: "in EVERY case the second group ... ".
Strong claims like that require strong evidence and a theory of WHY that would (always) be the outcome.
I'm thinking of society as large. That is an organization too. Are we doomed by bureaucracy?
When management becomes separated from both the people at the coalface (the people actually doing the jobs the organisation needs to do) and the founders/president/CEO, then behaviour changes. In most organisations, this is at 3 layers of management
(not including the actual workers and the top management layer, so 5 layers deep for the whole organisation). After this point, presentation and political acumen outweigh all other factors for the middle management layer, because all other factors can always be "spun" to look good, or blamed on a scapegoat, etc. - there's no direct link between what the middle-manager did and what the result was, so presentation matters more.
Once that happens, the organisation will promote people who do politics well. It's only a matter of time before the entire organisation is focused on internal politics (apart from the people actually doing the work, who become pawns in political moves). As the organisation grows and the layers expand and more layers of management become disconnected, it gets worse.
In a company, eventually the company will get disrupted and die off. In a government that's not a thing, and it'll just keep expanding and playing politics. This gets worse for government departments headed by a politician, because the politician is very focused on getting something they can boast about to their electorate in the few years they have in the department. And they're usually very familiar with the kinds of political games being played.
Source: We studied this in my MBA, it's a known thing. If I still had my textbooks I could dig out a reference.
Think of it in terms of thermodynamics. The first group requires extra energy relative to the second group to perform roles of leadership, since those are secondary goals. The second group is instead naturally drawn to the roles of direction of the group. Thus, the lowest energy state will be one where the second group is in charge. Over time, things will gravitate to that state as it is the global minimum.
Eventually the bureaucrats become the senior leadership and then they protect themselves.
This grows like a cancer: it starts from the bottom of the pool with people with no much skills, but looking for promotions while people with skills are looking for work results. In some very large companies I worked in (or with), techies focus on work while less competent people become managers; techies regard managers initially as admins that do work techies don't want to, but then the managers take over the organization and make it rot. This is initially far from senior leadership's sight, when it becomes visible it means most of the organization is already affected and it is too late. In most cases HR is helping with this because HR is completely disconnected and not understanding techies and the power dynamics ("those geeks nobody understands") and side with the bureaucrats because HR is also a form of bureaucracy (you don't get in HR is you are a brilliant STEM graduate).
They may offer resistance to the control of the second group but they don't fight as hard to take that control (because they focus on doing the work) so are eventually overpowered
There will be a lot of datapoints supporting that “law”... the problem is that it’s subjective.
Everyone hates “education bureaucrats”, but if the mission is educating children, at some level the state of the institution is critical to that mission.
I don’t really believe you could do such a thing empirically. I mean it just depends on scale as you indicated. I have never been a fan of ‘social’ sciences either.
Just like Christensen’s Dilemma books are mostly just anecdotes combined with patterns in history. As many such business books are.
But in my short time on this planet I’ve seen it in countless forms where I strongly believe it deserves such a title as “iron law”.
I don't have empirical evidence, but it mirrors the 2nd law of thermodynamics (entropy always increasing). Most "concentrated" things tend to dissipate away.
> Are we doomed by bureaucracy?
When empires collapse, you get small offshoots starting up somewhere nearby. If you search "tree life cycle" on google images you will see the analogy I'm trying to get at :)
Yes. This is why Moon, Mars, etc colonies are important - it is like small startups wrt. BigCo which is our Earth civilization reaching the state of disfunction.
You may have posted this many times, but this is my first time seeing and it explains so much about what is going on right now in my life. It doesn’t give me hope, but it gives some clarity around what otherwise seems like dysfunction. Thank you!
Apple is actually bigger by employee count, however about half (I think) are retail employees in the stores.
So yes - a very large organisation. However Apple's chip design teams are much, much smaller than that. And because Apple mostly doesn't do chip design those teams are likely able to work like a startup, without much internal politics or in-fighting. Where as all of Intel's 100,000+ employees are basically devoted to chip design and manufacture.
Apple as a whole, though, is starting to look rather sick from the same sort of problems that Intel has. Under Jobs there was an energy and clarity of purpose that's been lacking for some time. The drift in Apple's core businesses are obvious. The iPhone has been stuck in turgid incrementalism for a long time now, and has already been largely "disrupted" by Android which sold into cheaper markets and used that to fund R&D budgets that match Apple's. We don't think of it as disruption because Android arrive so soon after the iPhone and thus there was no obvious delayed "disruption event", Apple just had their market share capped by the refusal to compete on price, which is why Apple fans have for years been forced to make arguments about why Apple is successful because they take a larger profit margin than others.
Their core Mac business has also been adrift for many years now. I and many others actively avoid trying to upgrade because things frequently get worse rather than better. The first decade of the century saw constant innovation in the Mac business, after all their best people were reallocated to the iPhone and iPad, quality entered a long period of decline. macOS releases struggled with regressions and rarely introduced new innovations worth caring about. Their apps and hardware have also stalled with own goals and unforced errors like the keyboard fiasco <looks at butterfly keys with holes in the plastic from ordinary levels of use>.
