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One of my US high school history teachers once taught us that bureaucracy and endless mounds of red tape were the natural consequence of Americans valuing fairn

One of my US high school history teachers once taught us that bureaucracy and endless mounds of red tape were the natural consequence of Americans valuing fairness over efficiency, and in the end getting neither. We want a system that is: 1. fair, and Americans immediately suspect that humans tend to favor their friends 2. based on clear, written rules, so everyone can compete on an even playing field 3. good enough to handle any edge case, so that 'exceptions' to rules via human override (and potential corruption) can be avoided Implementing 1-3 means building a giant, inflexible bureaucracy, where responsibility is widely distributed (so nobody can be corrupt) and an immense book of rules and red tape (so it can handle every edge case). Unfortunately Americans don't even really get fairness in practice. The cost of following all the rules to the letter is so incredibly expensive and inefficient that obviously government agencies and their favored contract bidders have back channels with one another so that they know exactly how to structure their bids to win. This is why conservatives sometimes have a point - many regulations not only do not do anything for the public good, but they actually help entrenched interests.

js8 9y ago
I suspect if you think that U.S. is too bureaucratic or unfair, you have never been to other countries, really. There is only a handful of countries that can be said to do better in one of those respects. It seems to me that you claim that there is a trade-off between bureaucracy and corruption. I disagree, to me it seems (although I cannot readily prove it) that these are more often correlated than not.
- icegreentea2 9y ago
  I think his point that you don't actually get fairness in practice answers to your point about the trade-off between efficiency and corruption. I think the point was that adding rules and diffusing responsibility appear to be a way to reduce corruption and making things fair for everyone, but that in practice that relationship may not be so simple.
- smallnamespace 9y ago
  > U.S. is too bureaucratic or unfair Not so much at the local level where a citizen deals with the bureaucracy, but certainly at the level where lots of money gets allocated and spent, such as military procurement. Just look at what SpaceX has managed to achieve largely outside the world of government cost-plus contracting at a small fraction of the budget of its competitors. Large parts of the military-industrial complex are jobs programs for underserved portions of the country disguised as 'defense'. The inefficiency is purposeful. It keeps mounds of people employed in states where there otherwise wouldn't be much investment. It requires an army of federal bureaucrats who spend years writing detailed waterfall-style calls for bids, then an army of engineers at the large firms that craft bids that are happen to be perfectly suited to the government's needs. A clique of politicians from those states that will provide unwavering support to make sure the jobs remain in their states A small town worth of lawyers, accountants, inspectors, to make sure that the entire process is 'fair' and 'transparent', and to produce thousands of pages of documentation to a public that will never read (but is always available to defend against charges of corruption). This is still 'corruption', but legally, done at a massive, industrial scale and with more steps. But note that much of this is simply make-work, the equivalent of digging holes and filling them again. The country would probably be safer and have a better military if we were just honest with ourselves, made those industries efficient, and then pay off the existing beneficiaries with direct transfers and massive investments in health care and education.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  This website[1] claims there are fourteen countries less corrupt than the USA, and fifteen countries that are more democratic.[2] 1. http://www.worldaudit.org/corruption.htm http://www.worldaudit.org/corruption.htm 2. http://www.worldaudit.org/democracy.htm http://www.worldaudit.org/democracy.htm
mjklin 9y ago
The sociologist Stanislav Andreski wrote much about societies that have traditionally been tribal in nature and that now are nominally democratic. The thing is, once sometime from your tribe gets into power, he is expected to help your tribe members to the exclusion of everyone else. Money, jobs, loans, paperwork, general preferment. Is this corruption, or is it just a different way of structuring society?
- wnoise 9y ago
  It's both, of course.
Fnoord 9y ago
> We want a system that is: > 1. fair, and Americans immediately suspect that humans tend to favor their friends > [...] > Unfortunately Americans don't even really get fairness in practice. You seem to believe that suspicion is US-specific? Why doesn't this apply to, say, Germany? There's a saying for this, I believe the English one is: "Every man’s censure is first moulded in his own nature." > This is why conservatives sometimes have a point - many regulations not only do not do anything for the public good, but they actually help entrenched interests. They're just appealing to the common man who hates the rules, who doesn't like bureaucracy, or pay their tax even though all these rules within the law serve purposes. Also, if you look at the recent track record of a conservative (Bush) it isn't as if he simplified the books of law by say 1/3 due to removal of laws, or ensure that a law like the Espionage Act of 1917 or the PATRIOT Act aren't unnecessarily broad (oh wait, Bush enacted the PATRIOT Act). Or, they're going after international treaties which don't suit them such as international Co2 emission goals (Trump). In my country, someone like Wilders also abuses the "we're going to lessen the rules". It is empty marketing, nonsense, and populism. Nothing more, nothing less.
- smallnamespace 9y ago
  I didn't talk about other countries because I don't have as much direct experience dealing with them. I do think that Americans tend to have a much rigid view about corruption, fair dealing, and law than say Chinese people do. In some situations that rigidity is helpful, and in others I think it's actively harmful. As for your opinion of conservatives: I pretty much agree that their attack on the federal government in particular is motivated by naked self interest, and they are not the ones who can 'fix' the ills of the federal bureaucracy (at least not without enormous amounts of harm along the way). But that doesn't mean that their criticisms should be completely ignored. The best sort of marketing is that one that mixes lies with truth. I think when conservatives assail the federal bureaucracy for being huge, unaccountable, and grossly inefficient, they are largely correct, even if their proposed solutions would probably make things even worse. Unfortunately this has become a political point that those on the left largely don't want to concede because it complicates the argument for expanding health care. > They're just appealing to the common man who hates the rules Actually, the urban poor vote strongly Democratic. It's small business owners who are the target of this rhetoric, and it's because there's a lot of truth there: the cost of regulatory compliance often falls most heavily on small businesses that have just over 10 workers. They are too small to achieve scale and amortize compliance costs over many people. Small businesses and entrepreneurs are definitely people Democrats should support and help, but I have literally never seen anything on the platform that would make their lives easier.
bobcostas55 9y ago
"USG craves mechanical processes for decision-making. If a decision is made mechanically, no one is responsible for any bad results. Since mechanical management tends to produce bad results, this ass-covering imperative perpetuates itself. Of course, everyone in USG wants to be "in the loop" on everything - even the disasters. Better to be in on a fiasco than twiddling your thumbs around a success. Who needs responsibility? And mechanical decision models have another benefit. Obviously, USG makes real decisions all the time. Somewhere inside the great machine, there are real people with real power. But, since they exert that power by massaging a mechanical decision process - by disguising their personal whims, which are just as personal as anyone's, in the trackless bureaucratic wastes of law or science or the like - they get to rule in secret. Power without responsibility. What fun! Mechanical decision processes perform a kind of power laundering. Because all these processes can be gamed and hacked and massaged, they are not truly mechanical at all. But since the machine is so complex as to be incomprehensible to outsiders, no one can see the true power structures of the Beltway."
mc32 9y ago
One more deleterious thing which occurs when you have codified laws for every edge case is that you don't get the benefit of the doubt, or leeway, or ad hoc judgement. It would seem to result from over litigiousness. That one time someone made the wrong call and it ended up in something major. Like for example, 'three strikes laws' or any number of other over rigid interpretations leading to unfair outcomes.

