For a fine example look no further than the chief executive of the federal government. Too dumb to succeed in the private sector, he spent 40 years in DC government being wrong about everything. And to be able to afford the nice cars and fine restaurants, he resorted to corruption, which is probably a not-uncommon and underreported phenomenon.
It takes a lot of people to write a 3000 page bill that no one reads. It sounds like a soul destroying life. No wonder they went bat shit when Trump suggested some of these departments move closer to the people they are supposed to help. How are they supposed to find a proper mate in a backwater city destroyed by their policies.
Yes, there is a great sorting going on. Those valuing money go to lobbying, those who crave power reman in the government. The agencies and regulations gradually get more vindictive and petty.
From the '70's, the rate of inflation is predicted be the number of pages in the Federal Register
That the senior bureaucracy has gotten stupider, and our elites have become midwits , is undeniable. But I’m not sure what you’ve pointed out is the major driver. DEI impacted government long before private corporations. Much of government, our single largest employer, is now geared to providing sinecures for useless people. People are promoted for gender and ethnic checkboxes, not competence. Fani Willis, the DA, is the poster child for this phenomenon, and I think this accounts for the stupidification of government sufficiently.
Well, I spent fifteen years splitting the difference for the Haze-Grey Navy, and the view in those days was that Federal employment provided stability, near-unbreakable lifetime tenure, and a comfortable retirement.
Of course I was a GS--and later a GM, during the era of merit pay--for my entire career. So I wasn't one of those high-flyin' SES types. Not that we didn't have plenty of those but mostly their ambitions--if they had any beyond our organization--were policy jobs in the Navy secretariat or the Pentagon.
And there was power, even at a low level. The defense contractors we dealt with pretty much had to dance to our tune, down at the working level.
A friend had a great editorial cartoon on the wall of his cubicle that kinda summed it up: two guys in ermine robes, wearing crowns and holding scepters, and one says to the other, "Of course I could make more money working in the private sector. But in the private sector, I couldn't chop off heads."
A joke, of course, but a widely-shared attitude among my peers.
Your hypothesis - the Fed Govt is becoming more stupid - is accurate. The stupidity of the Left is mind boggling. The stupidity of our companies has also been showing. What happened - we destroyed our own education system, the very foundation of our own society - it started in the 1980s, so we have been dumbing down for 40 years.
Doesn't the expansion of federal power also sort for zealots? Those EPA regulations declaring puddles in your driveway to be "waters of the United States" didn't write themselves, and while they may in fact have been written by not-so-intelligent persons, they were willed into being by persons who knew exactly what they were doing and why. I am less concerned with the decline in relative intellectual capability among today's federal agency apparatchiks than I am with their increasingly sympathetic "us against them" sense of themselves as on a mission.
One of the interesting things is how the various public interest groups butt heads in their work to influence the govt. Back in the 1990s, the Highway Trust Fund was required to support non highway, non transit projects with a fairly large but capped funding amount Many States set up advisory groups to comment on the merits of various projects such as bike trails, historic preservation, wet lands rehabilitation, junk yard screening, etc. One person I know said his favorite activity at work was chairing these meetings and listening to the various greenie groups attack each other.
Well, also the tendency to enforce ideological conformity in hiring. This includes hiring based on increasingly debased academic credentials. When a Harvard degree and ideological alignment are the key considerations then merit, intelligence, and actual knowledge are at a discount.
Gerhard Weinberg in his history of WW II notes that the German Communist ex-pats imported by Stalin to rule the Eastern Sector were men brought up through a system guaranteed to produce nothing but "certified blockheads."
We may be witnessing a slower, but inexorable example of the same process.
The brain drain is true. I knew many (ex) government employees who spent a few years (3-10 years) or a full career (20-30 years, then retired) working in their respective regulatory agencies and they turned that experience into a 6-figure income as a lobbyist or a consultant. All the ones I knew were extremely smart and ambitious.
Good piece, and I agree with it based on my many interactions with federal regulatory agencies and consultants to help me navigate them.
I would add another hypothesis, probably less important but still interesting, to explain the perceived decline in the capabilities of federal employees: during the massive expansion of the federal regulatory agencies during the LBJ-Nixon years, I suspect the agencies hired a lot of new people who had worked for a long time in the private sector. That was the only place the government could get domain experts! These people were used to making decisions and getting stuff done. My speculation is that has significantly changed, and that far more people come out of college or law school and go more or less straight into government (perhaps with a few years as a very junior and unaccountable person in the private sector). My guess, therefore, is that the average level of private sector executive experience in government has declined considerably since 1960. I'd suggest that some academic study that question, but he'd be worried about never getting another federal grant....
Best* solution is 8 year term limits on bureaucrats, so the dumb ones and the power hungry are also pushed out.
*internal rules, irrespective of govt size.
Relocating Fed. Workers to non DC remote areas, like the school districts with the highest crime rates (for the good of that district).
Alternatively, reducing the size and power of Fed. Govt. Certainly after a few years going to an office in a high crime, the govt workers would be less rabidly against reducing govt size.
After reading, as always, an interesting and insightful Substack by Prof. Reynolds and the comments I come to the conclusion that we are in trouble. In addition to the intellectual sorting there is also the petty dictator sorting. In government the advancement goes to those who make the most trouble for the private sector. In the private sector the advancement used to go to the most efficient and brightest. With DiE ( I like that better than DEI) there is a partnership between government and the private sector for anti-meritocracy. I know someone who gushed that the new DIE administrator at her hospital was great. Five years later she is upset that patient care is suffering. I think this will distort the thesis of the Professor’s except in DC where the purest form of “capitalism” but not a free market system rules
For a fine example look no further than the chief executive of the federal government. Too dumb to succeed in the private sector, he spent 40 years in DC government being wrong about everything. And to be able to afford the nice cars and fine restaurants, he resorted to corruption, which is probably a not-uncommon and underreported phenomenon.