Developer experience and docs are another area of problems, there was a good rant about it posted here the other day.
All these are due to organisational rot, and most obviously, a form of in-fighting between iOS / macOS in which the iWorld got the best people and resources, leaving macWorld to pathetically try and steal things from the other group occasionally, regardless of whether it made sense for a laptop context or not.
I get the idea that Apple's culture of secrecy applies just as much to internal projects. So while the total headcount is huge, the headcount involved in any given project is small, and unlikely to be affected by the rest of the organisation because they don't know about the project.
Thanks for making me aware of this.
I’m interested in finding the derivation of this law. Intuitively it sounds sort of like Grisham’s law were bad money drives out good, but it can’t be quite that simple, can it? Is it more of an empirical thing? I know I am being lazy just asking but a quick search turns up only statements of the law. I can make up my own thinking behind it but I’d like to get it from Pournelle if possible.
(Aside: Rothbard was great at this sort of logic chaining I think)
Also nice rabbit hole generally here!
Turf wars are a symptom of thinking you are smarter than everyone else ... and what group makes the greatest effort in this counter-productive egotistical exercise? Silicon design engineers.
Wouldn't most employees fall under the first category, and managers and executives the next? And employees are paid to carry out goals. while employers take care of the organization and set the goals. With this modeling of the situation, the second group always had control to begin with. They're management.
And there's always corruption and politics where there are humans, be it in the mailroom or the boardroom.
> Wouldn't most employees fall under the first category,
Tell that to any college/university in the western world!
There's a reason tuitions have risen so high and it's largely been cited as the ratio of admins to teachers as being at least 10:1 when it used to be much closer.
I personally blame cheap gov subsidized credit for this quickly forming trend, which only took ~2 decades to have a devastating effect on students who come out of school without a degree which can somehow pay back such debt (which we in STEM are fortunate and I personally dropped out early).
This law is the reason term-limits and liquid-democracy are such strong tools.
Term limits are best implemented where someone must take on a different job every x years. This doesn't solve the problem of entrenched vampiric bureaucrats entirely, but it at least pushes them towards the chopping block.
Liquid democracy is a type of democracy where people give their voting power for particular issues to whoever they trust most for that topic. Then that person may pass the cumulative votes onto someone they trust and believe in. The point of liquid democracy is to empower people who are actual experts in a subject. Rather than having laymen vote in ways that just empower the most socially adept.
The entire skillset involved with gaining power is so time-consuming, it's incredibly rare for someone to have it and an actual technical skill at the same time.
Term limits are a terrible idea. They reduce the power and expertise of elected representatives in favor of the permanent government, civil service and lobbyists. On top of that they encourage corrupt behavior as you know you’re not getting elected so there is no reason not to beyond the threat of legal consequences.
> Disentangling Accountability and Competence in Elections: Evidence from U.S. Term Limits
> We exploit variation in U.S. gubernatorial term limits across states and time to empirically estimate two separate effects of elections on government performance. Holding tenure in office constant, differences in performance by reelection-eligible and term-limited incumbents identify an accountability effect: reelection-eligible governors have greater incentives to exert costly effort on behalf of voters. Holding term-limit status constant, differences in performance by incumbents in different terms identify a competence effect: later-term incumbents are more likely to be competent both because they have survived reelection and because they have experience in office. We show that economic growth is higher and taxes, spending, and borrowing costs are lower under reelection- eligible incumbents than under term-limited incumbents (accountability), and under reelected incumbents than under first-term incumbents (competence), all else equal. In addition to improving our understanding of the role of elections in representative democracy, these findings resolve an empirical puzzle about the disappearance of the effect of term limits on gubernatorial performance over time.
A: Power corrupts - is not a joke. Reelection doesn't prevent corruption at all. It's a complete non-factor.
B: Elected officials are supposed to be the overseeing representatives, rather than functional executives.(think board vs C-suite). Elected executive is overall a poor idea.
It's not just one study, either. This isn't the area of political science I work in. Amongst those who do, it's an essentially universally-held belief that term limits for legislators are empirically a bad idea.
It's a shame. I like the idea of not concentrating power.
What about the people who project themselves as being experts in a very believable fashion but are actually not experts? Human nature would tend to cause these people to double down on their own self delusion rather than admit they don’t actually know what they are talking about. How do we guard against that?
The Iron Law of Bureaucracy
> Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
> First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
> Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
> The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
This (and other organizational failures and technological innovations) is why there will always be startups and small businesses eventually where there was once a big entrenched business or two (or sometimes three).
There is also, of course, whole new industries and niches to be created out of nothing, value and wealth is never a finite pile. It's mostly a matter of human effort to find and break out these new areas. Sometimes just reinventing things as the old talent grows old and dies off, providing value in learning history.