Robert Moses is the famous master builder of New York City, being responsible for many of the bridges, highways, and parks which currently define the landscape. He might be the single best example of the kind of thing Samo is talking about—he wanted to build things, and to that end he started four authorities (or public benefit corporations), and ran three commissions, and chaired the Council of Parks.
By the lights of the post this marks eight bureaucracies that were simultaneously owned and effective.
The most in-depth biography of him is Caro’s The Power Broker, a recent review of which is here. I also found a contemporary article from the Atlantic.
I do wonder about the extent of the definition of ‘competent person’ in this case. Among the criticisms about Moses are that he was not an architect, engineer, or city planner by training; despite this the things he did were widely mimicked by those professions in other cities.
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 TVA is arguably the most storied bureaucracy in the United States; it is the go-to example for arguing about bureaucracy itself at the federal level, for example in political science curricula. The agency was founded in 1933 to economically develop the greater Tennessee Valley region. This was to be done with water management and electricity generation, in particular through hydropower.
It doesn’t match the “save the time of a competent person” description of purpose at all; economic development is not a routine competent-person task. It matches better the description of doing things one person cannot do at all. It is worth mentioning that in the 1920s Henry Ford attempted to build a private utility around the federal dam in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, which was claimed by its proponents to serve the same goals for which the TVA was created—this was blocked by Senator George Norris of Nebraska, who also drove the creation of the TVA.
By the standards Samo sets out, this would be an abandoned and ineffective bureaucracy; the creator is long dead, and the Great Depression long resolved. The area it serves has electricity, uses modern agricultural practices, etc. The authority is famous for having accumulated a bunch of tasks unrelated to the original function over the years; if I recall correctly at one point it was responsible for approving the specifications on what screws were to be used for all federal government projects.
Even from the outset it spent a lot of effort on things within the purview of its purpose but nominally outside of its mission. The dam manufactured fertilizer, the TVA spent a lot of time and effort modernizing local agricultural practices, and they had a role in providing vaccinations.
This example does not seem to match Samo’s system very closely.
Legendarily, one of the functions of bureaucracy envisioned by Confucius was to mitigate the harm which could be done by a wicked ruler. I imagine it might have gone like this:
RULER: I need more wealth to recover from my foolhardy adventures and to sate my beastly appetites!
BUREAUCRAT: Yes, my lord. We can assess a new tax.
RULER: No time for that. Let us find a group of people who have wealth in the city, kill them and take it!
BUREAUCRAT: We shall find them all and determine their wealth at once, lord. The better to enrich you, of course.
Sometime later, a bureaucrat knocks on the door of a local Sogdian.
SOGDIAN: Yes?
BUREAUCRAT: By order of the governor, we are conducting a census of the city. Only of Sogdians. We also require a list of your possessions, and a description of how easy they would be to transport to the governor’s palace.
SOGDIAN: I....see. But where are my manners! You, an official of the court, and me with my home a shambles! I am shamed to be seen in such a sorry state. You must return tomorrow and my family and I will host you a dinner befitting your status!
BUREAUCRAT: But of course—it does you credit to recognize the dignity of an official of the governor. I will return tomorrow.
The Sogdians all exit, stage left.
BUREAUCRAT: [Returns] I see the home is empty, as are many others.
Sometime later, at the governor’s palace.
BUREAUCRAT: My lord, we have conducted a census of the Sogdians and their wealth, and found there are none in the city.
Thanks, but I meant actual, real-world examples, of each of the claims / points / sections—not, like, fictional / imagined ones. (Preferably, multiple examples per point / claim / section.)
Fair request—I have a few examples for consideration, which would probably be better to break out into individual comments attached to your parent to focus discussion.
Examples?
Robert Moses
Robert Moses is the famous master builder of New York City, being responsible for many of the bridges, highways, and parks which currently define the landscape. He might be the single best example of the kind of thing Samo is talking about—he wanted to build things, and to that end he started four authorities (or public benefit corporations), and ran three commissions, and chaired the Council of Parks.
