Tl;dr: Bureaucracies do minimize blame, but to survive, they also must own at least one problem. Minimizing overall blame may entail taking possession of more than one problem, and incurring some of the blame in that area as well. Bureaucracies are blame-minimizers, but are problem-neutral as long as they always own at least one problem.
Selection-based models
I favor selection-based arguments in this area. Businesses that happen to be profit-maximizing tend to survive, along with their leadership. This doesn’t mean that leaders always believe that every decision they make is a profit-maximizing decision, and the important thing is the overall trend. Many mistakes are made, and there’s a lot of random noise in the system that can defeat even the wisest of profit-maximizing strategies.
To understand the behavior of bureaucracies, we need to understand what causes them to survive. I think that blame avoidance is a stronger argument than you’re making it out to be.
Short-term budget (or power) maximization can fail to explain their behavior, because a swollen bureaucracy that’s mis-managing its money or power is a ripe target for politicians. For survival, bureaucracies should aim to please the electorate, or at least be seen as less blameworthy than some other organization.
Your argument about the CDC and the rental market conflates responsibility-minimization with blame-minimization. A bureaucracy that reduces its responsibility to zero is dead. Having responsibilities is central to bureaucratic survival. And bureaucracies don’t have perfect control over what responsibilities are allocated to them. The CDC couldn’t necessarily control the amount of responsibility thrust upon them in the pandemic. They were trying to avoid blame for excessive COVID deaths, and in order to do that they assumed temporary responsibility over the rental market (and, predictably, rid themselves of it when the negative consequences manifested).
2. A more detailed model of bureaucracies: owning problems and minimizing blame.
To come into existence and survive, a bureaucracy must assume responsibility for at least one problem. We can call this “owning a problem.”
Owning a problem means that they will be blamed when things go wrong with it. Bureaucracies will try to minimize being blamed, and also to avoid a state of owning zero problems. Sometimes the most efficient strategy for blame-minimization is to take possession of another problem. Other times, it is to return that problem to its original owner.
It can even be in organization A’s interest to temporarily give a problem 1 to organization B, knowing in advance that organization B will return problem 1 to organization A in a worse state, incurring blame to organization A. This is because refusing to do so could entail having partial responsibility thrust upon organization A for an even worse problem 2, one that is presently entirely owned by B.
3. Caveats
What requires explanation here is why bureaucracies would come to exist in the first place. Why would any individual ever take ownership of a problem? Here, I think we can resort to utility maximization. Individuals and groups may see taking ownership of a problem as promising some benefit to them, such as status, power, money, or a sense of altruistic achievement.
This implies a disconnect between those who start bureaucracies and those who come to maintain them over time. The people who initially found the bureaucracy have objectives that are not perfectly aligned with blame avoidance. Therefore, we can expect that they will filter out, or be forced to learn how to play the blame-avoidance game.
As with profit maximization, not every behavior of every bureaucracy will be perfectly predicted by this theory. It’s a selection-based theory at its core. Bureaucracies will miscalculate in the blame-avoidance game, and they are also made of individuals with utility-maximizing objectives who may at times act in ways contrary to the blame avoidance that would be most favorable to the bureaucracy as a whole.
My point being, it’s not at all obvious to me that there are actually repercussions for swollen, mis-managed bureaucracies. But I would very much love to be wrong.
It can even be in organzation A’s interest to temporarily give a problem 1 to organization B, knowing in advance that organization B will return problem 1 to organization A in a worse state, incurring blame to organization A. This is because refusing to do so could entail having partial responsibility thrust upon organization B for an even worse problem 2, one that is presently entirely owned by A.
Thanks for the insightful comment. However, I didn’t understand this part. Could you maybe explain or rephrase it?
The CDC doesn’t “own” economic problems. It “owns” disease outbreaks. But it can pressure the federal government to manipulate the economy to help the CDC manage its disease problems. That might mean making the economy worse.
The CDC won’t be blamed for resulting inflation, and the federal government won’t get credit for the economic manipulation’s effects on controlling disease outbreaks, because nobody gets credit—only blame. The federal government will get blame for the resulting inflation, though.
So why might the federal government comply? One explanation is that they think their economic manipulation will be net positive for the economy, by suppressing the disease.
If they don’t think that, though, they still might do it. This is because the CDC has managed to temporarily define the economic measures they want as solving a “health problem,” not an “economic problem.” They just happen not to have the legal levers to pull to manage this particular aspect of the “health problem.”
If the federal government won’t pull those levers, then they are seen as “interfering with a health problem,” and thus taking partial ownership and blame for it.
If there’s more blame attached to the disease than to the inflation that results from the economic manipulation, they might do it. They’d rather be blamed less for the inflation than be blamed more for the disease.
Still, mapping your explanation to the original quote, if I assume that A is the federal government and B is the CDC, then I think maybe the second sentence in the quote is mixed up, and it should look like this:
It can even be in organzation A’s interest to temporarily give a problem 1 to organization B, knowing in advance that organization B will return problem 1 to organization A in a worse state, incurring blame to organization A. This is because refusing to do so could entail having partial responsibility thrust upon organization [A] for an even worse problem 2, one that is presently entirely owned by [B].
