The joy Paul C Light gets from bureaucracy is like that a coroner might feel, were it possible to dissect a live body, yet have that body suffer no pain. Professor Light has been teasing apart one body in particular: the US government.
The body is bloated, and growing ever more so, says Light. He is Paulette Goddard Professor of public service at New York University, Wagner. Every six years he compiles a list of the top administrative positions in the biggest branches of the US government, and the titles of the administrative positions that report to them:
Secretary; chief of staff to the secretary; deputy chief of staff to the secretary; deputy secretary; chief of staff to the deputy secretary; deputy chief of staff; deputy deputy secretary…
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.
UPDATE: Investigator Douglas Jones of Bermuda writes:
Saw your post in The Guardian today about thickening bureaucracy and was surprised to see a glaring failure to mention Parkinson?s Law, which describes how bureaucracies thicken. It?s a unified theory, as elegantly simple as evolution ? Light?s research is merely data gathering in support of same. Basic tenets below!
Kind regards,
Douglas Jones
BermudaParkinson’s Law
by Prof. Cyril Northcote Parkinson?WORK EXPANDS SO AS TO FILL THE TIME AVAILABLE FOR ITS COMPLETION?
General recognition of this fact is shown in the proverbial phrase ‘It is the busiest man who has time to spare.’ Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half an hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar box in the next street. The total effort that would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety, and toil…