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Plus: Steep drop in confidence in higher education, what The Bear can teach us about dynamism and bureaucracy, and more...

This week we ask which is better: a bureaucracy staffed by neutral civil servants; or one filled by political appointees?

Creating a new political post to oversee major social spending plans will cause a shift in the balance of power within Russia's bureaucracy.

We tend to think this is going to end up being a very bad idea indeed: The EU Digital Services Act (DSA), which goes fully into force on in-scope digital services later this month but is already being applied on a sub-set of larger platform providers like Meta, makes provision for charging these so-called very large online platforms (VLOPs) and very large online search engines (VLOSE) to help fund the cost of the bloc's oversight of their businesses.The regulation stipulates that the amount charged annually should take into account the costs incurred by the European Commission, which is the primary enforcer of the DSA on VLOPs and VLOSE; and be "proportionate" to the size of the service (based on average active monthly regional users) and also factor in the provider's "economic capacity", or that of the designated service (or services) they offer. (In Meta's case, it provides two services which are designated under the DSA: Its social networks, Facebook and Instagram.)Now, yes, some of us here aren't all that keen on the EU itself. Some have even campaigned against it - but there is no ASI "view" on the organisation. So this isn't about the EU specifically. It's also not about regulation - although we have a well known antipathy to many forms of it around here. This is, rather, about something very specific, the setting of that budget. We know, from C. Northcote Parkinson, that the motivating force of a bureaucracy is simply the survival of that bureaucracy. Once that is achieved it is the growth in the budget of that bureaucracy and the associated headcount. Given that there can be no useful measure of the output of a bureaucracy that's just what the motivating forces are. This is simply a revealed truth and is why we do now have more Admirals than ships, why the MoD now has more than one bureaucrat per sailor or soldier and also what gave rise to Ronnie Reagan's joke (the punchline of which is the D of Ag bureaucrat crying at his desk because "My farmer died").OK, we know this. So now we have a bureaucracy to "monitor" certain companies. But the budget is not determined by what taxpayers are willing to pay for such monitoring (not that that's much of a limitation at EU level) nor, in fact, by anything very much. The more the bureaucracy spends - that is, the greater the desire for a higher headcount, and expanded budget - the more the captive companies under the law will have to pay. We do not expect this to work out well. In fact, we'll make a prediction. Per the Commission, the total pot of supervisory fees it has collected from VLOPs/VLOSE for 2023 is €45.24M (~$48.7M).That's not going to remain about €45 million. That's going to go north at 15 to 25% a year soon enough.Come back and prove us wrong in 20 years.We do know that Parkinson is right. And the nutshell argument about bureaucracy is that to put bureaucrats in charge of their own budget is to put children in charge of the sweetie shop. An amusing idea leading to hyperactivity but no long term good will come of it.This isn't a good idea.

Christopher Booker used to note this about lead acid battery recycling here in Britain. But today's example comes from India:India has 11 similarly vast solar parks, and plans to install another 39 across 12 states by 2026, a commitment to a greener future.Yet this solar boom has a downside: the waste it generates from the panels, made of glass, aluminium, silicon, rare-earth elements; as well as power inverters and wiring.One minor piece of pedantry, solar panels do not contain rare earths. But, you know, sigh. Solar panels are made of things though, when the solar panels are end of life, those panels then need to be dealt with. Perhaps reusing, or recycling, those things in those panels is a good idea? Protocol dictates that solar waste from the plants must be transferred to e-waste contractors, authorised by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), within a specified timeframe, typically 90 or 180 days.Oh what a good idea. Lots of lovely bureaucracy. Because authorised e-waste contractors are often unwilling to handle the waste in accordance with the CPCB protocol, a network of informal operators – who dismantle, aggregate, transport and recycle panels – have stepped in to fill the gap.What a lot of really lovely rules and bureaucracy. Tayyab* and his family work at the tail end of this waste-management chain. In a dimly lit and poorly ventilated room in Bengaluru, the 20-year-old and his younger siblings spend their days dismantling broken panels for their valuable metals and other materials."I take apart the metal frame, separate the glass and sort out different metals that can be sold separately," says Tayyab.Some work outside the rules and the bureaucracy.Tayyab's story is just one among many in the informal solar-waste sector, where workers find ways to extract value from the under-regulated but booming renewable-energy sector.Ah. So the things that are valuable are extracted and reused or recycled. That's good. But it can only be done by those not obeying the rules and the bureaucracy - for the costs of the rules and the bureaucracy are greater than the value of what can be extracted. Which does lead to a thought. Say there's something you wish to have done, something you wish to encourage being done - say, the recycling of the valuable bits of solar panels. The way to do it would appear to be having few rules and no bureaucracy, so as to lower the cost of recycling solar panels. Humans do more of cheaper things, less of more expensive - so, lowering the costs of recycling solar panels will increase the recycling rate of solar panels.Anything we've missed there? Kill bureaucracy to save the planet. Sounds good to us.