js8 9y ago

I suspect if you think that U.S. is too bureaucratic or unfair, you have never been to other countries, really. There is only a handful of countries that can be said to do better in one of those respects. It seems to me that you claim that there is a trade-off between bureaucracy and corruption. I disagree, to me it seems (although I cannot readily prove it) that these are more often correlated than not.

icegreentea2 9y ago
I think his point that you don't actually get fairness in practice answers to your point about the trade-off between efficiency and corruption. I think the point was that adding rules and diffusing responsibility appear to be a way to reduce corruption and making things fair for everyone, but that in practice that relationship may not be so simple.
smallnamespace 9y ago
> U.S. is too bureaucratic or unfair Not so much at the local level where a citizen deals with the bureaucracy, but certainly at the level where lots of money gets allocated and spent, such as military procurement. Just look at what SpaceX has managed to achieve largely outside the world of government cost-plus contracting at a small fraction of the budget of its competitors. Large parts of the military-industrial complex are jobs programs for underserved portions of the country disguised as 'defense'. The inefficiency is purposeful. It keeps mounds of people employed in states where there otherwise wouldn't be much investment. It requires an army of federal bureaucrats who spend years writing detailed waterfall-style calls for bids, then an army of engineers at the large firms that craft bids that are happen to be perfectly suited to the government's needs. A clique of politicians from those states that will provide unwavering support to make sure the jobs remain in their states A small town worth of lawyers, accountants, inspectors, to make sure that the entire process is 'fair' and 'transparent', and to produce thousands of pages of documentation to a public that will never read (but is always available to defend against charges of corruption). This is still 'corruption', but legally, done at a massive, industrial scale and with more steps. But note that much of this is simply make-work, the equivalent of digging holes and filling them again. The country would probably be safer and have a better military if we were just honest with ourselves, made those industries efficient, and then pay off the existing beneficiaries with direct transfers and massive investments in health care and education.
TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
This website[1] claims there are fourteen countries less corrupt than the USA, and fifteen countries that are more democratic.[2] 1. http://www.worldaudit.org/corruption.htm http://www.worldaudit.org/corruption.htm 2. http://www.worldaudit.org/democracy.htm http://www.worldaudit.org/democracy.htm

