The sense I got from The Power Broker is that Moses’s work was good when doing good work was aligned with his perceived interests, and not when not, and it wasn’t that hard for him to find people competent at the relevant technical disciplines when that was needed (and his ability to accumulate power quickly initially gave him a lot of slack to hire based on merit, when delivering a conspicuously high-quality product seemed like it would be helpful for accumulating more power).
In general it doesn’t really seem to require much technical expertise to lead a technical project, just a somewhat difficult to maintain mixture (in a political context) of the skills necessary to obtain and defend resources, and the mindset that still cares about getting the technical side right.
Not sure I grok this, but it still seems like once you have the technical leadership, you still need a bureaucracy to actually build parks at scale – for hiring workers, doing taxes, etc.
That’s true but the bureaucracy isn’t what builds parks. The person in charge bosses around a bunch of other people competent to design and build parks, and secures the land and other inputs needed to do so via political processes. The bureaucracy is what normalizes the arrangement so that it can interface with other things in control of resource flows, e.g. so that people can get paid for reporting to Moses.
I’m not sure whether we disagree on facts, but the framing here seems off to me.
(Also, not sure if you mean “normalize” in the sense of “make seem normal” or normalize in the sense of “make regular and predictable such that the State Can See It”)
Ritualizes might be more precise. Provides a stereotyped interface that plays nicely with other stereotyped interfaces. Military drill sort of serves a similar function, in the face of a different kind of entropy than the one this is a defense against.
Yeah, that makes sense. I agree you can totally build a park without bureaucracy at all, in the absence of a scaled-up-enough-world that the plays-nice-with-each-other-interface is necessary.
(Hmm. Does feudalist societies or other mid-scale civilizations have bureaucracy? I don’t actually know. Did the Hanging Gardens of Babylon require bureaucracy?)
Here’s my vague overall impression from reading secondary sources not directly concerned with this question (probably more noisy but also more trustworthy than secondary sources making a direct argument about this.)
Overall the sense I get is that recordkeeping and action were kept separate in most ancient civilizations, even pretty big ones—no minutes of meetings or white paper equivalents or layers of approval and formalized decision delegation.
It seems to me like “clay tablet” cultures had extensive scribal institutions, but these were mostly used for rituals in temple cults (of unknown function), tax assessment, and central recording of contracts (the state served as a trusted third party for record storage and retrieval). You’d also need logistical records for many public works projects, but these were often very simple. Someone would be in charge and sometimes have to request resources from other people, who would keep track of what was sent, sometimes the king would want to know what was going on, so they had to know the broad outlines.
As I understand it the Persian empire’s managerial and formal information-processing layer was extremely lean, the king would just personally send some guy to check on a whole province, there was a courier network but nothing on the scale of USPS or even Akkadian scribal records.
It is worth mentioning here that the Achaemenid and Sassanian Empires both were in the habit of relying on local systems already in place, which were incorporated via the Satrapy system.
So when the Persian emperor sent someone to check on a whole province, they would probably access the Egyptian or Babylonian or Assyrian scribal record system at work locally.
The sense I got from The Power Broker is that Moses’s work was good when doing good work was aligned with his perceived interests, and not when not, and it wasn’t that hard for him to find people competent at the relevant technical disciplines when that was needed (and his ability to accumulate power quickly initially gave him a lot of slack to hire based on merit, when delivering a conspicuously high-quality product seemed like it would be helpful for accumulating more power).
In general it doesn’t really seem to require much technical expertise to lead a technical project, just a somewhat difficult to maintain mixture (in a political context) of the skills necessary to obtain and defend resources, and the mindset that still cares about getting the technical side right.
Not sure I grok this, but it still seems like once you have the technical leadership, you still need a bureaucracy to actually build parks at scale – for hiring workers, doing taxes, etc.
That’s true but the bureaucracy isn’t what builds parks. The person in charge bosses around a bunch of other people competent to design and build parks, and secures the land and other inputs needed to do so via political processes. The bureaucracy is what normalizes the arrangement so that it can interface with other things in control of resource flows, e.g. so that people can get paid for reporting to Moses.
I’m not sure whether we disagree on facts, but the framing here seems off to me.
(Also, not sure if you mean “normalize” in the sense of “make seem normal” or normalize in the sense of “make regular and predictable such that the State Can See It”)
Ritualizes might be more precise. Provides a stereotyped interface that plays nicely with other stereotyped interfaces. Military drill sort of serves a similar function, in the face of a different kind of entropy than the one this is a defense against.
Yeah, that makes sense. I agree you can totally build a park without bureaucracy at all, in the absence of a scaled-up-enough-world that the plays-nice-with-each-other-interface is necessary.
(Hmm. Does feudalist societies or other mid-scale civilizations have bureaucracy? I don’t actually know. Did the Hanging Gardens of Babylon require bureaucracy?)
Here’s my vague overall impression from reading secondary sources not directly concerned with this question (probably more noisy but also more trustworthy than secondary sources making a direct argument about this.)
Overall the sense I get is that recordkeeping and action were kept separate in most ancient civilizations, even pretty big ones—no minutes of meetings or white paper equivalents or layers of approval and formalized decision delegation.
It seems to me like “clay tablet” cultures had extensive scribal institutions, but these were mostly used for rituals in temple cults (of unknown function), tax assessment, and central recording of contracts (the state served as a trusted third party for record storage and retrieval). You’d also need logistical records for many public works projects, but these were often very simple. Someone would be in charge and sometimes have to request resources from other people, who would keep track of what was sent, sometimes the king would want to know what was going on, so they had to know the broad outlines.
As I understand it the Persian empire’s managerial and formal information-processing layer was extremely lean, the king would just personally send some guy to check on a whole province, there was a courier network but nothing on the scale of USPS or even Akkadian scribal records.
It is worth mentioning here that the Achaemenid and Sassanian Empires both were in the habit of relying on local systems already in place, which were incorporated via the Satrapy system.
So when the Persian emperor sent someone to check on a whole province, they would probably access the Egyptian or Babylonian or Assyrian scribal record system at work locally.