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I also highly recommend this book! Regarding the sentence "One that he doesn’t discuss much but that is particularly pertinent to today, is the accretion of la

• agomez314 4y ago
  I also focused in on this sentence. How difficult it becomes for an average person to start new things on his/her own nowadays! The only solution to the diminishing of widespread bureaucracy i can think of is war - but is costly, can take a long time, and most societies don't make it past a civil war. Like a forest fire, it clears away the hubris and overgrowth of process that accumulates over time.
  • RandomLensman 4y ago
    I don't think war is necessary (and looking at things like the "war on terror" that spawned a lot of rules, it might even do the opposite). Societies can do "de-sprawling" of rules, but it isn't a frequent thing (the German civil code is kind of a reduction of lots of several codes into one, for example). There is probably also an element of aging societies becoming more risk averse, hence more rules and regulations.
    • _alxk 4y ago
      The "war on terror", like the "war on drugs", is a misnomer though; it's not really a war (although a couple of wars were waged as part of it, or alongside it).
      • RandomLensman 4y ago
        Fair enough. WW1 spawned things like DORA in the UK, for example. Edit: And WW2 saw another massive increase of the "state", so not sure war does generally shrink administrative systems.
        • inglor_cz 4y ago
          If you lose the war decisively, you have a chance to rebuild the state from scratch, including the legal system. As a winner, though, you face the task of trying to shrink an administrative system that just won a war.
          • WalterBright 4y ago
            Obvious examples are Germany and Japan after WW2.
            • inglor_cz 4y ago
              Another interesting point is Switzerland after 1848. They had a very small-scale civil war which made them rethink their political structure. Or the Austrian empire in 1866, which lost a major war against Prussia and was forced to reform itself into a dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Which was somewhat more competitive and liberal than its predecessor and if it avoided other wars, it might in some form survive until today.
            • wizofaus 4y ago
              Neither Germany or Japan stand out as being societies with minimal bureaucracy and unnecessary/intrusive regulation. Singapore (as a state that had to rebuild considerably after war) is arguably an even more extreme example.
              • dredmorbius 4y ago
                The point is that any such bureaucracy is recently formed and not a legacy of pre-1945 statutes.
    • dredmorbius 4y ago
      Notionally the "wars" on drugs and terror are more akin to the Islamic principle of jihad, in the sense of a struggle, rather than of military domination, occupation, and conquest. In the case of World War II, numerous governments were created from whole cloth following the war, amongst conquored territories, in newly-created states, and even amongst some of the winners. Notably, Japan had a constitution imposed on it by the United States, which largely exists to the present day. Some traditional institutions were preserved (e.g., the emperor), but in almost entirely symbolic form. Germany likewise was reconstituted under a new government, as was Italy. Even France saw a new government formed (the Fifth Republic) in 1958. The states of the Eastern bloc were reconstituted under Communist rule as Soviet satellites. India, Indonesia, the Phillipines, and several Arabic states received independence. The state of Israel was formed. Much of Africa decolonised in the 1950s and 1960s. There was of course some continuity through all of this, but in large part, new governments emerged and old laws were often voided.
      • RandomLensman 4y ago
        But through all of that the German civil code after WW2 still looked quite similar to the one pre-WW1, e.g, rules on how people transact or private property had huge continuity. Isn't the question not that laws etc. change but if there is true reduction of the total?
  • Spooky23 4y ago
    Huh? I started a company for a small project on Tuesday. It took me 30 minutes and I never left my chair.
    • paganel 4y ago
      Maybe the OP hadn't in mind the actual process of incorporating a company per se, but the process of "starting" a company as in getting it off the ground in terms of money coming in/revenues. And, imo, it's more difficult now to do that compared to 10, 20 years ago, and not only because of increased competition.
    • recyclelater 4y ago
      Get some employees, have some of them turn out to be pain in the ass, then find out how annoying west coast labor laws are. Hire some employees, spread them across multiple states, find out the complexities of employment law in multiple states. Start up a health plan, same thing. There a million examples, none of them are bad by themselves, but every aspect of a multi employee business has rules and regulations that if you run afoul of, there are consequences. No one gives you a manual of these, you find them out along the way and it costs you money and time.
      • Spooky23 4y ago
        I was an exec at a small company in a union building in Manhattan. I’m familiar with annoyances. That’s life. It’s full of annoyances. Our forebearers had a lot more.
  • avidphantasm 4y ago
    What people arguing against accretion of regulations tend to miss is that this accretion (as currently experienced in the US at least) goes hand-in-hand with accumulation of capital and consolidation of industries. The large corporations can afford to comply with complex regulations. For them, maintaining complex regulatory regimes (through legalized bribery and regulatory capture) is part of the defensive fortifications that maintain their monopoly/oligopoly positions. As an optimist, I believe we can reform the system (e.g., through antitrust enforcement, which the FTC under Ms. Khan is doing more of than in recent decades), rather than burn it down.