mjklin 9y ago

The sociologist Stanislav Andreski wrote much about societies that have traditionally been tribal in nature and that now are nominally democratic. The thing is, once sometime from your tribe gets into power, he is expected to help your tribe members to the exclusion of everyone else. Money, jobs, loans, paperwork, general preferment. Is this corruption, or is it just a different way of structuring society?

wnoise 9y ago
It's both, of course.

Fnoord 9y ago

> We want a system that is: > 1. fair, and Americans immediately suspect that humans tend to favor their friends > [...] > Unfortunately Americans don't even really get fairness in practice. You seem to believe that suspicion is US-specific? Why doesn't this apply to, say, Germany? There's a saying for this, I believe the English one is: "Every man’s censure is first moulded in his own nature." > This is why conservatives sometimes have a point - many regulations not only do not do anything for the public good, but they actually help entrenched interests. They're just appealing to the common man who hates the rules, who doesn't like bureaucracy, or pay their tax even though all these rules within the law serve purposes. Also, if you look at the recent track record of a conservative (Bush) it isn't as if he simplified the books of law by say 1/3 due to removal of laws, or ensure that a law like the Espionage Act of 1917 or the PATRIOT Act aren't unnecessarily broad (oh wait, Bush enacted the PATRIOT Act). Or, they're going after international treaties which don't suit them such as international Co2 emission goals (Trump). In my country, someone like Wilders also abuses the "we're going to lessen the rules". It is empty marketing, nonsense, and populism. Nothing more, nothing less.

smallnamespace 9y ago
I didn't talk about other countries because I don't have as much direct experience dealing with them. I do think that Americans tend to have a much rigid view about corruption, fair dealing, and law than say Chinese people do. In some situations that rigidity is helpful, and in others I think it's actively harmful. As for your opinion of conservatives: I pretty much agree that their attack on the federal government in particular is motivated by naked self interest, and they are not the ones who can 'fix' the ills of the federal bureaucracy (at least not without enormous amounts of harm along the way). But that doesn't mean that their criticisms should be completely ignored. The best sort of marketing is that one that mixes lies with truth. I think when conservatives assail the federal bureaucracy for being huge, unaccountable, and grossly inefficient, they are largely correct, even if their proposed solutions would probably make things even worse. Unfortunately this has become a political point that those on the left largely don't want to concede because it complicates the argument for expanding health care. > They're just appealing to the common man who hates the rules Actually, the urban poor vote strongly Democratic. It's small business owners who are the target of this rhetoric, and it's because there's a lot of truth there: the cost of regulatory compliance often falls most heavily on small businesses that have just over 10 workers. They are too small to achieve scale and amortize compliance costs over many people. Small businesses and entrepreneurs are definitely people Democrats should support and help, but I have literally never seen anything on the platform that would make their lives easier.

bobcostas55 9y ago

"USG craves mechanical processes for decision-making. If a decision is made mechanically, no one is responsible for any bad results. Since mechanical management tends to produce bad results, this ass-covering imperative perpetuates itself. Of course, everyone in USG wants to be "in the loop" on everything - even the disasters. Better to be in on a fiasco than twiddling your thumbs around a success. Who needs responsibility? And mechanical decision models have another benefit. Obviously, USG makes real decisions all the time. Somewhere inside the great machine, there are real people with real power. But, since they exert that power by massaging a mechanical decision process - by disguising their personal whims, which are just as personal as anyone's, in the trackless bureaucratic wastes of law or science or the like - they get to rule in secret. Power without responsibility. What fun! Mechanical decision processes perform a kind of power laundering. Because all these processes can be gamed and hacked and massaged, they are not truly mechanical at all. But since the machine is so complex as to be incomprehensible to outsiders, no one can see the true power structures of the Beltway."

mc32 9y ago

One more deleterious thing which occurs when you have codified laws for every edge case is that you don't get the benefit of the doubt, or leeway, or ad hoc judgement. It would seem to result from over litigiousness. That one time someone made the wrong call and it ended up in something major. Like for example, 'three strikes laws' or any number of other over rigid interpretations leading to unfair outcomes.