By the lights of the post this marks eight bureaucracies that were simultaneously owned and effective.
The most in-depth biography of him is Caro’s The Power Broker, a recent review of which is here. I also found a contemporary article from the Atlantic.
I do wonder about the extent of the definition of ‘competent person’ in this case. Among the criticisms about Moses are that he was not an architect, engineer, or city planner by training; despite this the things he did were widely mimicked by those professions in other cities.
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.
Robert Moses isn’t trained as architect just as Elon Musk isn’t trained as rocket engineer.
Robert Moses had the skills to get big things build in a short amount of time which is lacking in most big public projects these days.
The Tennessee Valley Authority
The TVA is arguably the most storied bureaucracy in the United States; it is the go-to example for arguing about bureaucracy itself at the federal level, for example in political science curricula. The agency was founded in 1933 to economically develop the greater Tennessee Valley region. This was to be done with water management and electricity generation, in particular through hydropower.
It doesn’t match the “save the time of a competent person” description of purpose at all; economic development is not a routine competent-person task. It matches better the description of doing things one person cannot do at all. It is worth mentioning that in the 1920s Henry Ford attempted to build a private utility around the federal dam in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, which was claimed by its proponents to serve the same goals for which the TVA was created—this was blocked by Senator George Norris of Nebraska, who also drove the creation of the TVA.
By the standards Samo sets out, this would be an abandoned and ineffective bureaucracy; the creator is long dead, and the Great Depression long resolved. The area it serves has electricity, uses modern agricultural practices, etc. The authority is famous for having accumulated a bunch of tasks unrelated to the original function over the years; if I recall correctly at one point it was responsible for approving the specifications on what screws were to be used for all federal government projects.
Even from the outset it spent a lot of effort on things within the purview of its purpose but nominally outside of its mission. The dam manufactured fertilizer, the TVA spent a lot of time and effort modernizing local agricultural practices, and they had a role in providing vaccinations.
This example does not seem to match Samo’s system very closely.
You yourself wrote why it does seem, to me at least, to match Samo’s system well:
Legendarily, one of the functions of bureaucracy envisioned by Confucius was to mitigate the harm which could be done by a wicked ruler. I imagine it might have gone like this:
RULER: I need more wealth to recover from my foolhardy adventures and to sate my beastly appetites!
BUREAUCRAT: Yes, my lord. We can assess a new tax.
RULER: No time for that. Let us find a group of people who have wealth in the city, kill them and take it!
BUREAUCRAT: But what group shall it be, lord?
RULER: The Sogdians are wealthy. Let it be them!
BUREAUCRAT: We shall find them all and determine their wealth at once, lord. The better to enrich you, of course.
Sometime later, a bureaucrat knocks on the door of a local Sogdian.
SOGDIAN: Yes?
BUREAUCRAT: By order of the governor, we are conducting a census of the city. Only of Sogdians. We also require a list of your possessions, and a description of how easy they would be to transport to the governor’s palace.
SOGDIAN: I....see. But where are my manners! You, an official of the court, and me with my home a shambles! I am shamed to be seen in such a sorry state. You must return tomorrow and my family and I will host you a dinner befitting your status!
BUREAUCRAT: But of course—it does you credit to recognize the dignity of an official of the governor. I will return tomorrow.
The Sogdians all exit, stage left.
BUREAUCRAT: [Returns] I see the home is empty, as are many others.
Sometime later, at the governor’s palace.
BUREAUCRAT: My lord, we have conducted a census of the Sogdians and their wealth, and found there are none in the city.
RULER: No time for that, you fool! There is a rebellion in the north, and mysteriously also a rebellion in the west!
BUREAUCRAT: Of course, my lord. We will turn our attention to this new matter at once.
Thanks, but I meant actual, real-world examples, of each of the claims / points / sections—not, like, fictional / imagined ones. (Preferably, multiple examples per point / claim / section.)
Fair request—I have a few examples for consideration, which would probably be better to break out into individual comments attached to your parent to focus discussion.