Viswanathan K's Thoughts

For humans to function as a group, records became critical, writes Yuval Noah Harari in Nexus . This makes sense – leaving things to memory led to disagreements. Over time though, the record didn’t just represent an aspect of reality (a loan, for example) – the record became the reality! “If somebody repaid the loan but failed to “kill the document”, the debt was still owed. Conversely, if someone didn’t repay the loan but the document “died” is some other way… the debt was no more.” This is exactly why during all revolutions, records are destroyed (That doesn’t work in a networked, digitized world though).   As societies advanced, the volume of records exploded. This created a new challenge: Retrieval. This need to organize information to make it easy to find led to the rise of the bureaucracy . “Bureaucracy too tends to sacrifice truth for order. By inventing a new order and imposing it on the world, bureaucracy distorted people’s understanding of the world in unique ...

In his book, Accelerating India’s Development , Karthik Muralidharan looks at the role of bureaucrats in India’s poor public service systems. As mentioned in earlier blogs, democracy forces politicians to over-promise. To deliver on those promises, they need a capable bureaucratic system. To improve the bureaucracy, investments have to be made. But we are a poor country – so there isn’t enough money to invest. Even worse, any investments in improving the bureaucracy will take a long time to translate into visible actions, but a politician’s re-election cycle comes within 5 years, why then would a politician invest in the bureaucracy?   In addition, politicians want to have pliable bureaucrats who will do their bidding. So they have actively undermined the professionalism and capability of the bureaucracy.   A lesser-known fact is that the Indian bureaucracy is understaffed . Not a typo. As a ratio of public servants to the population, India’s ratio is lower than China’...

At the workplace (or at least in the software industry), we see endless checklists. Most of these checklists are useless, or even worse than useless: they just delay things without adding any value. Why then do we still have these checklists? Good old bureaucracy, I thought. Which reminded me of this tirade by Bill Bonner against bureaucracy: “But you don't really think bureaucrats could improve the quality of teaching, do you? Of course not. What do they know about teaching? Or agriculture? Or selling stocks? Or banking? Or anything else? What improvements have bureaucrats ever made? Name one! Who invented indoor plumbing? Who invented the repeating rifle or rolled the first cigarette? Who created Facebook? Bureaucrats do not create wealth. They transfer it. From the people who earned it to themselves and other zombies.” But if checklists are just bureaucracy, why then do survive in the corporate world? Surely the profit motive should eliminate these inefficiencies, right? Gues...