When I lived in England, there was a TV show called The Worst Jobs in History. Gong farmers, whose job was to remove excrement from cesspits before widespread sanitation, came up.
One of the worst jobs I can imagine is to be a bureaucrat of an authoritarian regime. I have a problem both with authority and with excessive processes. While my work in the private sector is tolerable, it has elements of both, and I hate those parts. Too often, I don’t ask myself, what do I need to do to get this done? Instead, it’s who do I have to convince to get this done? One consolation I have is that there is less bureaucracy than in government, in academia or in not-for-profits.
Unfortunately, bureaucracy is one of the universals of modernity. Here is Alex Tabarrok, on Marginal Revolution, quoteing another economist, Jesús Fernández-Villaverde:
What strikes me is that most critics of “capitalism” (whatever “capitalism” might mean, and regardless of the value of those critiques) are really critics of modernity, understood as the organization of society around technology, formal institutions, and rational criteria.
I teach the economic history of the Soviet Union and socialist China, and all the pathologies (pollution, reliance on fossil fuels, inequality, depersonalization, consumerism, alienation, you name it) that you can find in a poor neighborhood of 2026 Philadelphia appeared in the same way, or even more, in a factory in Leningrad in 1970 or on a collective farm in Jiangsu in 1978.
Critics seem to lack a vocabulary (or, if you prefer, a cognitive framework) for distinguishing “capitalism” from modernity.
One of my big hopes for AI is that it will help to reduce bureaucracy. One of my biggest fears is that it will increase it.
Here is the Asterix and Obelix clip that comes to mind when I think about bureaucracy.
Nehaveigur 