It takes a lot of people to write a 3000 page bill that no one reads. It sounds like a soul destroying life. No wonder they went bat shit when Trump suggested some of these departments move closer to the people they are supposed to help. How are they supposed to find a proper mate in a backwater city destroyed by their policies.
Yes, there is a great sorting going on. Those valuing money go to lobbying, those who crave power reman in the government. The agencies and regulations gradually get more vindictive and petty.
From the '70's, the rate of inflation is predicted be the number of pages in the Federal Register
That the senior bureaucracy has gotten stupider, and our elites have become midwits , is undeniable. But I’m not sure what you’ve pointed out is the major driver. DEI impacted government long before private corporations. Much of government, our single largest employer, is now geared to providing sinecures for useless people. People are promoted for gender and ethnic checkboxes, not competence. Fani Willis, the DA, is the poster child for this phenomenon, and I think this accounts for the stupidification of government sufficiently.
Well, I spent fifteen years splitting the difference for the Haze-Grey Navy, and the view in those days was that Federal employment provided stability, near-unbreakable lifetime tenure, and a comfortable retirement.
Of course I was a GS--and later a GM, during the era of merit pay--for my entire career. So I wasn't one of those high-flyin' SES types. Not that we didn't have plenty of those but mostly their ambitions--if they had any beyond our organization--were policy jobs in the Navy secretariat or the Pentagon.
And there was power, even at a low level. The defense contractors we dealt with pretty much had to dance to our tune, down at the working level.
A friend had a great editorial cartoon on the wall of his cubicle that kinda summed it up: two guys in ermine robes, wearing crowns and holding scepters, and one says to the other, "Of course I could make more money working in the private sector. But in the private sector, I couldn't chop off heads."
A joke, of course, but a widely-shared attitude among my peers.
Your hypothesis - the Fed Govt is becoming more stupid - is accurate. The stupidity of the Left is mind boggling. The stupidity of our companies has also been showing. What happened - we destroyed our own education system, the very foundation of our own society - it started in the 1980s, so we have been dumbing down for 40 years.
A's hire A's. B's hire C's
Doesn't the expansion of federal power also sort for zealots? Those EPA regulations declaring puddles in your driveway to be "waters of the United States" didn't write themselves, and while they may in fact have been written by not-so-intelligent persons, they were willed into being by persons who knew exactly what they were doing and why. I am less concerned with the decline in relative intellectual capability among today's federal agency apparatchiks than I am with their increasingly sympathetic "us against them" sense of themselves as on a mission.
One of the interesting things is how the various public interest groups butt heads in their work to influence the govt. Back in the 1990s, the Highway Trust Fund was required to support non highway, non transit projects with a fairly large but capped funding amount Many States set up advisory groups to comment on the merits of various projects such as bike trails, historic preservation, wet lands rehabilitation, junk yard screening, etc. One person I know said his favorite activity at work was chairing these meetings and listening to the various greenie groups attack each other.
Well, also the tendency to enforce ideological conformity in hiring. This includes hiring based on increasingly debased academic credentials. When a Harvard degree and ideological alignment are the key considerations then merit, intelligence, and actual knowledge are at a discount.
Gerhard Weinberg in his history of WW II notes that the German Communist ex-pats imported by Stalin to rule the Eastern Sector were men brought up through a system guaranteed to produce nothing but "certified blockheads."
We may be witnessing a slower, but inexorable example of the same process.
The number one priority of the citizenry should be to deconstruct and destroy the Administrative State.
The brain drain is true. I knew many (ex) government employees who spent a few years (3-10 years) or a full career (20-30 years, then retired) working in their respective regulatory agencies and they turned that experience into a 6-figure income as a lobbyist or a consultant. All the ones I knew were extremely smart and ambitious.
There's no turnover, no penalty for failure or failure to perform. Biden is a feature, not a bug. This is what Plato's Republic looks like.
Good piece, and I agree with it based on my many interactions with federal regulatory agencies and consultants to help me navigate them.
I would add another hypothesis, probably less important but still interesting, to explain the perceived decline in the capabilities of federal employees: during the massive expansion of the federal regulatory agencies during the LBJ-Nixon years, I suspect the agencies hired a lot of new people who had worked for a long time in the private sector. That was the only place the government could get domain experts! These people were used to making decisions and getting stuff done. My speculation is that has significantly changed, and that far more people come out of college or law school and go more or less straight into government (perhaps with a few years as a very junior and unaccountable person in the private sector). My guess, therefore, is that the average level of private sector executive experience in government has declined considerably since 1960. I'd suggest that some academic study that question, but he'd be worried about never getting another federal grant....
Of course, I could be wrong.
Best* solution is 8 year term limits on bureaucrats, so the dumb ones and the power hungry are also pushed out.
*internal rules, irrespective of govt size.
Relocating Fed. Workers to non DC remote areas, like the school districts with the highest crime rates (for the good of that district).
Alternatively, reducing the size and power of Fed. Govt. Certainly after a few years going to an office in a high crime, the govt workers would be less rabidly against reducing govt size.
After reading, as always, an interesting and insightful Substack by Prof. Reynolds and the comments I come to the conclusion that we are in trouble. In addition to the intellectual sorting there is also the petty dictator sorting. In government the advancement goes to those who make the most trouble for the private sector. In the private sector the advancement used to go to the most efficient and brightest. With DiE ( I like that better than DEI) there is a partnership between government and the private sector for anti-meritocracy. I know someone who gushed that the new DIE administrator at her hospital was great. Five years later she is upset that patient care is suffering. I think this will distort the thesis of the Professor’s except in DC where the purest form of “capitalism” but not a free market system rules