Tl;dr: Bureaucracies do minimize blame, but to survive, they also must own at least one problem. Minimizing overall blame may entail taking possession of more than one problem, and incurring some of the blame in that area as well. Bureaucracies are blame-minimizers, but are problem-neutral as long as they always own at least one problem.
Selection-based models
I favor selection-based arguments in this area. Businesses that happen to be profit-maximizing tend to survive, along with their leadership. This doesn’t mean that leaders always believe that every decision they make is a profit-maximizing decision, and the important thing is the overall trend. Many mistakes are made, and there’s a lot of random noise in the system that can defeat even the wisest of profit-maximizing strategies.
To understand the behavior of bureaucracies, we need to understand what causes them to survive. I think that blame avoidance is a stronger argument than you’re making it out to be.
Short-term budget (or power) maximization can fail to explain their behavior, because a swollen bureaucracy that’s mis-managing its money or power is a ripe target for politicians. For survival, bureaucracies should aim to please the electorate, or at least be seen as less blameworthy than some other organization.
Your argument about the CDC and the rental market conflates responsibility-minimization with blame-minimization. A bureaucracy that reduces its responsibility to zero is dead. Having responsibilities is central to bureaucratic survival. And bureaucracies don’t have perfect control over what responsibilities are allocated to them. The CDC couldn’t necessarily control the amount of responsibility thrust upon them in the pandemic. They were trying to avoid blame for excessive COVID deaths, and in order to do that they assumed temporary responsibility over the rental market (and, predictably, rid themselves of it when the negative consequences manifested).
2. A more detailed model of bureaucracies: owning problems and minimizing blame.
To come into existence and survive, a bureaucracy must assume responsibility for at least one problem. We can call this “owning a problem.”
Owning a problem means that they will be blamed when things go wrong with it. Bureaucracies will try to minimize being blamed, and also to avoid a state of owning zero problems. Sometimes the most efficient strategy for blame-minimization is to take possession of another problem. Other times, it is to return that problem to its original owner.
It can even be in organization A’s interest to temporarily give a problem 1 to organization B, knowing in advance that organization B will return problem 1 to organization A in a worse state, incurring blame to organization A. This is because refusing to do so could entail having partial responsibility thrust upon organization A for an even worse problem 2, one that is presently entirely owned by B.
3. Caveats
What requires explanation here is why bureaucracies would come to exist in the first place. Why would any individual ever take ownership of a problem? Here, I think we can resort to utility maximization. Individuals and groups may see taking ownership of a problem as promising some benefit to them, such as status, power, money, or a sense of altruistic achievement.
This implies a disconnect between those who start bureaucracies and those who come to maintain them over time. The people who initially found the bureaucracy have objectives that are not perfectly aligned with blame avoidance. Therefore, we can expect that they will filter out, or be forced to learn how to play the blame-avoidance game.
As with profit maximization, not every behavior of every bureaucracy will be perfectly predicted by this theory. It’s a selection-based theory at its core. Bureaucracies will miscalculate in the blame-avoidance game, and they are also made of individuals with utility-maximizing objectives who may at times act in ways contrary to the blame avoidance that would be most favorable to the bureaucracy as a whole.
Politicians certainly rail against bureaucracies, but off the top of my head, I’m not aware of any bureaucracy that had its budget or its power cut.
Even the places where “defund the police” got some traction, it was generally accounting tricks. In many cases they ended up having funding restored shortly after or funding simply came from other sources.
My point being, it’s not at all obvious to me that there are actually repercussions for swollen, mis-managed bureaucracies. But I would very much love to be wrong.
Thanks for the insightful comment. However, I didn’t understand this part. Could you maybe explain or rephrase it?
The CDC doesn’t “own” economic problems. It “owns” disease outbreaks. But it can pressure the federal government to manipulate the economy to help the CDC manage its disease problems. That might mean making the economy worse.
The CDC won’t be blamed for resulting inflation, and the federal government won’t get credit for the economic manipulation’s effects on controlling disease outbreaks, because nobody gets credit—only blame. The federal government will get blame for the resulting inflation, though.
So why might the federal government comply? One explanation is that they think their economic manipulation will be net positive for the economy, by suppressing the disease.
If they don’t think that, though, they still might do it. This is because the CDC has managed to temporarily define the economic measures they want as solving a “health problem,” not an “economic problem.” They just happen not to have the legal levers to pull to manage this particular aspect of the “health problem.”
If the federal government won’t pull those levers, then they are seen as “interfering with a health problem,” and thus taking partial ownership and blame for it.
If there’s more blame attached to the disease than to the inflation that results from the economic manipulation, they might do it. They’d rather be blamed less for the inflation than be blamed more for the disease.
Thanks, that explains it!
Still, mapping your explanation to the original quote, if I assume that A is the federal government and B is the CDC, then I think maybe the second sentence in the quote is mixed up, and it should look like this:
Yes, I think you’re right that I mixed those two up. Will edit—thanks!