Policy is a statement of intent or ambition. It is only effective to the extent that it penetrates the practices and mindset of the bureaucracy responsible for implementing it. Bureaucracies in general and defence bureaucracies ...

Pentagon leaders continue to prioritize short-term temporary solutions rather than structural improvements that position the bureaucracy for the longer-term competition and to avoid altogether the conflict.
The post By Skimping on the Budget for Competition with China, Washington Makes War More Likely appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

The bill would empower the Federal Trade Commission (which would also get $1bn in additional funding) and state attorneys general to stop companies from charging "grossly excessive" prices, regardless of where alleged price gouging took place in a supply chain.Of course, it's Robert Reich so it's clearly going to be bad economics. The suggestion is that the bureaucracy will tell everyone what prices should be. Which is not, not really, a course of action which has a great track record. The Soviet Union told everyone what all prices need to be all the time- that didn't work. Venezuela told everyone what toilet paper prices should be - toilet paper immediately disappeared from Venezuela. True, civilisation existed before toilet paper, civilisation can survive the loss of toilet paper but we're really very sure that giving bureaucrats the power to determine fair toilet paper prices is not worth the disappearance of toilet paper. As this is America under discussion it will also get worse. That top layer - some 3,000 people - of the bureaucracy is politically appointed, replaced with each turn of the Presidential administration. Thus in the political campaigns in the run up to any election there will be a certain pressure on those running the bureaucracy to fix prices in only that one, voter pleasing, direction. You know, job preservation? Well, voter pleasing in that short term sense of reducing the price now at the cost or reducing availability a little further out - after the election say. That 20th century was - among other things - a grand economic experiment. Price fixing by bureaucrats was the system that didn't work. We really have been there, done that, perhaps we should obey The Science and not do that again?

Governments and government agencies are frequently the subject of criticism from the public, media, and politicians, over issues of inefficiency and bureaucracy. In new research, Jan Boon, Jan Wynen and Koen Verhoest find that exposure to these criticisms and the reputational damage that they can do can lead to government agencies having more rigid bureaucracies. … Continued

Promises to cut “red tape” in US government bureaucracy are a perennial part of politicians’ campaign promises. But what do we really mean when we talk about “red tape”? Randall S. Davis uncovers the psychological foundations of red tape, writing that people can consider that a regulation is “red tape” when they see it as … Continued

It's crucial that we learn from the unintended consequences of past regulatory failures and overcorrections. Policymakers must strike a delicate balance between ensuring the safe development of AI while avoiding the pitfalls of excessive bureaucracy that could stifle innovation and hinder progress.
The post The Lesson of History: AI's Potential Depends a Lot on Avoiding Regulatory Pitfalls appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Nature recently published a perspective "Has the 'great resignation' hit academia?"  In discussing faculty discontent with academia and shifting to "non-academic" jobs, one factoid they cite is "Forty-one per cent of mid-career researchers — compared with 32% of early-career scientists — reported that organizational politics or bureaucracy frequently or always frustrated their efforts to do a good job".  What is it about the corporate culture of aca

Contributor(s): Professor David Graeber | This episode is dedicated to David Graeber, LSE professor of Anthropology, who died unexpectedly in September this year. David was a public intellectual, a best-selling author, an influential activist and anarchist.
He took aim at the pointless bureaucracy of modern life, memorably coining the term 'bullshit jobs'. And his book 'Debt: The First 5000 years' was turned into a radio series by the BBC.
But David started his academic career studying Madagascar. Anthropology interested him, he said, because he was interested in human possibilities - including the potential of societies to organise themselves without the need for a state - as he had seen in his own research.
He was also a well-known anti-globalisation activist and a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street Movement.
David was generous enough to do an interview for us in 2016 when LSE iQ was in its infancy. That episode asked, 'What's the future of work?' and in his interview he reflected on the disappointments of technology, pointless jobs and caring labour.
David was such an interesting speaker that we would have liked to use more of it at the time, but we didn't have the space. Now, it feels right to bring you a lightly edited version of the interview.

