Bureaucracy and None of the Above

The Progressive movement and its social democratic system put considerable faith in bureaucracy. In part, this was because the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw bureaucracy as improvement over the paternalism of the early nineteenth century, and they were right. However, by 1940 right as the New Deal reforms of 1932-7 were drawing to a close, it had become evident that bureaucracy does not work so well as its proponents thought. In the 1940s the sociologist Robert Merton wrote an article about the rigidity of bureaucracy and bureaucrats' fetishization of rules at the expense of efficiency. In the 1950s Taiicho Ohno of Toyota pioneered the principles of lean production and total quality management. Even going back so far as the 1920s, Alfred Sloan of General Motors, along with executives in other leading firms, pioneered the use of decentralization, federalized organization, realizing that large firms did not permit global or functional forms of organization. The information and flexibility requirements of large firms are too daunting for anyone to handle.

Strangely, though, the Progressive and social democratic movement continued to emphasize centralization. The result is that increasingly, American life has been dominated by unresponsive, unproductive government bureaucracies that spin regulation and do not care what the public thinks. This is the result not only of centralization but also of the increasing emphasis on expertise in the expansion of government at the expense of the spoils system.

The result is a considerable degree of dissonance between the public's experience and the "facts" it is fed in school, through the news media and through public opinion leaders who are committed to the Progressive, social democratic solution because it enforces their status as professional experts, elite business leaders and the like.

The public has become increasingly alienated from public institutions because they are distant; they do not work; and they are held forth as far superior to the processes and systems that in the public's own experience work. As a result, the public experiences what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance". On the one hand, they are taught that "experts" know better than they do. But when they interact with state government, the department of motor vehicles and the like, they experience systems that do not work so well as ones that they themselves could devise. They are taught that scientists can solve problems. But then they hear that cancer has become an industry characterized by avoidance of effective remedies, politics, waste and regulation of innovative ideas out of existence. They are told that the state equalizes inequity, then they learn that the federal government subsidization billionaire investment bankers through direct bounties and a central banking system that sees its primary role as to support stock prices.

Cognitive dissonance has unpredictable effects, but one of them is potentially withdrawal. Others include anger, attempting to intervene and correct the situation, and denial. All of these are present in today's society.

Both left and right have become increasingly strident as the remedies that they advocate, central banking, expertise in government, efficiency, a corporatist state that supports the public interest, have failed to materialize. Political correctness, left wing intolerance of dissent in universities and other institutions, reflects the left's inability to confront the failure of the mercantilist solution to which it has been wedded since the late eighteenth century. Likewise, the right wing increasingly fights within itself, unable to arrive at a coherent picture of reform. As well, much of the right is in denial about its own Progressive spirit. The split between libertarians and conservatives has permitted mercantilists of the Progressive (Republican) and social democratic (Democratic) stripe to dominate the electoral process.

The public faces declining real wages, yet has refused to confront the decline and has borrowed, consuming about six percent more each year than it creates. There is avoidance of the causes of economic decline. Firms have heavily relied on public subsidy, especially through the banking system, yet corporate executives claim prerogatives of private property in extracting ever-increasing salaries that at most weakly reflect corporate performance. Few in the news media suggest that corporations that do not see a public role ought not to be subsidized by the public, and that the Federal Reserve system is little more than a crutch for inefficient American firms.

Americans increasingly feel alienated. The reason is that the obsession with size and economies of scale has been pursued too far. The large scale of industry; the large federal government have not yielded increases in wealth. Rather, they have become vehicles by which corrupt special interests extract wealth at public expense and as the public has reacted to cognitive dissonance by increasingly withdrawing or by becoming ever more strident in its demand for "change", a noun that describes an unnamed verb.

The remedy for too much centralization is decentralization.

Progressivism, Bureaucracy and the Limits of Government

In Search for Order 1877-1920 Robert Wiebe* argues that a bureaucratic philosophy emanated from the Populism; late 19th century Utopian visions of Henry George and Edward Bellamy; the social Gospel of Reverend Washington Gladden; the Utopian new order of Henry Demarest Lloyd; and the evolutionary historicism of Lester F. Ward (who argued that economic history followed four stages) and Richard T. Ely (who argued that history followed seven stages). The bureaucratic philosophy was not, in Wiebe's view, well-formulated. It combined elements of scientific management with pragmatism and an early version of Progressivism (Wiebe, p. 145):

"The ideas that filtered through and eventually took the fort were bureaucratic ones particularly suited to the fluidity and impersonality of an urban-industrial world. They pictured a society of ceaselessly interacting members and concentrated upon adjustments from within it...the rules, resembling orientations much more than laws, stressed techniques of constant watchfulness and mechanisms of continuous management...Bureaucratic thought made science practically synonymous with 'scientific method'. Science had become a procedure, or an orientation, rather than a body of results...The new ideas concerned what men were doing and how they did it. As Arthur Bentley said, the individual was meaningless as a unit for investigation: only men's social behavior deserved analysis...

"...The sanguine followers of the bureaucratic way constructed their world on a comfortable set of assumption. While they shaded many of the old moral absolutes, they still thought in terms of normal and abnormal

"...Endless talk of order and efficiency, endless analogies between society and well-oiled machinery, never in themselves supplied an answer. Instead of careful definitions, they offered only tendencies...One explained process through human consent and human welfare. The second construed process in terms of economy: regulate society's movements to produce maximum returns for minimum outlay of time and effort...Touching almost every area, this view appealed particularly to business, labor and agricultural organizations

(p.160)"the new political theory (progressivism) borrowed its most revolutionary qualities from bureaucratic thought, and the heart of these was continuity...Trained professional servants would staff a government broadly and continuously involved in society's operations...Above them stood the public man, a unique and indispensable leader. Although learned enough to comprehend the details of a modern, specialized government, he was much more than an expert among experts. His vision encompassed the entire nation...As the nation's leader the public man would be an educator-extraordinary. He bore the greatest responsibility for raising mass intelligence to the level of true public opinion. That, as Franklin Giddings explained, 'is rational like-mindedness...'

"...(p.161) the theory was immediately and persistently attacked as undemocratic, an accusation that never ceased to sting its defenders...the theory also presupposed an ethereal communion between leaders and citizens. As all citizens became rational they would naturally arrive at the same general answers...national rationality would assure consensus on big issues..."

What a brilliant 20 pages from Professor Wiebe. But here's the rub. The bureaucratic model as Wiebe construes it utterly misconstrues the cognitive limits of rationality. Processes of production require a degree of flexibility that is far greater than governmental processes permit. The degree is greater by orders of magnitude. There is no such thing as a priori rationality in real world produciton processes. Rationality is ONLY derived from continuous application of thought to specific processes. No one could arrive at a solution a priori. This is true with respect to production systems, which according to total quality management and continuous improvement require ever more refined adjustment that is only possible by operators with knowledge on the spot. It is true with respect to retail sales people who must make on-the-spot decisions to accommodate customers. It is true with respect to teachers who see that a given approach to education is not working with their students and need to adjust the approach. It is true with respect to Theodore Dalrymple, who observes that welfare policies established by central authority decimate low-income Britain but is powerless to change them. Bureaucratic thought overestimated the importance of statistical and theoretical, i.e., "scientific", knowledge to production processes, and it vastly underestimated the sensitivity of production processes to on-the-spot information. But on-the-spot information is not conducive to a unitary rational solution; a Volkish meeting of the minds between ruler and ruled; or a solution by bureaucratic experts.

*Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order 1877-1920. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.