    • starkd 4y ago
      I applaud your optimism, but don't let optimism cloud realism. There's comes a point when war is the only path that can relieve the accumulated stresses.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > comes a point when war is the only path that can relieve the accumulated stresses This is historically untrue. When complex societies civil war, they tend to fall apart. (Wars of unification being an exception.) Their citizens’ living conditions permanently fell, often for generations, until an outside power subsumed them. This trend looks to be strengthening as time goes on, probably on account of increasing species-wide firepower and mobility. Instead, peaceful (if politically violent) “revolutions” reboot the society from time to time. One could argue the Great Depression was the last such restructuring of the American system.
        • jdkee 4y ago
          "One could argue the Great Depression was the last such restructuring of the American system." A better argument would be the case that American involvement in WWII resulted in a larger restructuring of American lives. Women entering the workforce. The U.S. military fighting racial segregation. The resultant boomer generation and the rise of labor until 1980. Lowered income inequality. The GI bill providing affordable higher-ed to a broad swatch of the populace.
  • jollybean 4y ago
    There are more opportunities for 'regular folks' to do something on a 'grand scale' than at any time in history, but not everyone can do it. Paradoxically, starting your own business in the 'old time' way, i.e. plumbing or roofing contractors ... it's like guaranteed work for great income. Plumbers are the new Dentists. That said, there are areas in which regulatory issues are obviously a problem. This talk of 'war' is hyperbolic.
• jxramos 4y ago
  reminds me of that Elon Musk quote > “Rules and regulations are immortal. They don’t die … there’s not really an effective garbage collection system for removing rules and regulations.” Piling rules upon rules instead gradually “hardens the arteries of civilisation, where you are able to do less and less”.
• wjnc 4y ago
  Perhaps you know since you’ve read the book: Does the book _really_ decide on declining marginal returns to complexity as an ultimate factor? Or is that the interpretation by the reviewer? The bridging of sociology, history and economics was somewhat rare back in the 80s and before. (Douglas North a notable exception, obviously not alone.) If the author does, now I’m wondering why I missed this book & going to read. First thing as a counterpoint that comes to mind is biological complexity. There are marginal diminishing returns to complexity in biology as well, but not a rise / collapse rhythm in biological complexity outside of external events that I know of.
  • archduck 4y ago
    > The bridging of sociology, history and economics was somewhat rare back in the 80s and before. (Douglas North a notable exception, obviously not alone.) So Karl Marx and Max Weber are just chopped liver?
    • wjnc 4y ago
      Ah true point. Perhaps the addition /in the modern scientific era/ would be in place. Begging the question when that starts of course. Let’s say that economics was earlier embracing quantitative techniques in the 20th century and that there was a rift between the fields especially when sociology was young that nowadays is less pronounced. It’s all interpretation.
      • PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        I would have said that the 1960s and part of the 1970s were filled with attempts to synthesize, among other things the fields you've mentioned. It wound down with Reagan and Thatcher's elections, which may or may not be proximate cause - the new right at that time were certainly not fond of the humanities in any way.
  • najarvg 4y ago
    This is a great point of comparison. I feel that societal systems (and associated complexities) are more rigid than biological systems in the sense that a biological systems evolve efficient solutions in response to changing internal and external stimuli while societal systems cannot/will not due to man-made laws, norms, expectations etc. The latter (biological systems) shows first order adaptation while the former (societal) shows, at best second and third order adaptations, if it even adapts.
• Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  > trying to collect and compare precise numbers that show how they have become more efficient at a task that is in essence not really quantifiable For me this is particularly maddening as I run into it frequently. Managers/bureaucrats want to make decisions based on 'metrics', primarily because it gives them cover if it happens to be the wrong decision. But, many many issues where decisions are required are more subjective than objective. Meaning there really aren't any metrics that can reliably 'measure' them. Instead of just acknowledging this plain and simple fact, they just create more metrics and/or define the criteria with even more detail. It just makes more work but adds no further insight because ultimately, the issue is subjective and no volume of measurements will help. Think about coming up with a formula about how 'good' art is by measuring how many colors it has, how many curves, right angles, etc. It just doesn't work that way and but they keep trying.
  • Schroedingersat 4y ago
    > But, many many issues where decisions are required are more subjective than objective. They're still objective, it's still objectively wrong to order your employees into a battle royale to the death or paint everything they can find teal as a response to pretty much any problem even when the$e are multiple right answers with a human component. It's just that measuring can cost more than the benefit the task brings, and change what is being measured to destroy anyvalue produced.
    • Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
      The belief that all problems can become objective provided enough data is measured is the problem. It's not anywhere close to practically true, and I doubt its even theoretically true even with all the assumptions of a frictionless spherical cow in vacuum type scenarios. This belief is what is driving the both the wasted resources in pointless data gathering, but also a paralysis of decision making by those in positions to make them. The key above is 'all'. There are many, a majority even, of problems for which data gathering and analysis is absolutely the best the approach. These would be the objective problems. Not all problems fall into this category.
• _n3lh 4y ago
  Imo it is not the existence or ineffectiveness of complex laws/regs that leads to problems. Rather, their lack of understanding among the population, and difficulty of execution/implementation. I actually had a startup project the I shelved specifically aimed at addressing this. Wonder if I should revisit it...
  • oblak 4y ago
    Not sure you had to be downvoted for stating a simple opinion. While I don't believe you are right, I'd like to ask for the reasoning that led you to this conclusion.
• starkd 4y ago
  There is also the phenomenon of regulatory capture, when the bureaucracy responsible for implementing regulations gets captured by the corporations and entities involved. Very relevant to what's happening today.
  • germinalphrase 4y ago
    I can’t say much about the veracity of her arguments, but there is a journalist named Sarah Chayes that has been investigating the US failures in Afghanistan as, primarily, a reflection of America supporting (and helping to build) a culture of corruption that undermined our primary nation building objectives in that country. She extends this argument to American political and business culture that shares these same qualities of corruption (that we conveniently label as something other than “corruption”).
• pbronez 4y ago
  > the tendency of contemporary administrations to create more bureaucracy even when their own stated goal is to reduce bureaucracy or increase efficiency, for example by trying to collect and compare precise numbers that show how they have become more efficient at a task that is in essence not really quantifiable. Helloooo paperwork reduction act https://www.ffiec.gov/pdf/2017_FFIEC_EGRPRA_Joint-Report_to_Congress.pdf https://www.ffiec.gov/pdf/2017_FFIEC_EGRPRA_Joint-Report_to_...
• zwkrt 4y ago
  In the book A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge outlines a kind of bleak future for humanity in which societal collapse is inevitable. Despite interstellar communication and wild technology, there always comes a point at which the machinery of a given society is too complicated and heavy handed and over-fitted to handle some change in circumstances. The result is the survivors are thrown back to pre-industrial society. Of course in his book the machinery of society is more intrinsically enmeshed with high technology—a failure in supply chain could result in a failure of resource allocation or governance.
  • jasone 4y ago
    I found the prequel, "A Deepness in the Sky", even more compelling. The book's theme is the inevitable collapse of legacy software under the weight of its own complexity. And the book views codified government as a form of legacy software.
• AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  > One thing I would add, in addition to the diminishing marginal return of bureaucracy that Tainter mentions, is the tendency of contemporary administrations to create more bureaucracy even when their own stated goal is to reduce bureaucracy or increase efficiency Hello, Agile.
• teddyh 4y ago
  “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 https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
  • jollybean 4y ago
    There is some insight in this, but it's also deeply cynical to the point of being very misleading and maybe a bit wrong. Teachers and Administrators are equally as committed to 'keeping their jobs'. It just so happens that 'teaching' is mostly 'teaching' and all you can do is 'teach' and so long as you have kids in front of you 'it's working'. The scope of their roles doesn't allow for them to go too far away from 'the mission'. Administrators are not default committed to the 'org' they're just in a position where their decisions and actions may or may not further the mission. 'Very Bad Teaching' is rare and usually self evident. With administration, it's not so clear. NASA Engineers are not like teachers, in that, the could be wasting a lot of time and energy. Maybe the risk is worth it in some cases (?) in others, maybe not so much. FYI - in teaching, the biggest costs are generally the 'teachers'. etc.. Regular Public Schools aren't a good opportunity so much to demonstrate this 'Law'. A not-quite-independent entity like a Post Office might be. They often fight directly against innovation due to the risk it may create to jobs for rank and file, and don't quite have the same competitive basis as others.
    • jaybrendansmith 4y ago
      Pournelle was not cynical enough. You only need to spend time in corporate America to watch the bureaucrats, administrators, and bean counters take over. It always starts small, but every day, while you are focused on making a better product, or a better process, or service to the customer, they are focused on control of the finances and core decisions, because it is in their nature to do so. And one day you look up from your work, and find that you are no longer permitted to make the decisions that are best for the company's goals. It is inevitable, because these people are like barnacles on a boat, or scum on a pond, or tarnish on silver. They dull and destroy every good thing they touch.
• jdkee 4y ago
  "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." -Oscar Wilde