How to explain bureaucratic dysfunction to a biologist?

Yes, social evolution happens.

The honey fungus, Armillaria mellea, is a parasite of trees, and a saprophyte feeding on the trees it has killed. Wikimedia Commons.

Lawyers and economists are familiar with principal-agent problems. This provides a useful basis for identifying and understanding bureaucratic dysfunction.

What about biologists? Yes, everything social is emergent from the biological. So, our biology both enables and constrains what we can do. Including, in our case, enabling us to be the technological species.

But emergent from means having its own causal processes. The biological is emergent from the chemical, but there are still biological causes. Similarly, there are still social processes and causes, even if we are all biological beings.

There are biological concepts that can be helpful for understanding bureaucracy and its problems. Cancer cells are cells within the larger organism that defect from cooperation. There are ways that bureaucracies can be cancerous but they are not the only social thing that can defect from cooperation. That bureaucracies can absolutely metastasize is, however, worth keeping in mind.

A parasite is an organism that lives off, or within, another organism. Bureaucracies can absolutely be parasitic. But some parasites are (positively) symbiotic: i.e., beneficial to the larger organism.

Bureaucracies typically present themselves as beneficial, even necessary. This may be true, or it may be camouflage, or a mixture of both.

Things that evolve

A good place to start might be to explain what bureaucracy is not. A bureaucracy is not a machine. It is not something you set up and it operates in the same way indefinitely. Every bureaucracy is a social structure staffed by biological beings. Bureaucracies evolve. Social evolution happens. We call it history.

So, the question becomes: how do bureaucracies evolve?

How any particular bureaucracy evolves will depend on its particular circumstances: both internal processes and external pressures. Nevertheless, we can point to general patterns inherent in bureaucracy itself.

The most obvious is that bureaucracies will seek to expend resources on themselves. The more career prospects for bureaucrats, the better they are paid, the more comfortable, the better for the bureaucrats.

This makes bureaucratic incentives very different from commercial ones, as for commerce, utilising under-used or unused resources is a profit opportunity. Hence commerce tends to select for efficiency while bureaucracy tends to select for inefficiency.

This is as true for corporate bureaucracies as for other bureaucracies. It is just they have the constraints of bankruptcy and of takeover. Elon Musk sacking about 80% of the staff of Twitter (now X) is a case in point.

The need to make a profit creates pressure for efficiency on corporations, but pressure that is absolutely not internal to the corporate bureaucracy itself. The internal pressure from bureaucracy is the opposite. Hence the tendency for bureaucracies to expand over time — to become more inefficient and more parasitic while less (positively) symbiotic.

As part of this incentive to have resources expended on themselves, bureaucracies tend to hoard authority. Authority being:

systematic deference within some area of competence — both in the sense of accepted area of action and of being able to act effectively within it.

Thus, bureaucracies seek to block or de-legitimize other sources of information. They have a powerful lever to do this by emphasizing their status as the agents of whomever they are reporting to.

This is, however, classic principal-agent problem. It is in the bureaucrats’ interest to monopolise information to whomever they are reporting to as much as possible, as that minimises the capacity to disagree with what they claim and maximises the likelihood of maintaining or expanding their ambit of operation — and so the resources going to, and controlled by, them. If they cannot so monopolise, they can seek to de-legitimise, or otherwise encourage discounting of, other sources of information.

In reality, it is precisely the folk who you do not control who one needs to get information from: to avoid the “wilderness of mirrors” problem. As this can be more emotionally confronting, the bureaucrats have a powerful advantage in parading as the agents of whomever they are reporting to. This is camouflage which can enable a great deal of negative parasitism.

Another form of this is the moral projects ploy. Claiming some urgent moral necessity is a great way to expand the resources and authority of bureaucracy.

Moralising and rationalising self-interest is something we Homo sapiens are very good at. Self-deception is one of our greater skills.

Alleged moral necessity can cover a multitude of sins, and bureaucratic expansion. But judging outcomes as a function of intention and resources is highly misleading. Especially as much of the costs of bureaucracy is not only its direct budgetary cost, but also the time and attention it forces upon those who have to deal with it. DEI (Diversity-Equity-Inclusion) is classic bureaucratic self-aggrandisement based on very dubious claims of effectiveness but a great deal of alleged moral urgency.

Which brings us to the final way bureaucracy tends to evolve pathologically: evading accountability. Bureaucracy is a matter of tasks and processes, rather than effects and outcomes. It is very useful for bureaucracy to have what it does to be judged as being a function of intention and resources. For the intentions are always great, so provide a basis for ever more resources.

The more bureaucracy can hoard authority and control information, the less accountable it becomes. The less accountable, the easier life as a bureaucrat is and the more they can seek to maximise resources going to them.

If they play it right, every failure can be loaded onto others and the more they become the “solution” to whatever went wrong. They can literally grow through failure. That is true metastasising. That is cancerous parasitism.

[All this is made worse if selecting for capacity, but not character, leads to selection for manipulative personalities who can better game the system. Bureaucracy can become pathocratic (rule by the pathological, by the morally disordered).]

So, perhaps it is not so hard to explain the pathologies of bureaucracy to a biologist. Why would that matter? No particular reason. Just a fancy that occurred to me. For some reason.

References

P. W. Anderson, ‘More is Different,’ Science, New Series, Vol. 177, No. 4047. (Aug. 4, 1972), 393-396.

Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems’, Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353.

F. A. Hayek, ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society,’ American Economic Review, Sep. 1945, XXXV, No. 4, 519-30.

Erik P. Hoel, Larissa Albantakis, and Giulio Tononi, ‘Quantifying causal emergence shows that macro can beat micro,’ PNAS, December 3, 2013, vol. 110, no. 49, 19790–19795.

Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, Red Pill Press, [2006] 2012.

Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell with Mind And Matter & Autobiographical Sketches, Cambridge University Press, [1944, 1958, 1992] 2013.

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, 1998.

Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books, [2011], 2013.

Daniel Williams, ‘The marketplace of rationalizations,’ Economics & Philosophy (2022), 1–25.