Contributors
David Graeber

Research

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, published by Melville House.

'On the Phenomenon of Bullshit jobs: A work rant', STRIKE! Magazine

Bullshit Jobs: A theory, published by Allen Lane

As we've pointed out before, it's the time taken by bureaucracy that matters more than the actual decisions: Adobe is ditching its planned $20 billion takeover of Figma, the app design business, after the deal's future was thrown into doubt by UK and European competition watchdogs, which said they were minded to block it.Maybe the block is the right decision, maybe it isn't. We'd not even pretend to enough knowledge of the sector to know. But we would insist that the actual problem is here:It (Adobe) will now pay Figma a $1 billion break-up fee, as set out in the agreement they made when the tie-up was agreed 15 months ago.As we have indeed said before: This productivity increase - it comes from either doing new things, or doing old things in new ways. As above, this has historically been 80% of total growth. The speed of GDP growth is the speed at which we do those new things or things the new way. This is also the same, in concept, as the speed of productivity growth.So, now we've a bureaucracy taking 15 months to even decide whether they might have a concern about someone suggesting a new arrangement for doing something or other. Sure, that new thing might be bad. Might be good too. But at some rate of bureaucratic cogitation the time spent to think through it causes as much damage to economic and productivity growth as simply allowing a bad thing to happen.We're not getting richer precisely and exactly because we've a bureaucracy deciding how we should be getting richer. The answer is obvious - simply abolish the Competition and Markets Authority. Replace it, perhaps, with something efficient, that doesn't, by definition, make us poorer. Or a coin toss, likely to do less harm.Or, perhaps to revive that old joke about why's there only one Monopolies Commission, we should ponder whether the correct number of CMAs is none or three. The multiplicity would provide the competition leading to thumbs being extracted and decisions reached in less than geological time.#We're ideologically opposed to an economy in which the main question about anything new is "May we?". But if that is the way that it's going to be can we at least start employing people who can make up their minds in, say, a week?

The Guardian is becoming increasingly hysterical about deep sea mining. Articles here and here. To add to that Billy Hague piece we critiqued here. The demand is that there should be a pause, everyone should have more time to think this through and so on. Or, as it might also be put, hit the issue into the long grass where it can be strangled by ignoring it. Note, not issuing the rules for a licence would achieve the goal of not ever issuing a licence, after all.The particular and specific issue here is the set up. An exploitation licence - as opposed to an exploration one - is, in effect, a shall issue licence. Two years after someone says well, what are the rules here, can we have a licence please, that exploitation licence must be issued. Or at least the rules for one must be. Note "must". It is not possible to argue for more time, greater consideration and then lose the issue in the bureaucracy.Which is exactly why the issue is coming to a head here. Either those rules, that licence, gets issued or the reason why not has to be published and defended. With, obviously, the opportunity for court action and so on against any refusal.To go from that general to the very particular. One of us recently applied for a holiday let licence in one of the minor continental countries. The expectation was that this would take months, if not years, as the desire to not issue them - already well known and telegraphed - meant lost paperwork and echoes of Kafka. Except the national government had changed the rules. If the licence was not denied within 7 days then it was automatically issued. Indeed it came through, via email, 7 days later, within minutes in fact of the filing time (not just date) plus 168 hours.We think this idea should be more generally applied. In fact, not generally, but universally. Every licence, every permission, for everything, becomes a shall issue one. There is a specific time period, 7 days sounds good, in which the bureaucracy can say no. Can say no while pointing to the specific law they are saying no under, the reason why, in a form that can then be used in a court to test the power of the bureaucracy to do that. Failure to issue such a denial within those 7 days means that the licence is automatically granted. One granted it is not appealable.This applies to pylons across the countryside, fracking plants, planning permissions for housing, everything. We insist that the planning bureaucracy micturate or get off the pot. That phrase can be modified for less family friendly conversations.Note that this doesn't stop planning. It does though stop delay in planning. So, everyone should support it, right?