Wilson on Bureaucracy: A Belated Review

The big book I spoke of the other day--it's James Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy which has been languishing unattended on myself for years, I now cannot imagine why.  It's a delight--not a grand theory but an almost illimitable number of individual anecdotes with instructive commentary.  I have only one disappointment which I will save for a moment.  First, let me see if I can lay out a few general assertions:

One, "bureaucracy" is not just about "government"  Private entities have bureaucracies just like the government. The difference is in the structure of incentives: Private entities--say, MacDonald's--can orchestrate pay and perks so as to get the most out of its people.  Government bureaucracies operate under the hawk eye of the legislature, often hampered by the  constraint of amorphous and conflicting demands, such as to make you think they are almost defined to fail.

But two, there are  bureaucracies and bureaucracies.   Some have well-defined and achievable missions.  Given good enough leadership, you can almost forget they are there.  Think the Social Security Administration.   Have you ever heard of them  mismailing a check?

And the institution may be the shadow of the man.  Gifford Pinchot at the Forest Service, J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI: love them or hate them, each  defined and instilled an institutional ethos so strong that it has long outlasted its creator.

There's a lot more good stuff here and I may come back and write about some particular topics later. But for the moment, let me go back and drill down on that  matter of "amorphous and conflicting demands."  Wilson argues that if the goals are uncertain, we may end up judging (in default of a good alternative) on procedures.  Thus he says:

Police administrators rarely lose their jobs because the crime rate has gone up or win promotions because it has gone down. They can easily lose their jobs if somebody persuasively argues that the police department has abused a citizen, beaten a prisoner, or failed to answer a call for service.  School administrators rarely lose their jobs when their pupils’ reading scores go down or win promotions when scores go up. But they can lose their jobs or suffer other career-impeding consequences if students are punished, controversial textbooks assigned, or parents treated impolitely. 

So James Q. Wilson Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do And Why They Do It (Basic Books Classics) (pp. 132-133).  (Kindle ed.).

This is tempting but wait--is this really so?  And here I come to my one real difficulty with this book: it was published back in 1991.  The more fool I for not reading it at the time.  But a lot has changed since 1991, and speculate he might write it differently today.  How much differently?   I'm not at all sure, but my tentative guess is that cops are a lot more likely to get judged today on the crime write, just as teachers are more likely to get judged on student performance.  "More likely," I'd venture, at least in part because of what Wilson wrote.

Which brings me to my real beef: Wilson had the bad grace to die before he could do a second edition (in 2012, at 79).  How inconsiderate of him to leave us with the the mere abundance of his original insights, unequipped by whatever second thoughts or revisions might have come to him in the busy decades after his first publication.

Bureaucrats, Pointy-headed and Otherwise

First Things offers up an appreciation of a certain civil servant:

[H]e belongs to a type of quiet and careful civil servant that Caesar Augustus would have recognized. As would Phillip II and Napoleon and Gladstone, for that matter. Powerful governments have always needed this kind of man: the senior administrator, the superior public official who (to reverse the entropy the Irish senator W.B. Yeats feared) makes the center hold and keeps things from falling apart.

For "Caesar Augustus," I suspect that the writer thought he was saying "Hadrian," but let that be: the general point is important, and well made. But how ironic to see it come from an institution somewhere near the center of the right-wing bile machine--guys who have spent almost every moment of every waking hour over the past generation trying to mock or demean or belittle the (as it is said) pointy headed bureaucrats who (as it is said) dedicate their lives to complicating our lives while fattening their own retirement plans.

Of course very stereotype is founded on truth and there are plenty of time-servers who fit the description exactly (and god knows I rolled around on the floor helpless with hilarity in my first encounter with Yes, Minister). But that's why FT's narrow point is so important. In an age that does so much to demonize public service, it's at least a small comfort to see that once, just once, a commentator will let slip a word of well-deserved appreciation.

And who is he, this paragon, the subject of this encomium, and what does he do? Go read the original; it's quite a story.