Quotes About Bureaucracy

We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.

When the TSA was established, it was never envisioned that it would become a huge, unwieldy bureaucracy which was soon to grow to 67,000 employees. As TSA has grown larger, more impersonal, and administratively top-heavy, I believe it is important that airports across the country consider utilizing the opt-out provision provided by law.

Being a bureaucrat means never having to say you're sorry.

Living in South Africa and periodically coming back to Kenya, my relationship with officialdom in Kenya was just insane.

For an American, as mad you may be about whatever the EPA or the IRS does, just imagine if you only had a one twenty-eighth vote over what it does. You were in this place with this big bureaucracy that sets rules, and you only have a small vote. You'd feel like you've given up your sovereignty, wouldn't you?

Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.

Some people do not know their own interest—just consider addicts, workaholics, people trapped in a bad relationship, people who support large government, the press, book reviewers, or respectable bureaucrats, all of whom for some mysterious reason act against their own interest.

by creating bureaucracies, we put civil servants in a position to make decisions based on abstract and theoretical matters, with the illusion that they will be making them in a rational, accountable way.

La burocracia es una estructura mediante la cual una persona es convenientemente separada de las consecuencias de sus actos.

let governments predict (it makes officials feel better about themselves and justifies their existence) but do not set much store by what they say. Remember that the interest of these civil servants is to survive and self-perpetuate—not to get to the truth.

Beware of precise plans by government. Let government predict: it makes them feel better about themselves and justifies their existence.

the more complex the regulation, the more bureaucratic the network, the more a regulator who knows the loops and glitches would benefit from it later

The incentive of a regulator is to have complex regulation. Again, the insiders are the enemies of the less-is-more rule.

We saw that bureaucrats (whether in government or large corporations) live in a system of rewards based on narratives

3) The regulator's incentive to make complicated regulations in order to subsequently sell his "expertise" to the private sector.

It contradicts modern methods and ideas of innovation and progress on many levels, as we tend to think that innovation comes from bureaucratic funding, through planning, or by putting people through a Harvard Business School class by one Highly Decorated Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (who never innovated anything) or hiring a consultant (who never innovated anything).

We are largely collaborative—except when institutions get in the way.

Administrators everywhere on the planet, in all businesses and pursuits, and at all times in history, have been the plague.

You'll find in life, Caden, that many decisions are made by morons in high places.

The Isle of Unemployed Bureaucrats

you realize when you're plucked out of the mainstream that it doesn't need you or anybody else. the birds don't notice you're gone, the flowers don't care, the people out there don't notice, but the IRS, the phone co., the gas and electric co., the DMV, etc., they keep in touch. being very sick and being dead are very much the same in society's eye.

what social scientists call governmentality and what everybody else calls corruption, inefficiency, incompetence, and indifference.

Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can't always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake.

But, as Andy pointed out, if being a smart-arse was an offence, the Laundry would not exist in the first place.