Government Efficiency and Network Theory

Science News reports on a study relating (in a loose way) the efficiency of a national government with the size of its cabinet. Researchers in Vienna found that the development level of countries, as a proxy for the efficiency of their governments, is in general lower for countries with more members in the national cabinets. They then went on to model cabinet members as nodes in a network and found support for the observed correlation. There was even specific evidence for the decades-old observation of English historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson that decision-making is severely impaired in committees of more than 20 people. The US is getting close to Parkinson's cutoff, at 17.

Comments

Well, that explains...

[Anonymous Coward]

There was even specific evidence for the decades-old observation of English historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson that decision-making is severely impaired in committees of more than 20 people.

Well that explains the ISO.

Oh, and the corruption of course.

Re:Well, that explains...

[ShieldW0lf]

Slavery is a good deal more efficient than negotiating with unions. An Emperor is a good deal more efficient than Democracy. Do we want to live in a perfectly efficient world? No. We do not. 99% of the foolish, arrogant ideas held by those in positions of authority should be prevented from ever being pursued in a serious fashion.

Efficiency, ultra-violence, ultra-realism and secret prison camps. Gee, where does this all lead?

National governments

[Iamthecheese]

This can, at best, describe the cabinet-level and section of the governments. With many different structures, a poor measure at best. A proper study would require many more measurements, and be weighted by the decision powers given to various levels of government. The Japanese diet, for instance, is much more powerful than the president and his cabinet.

Re:National governments

[edittard]

The Japanese diet, for instance, is much more powerful than the president and his cabinet.

I apologise to rice and raw fish. Seems I underestimated them!

Re:National governments

[paanta]

"Stefan Thurner, a physicist at the Medical University of Vienna, and his collaborators looked at the overall efficiency of virtually every government on the globe, as measured by United Nations and World Bank indicators taking into account factors such as literacy, life expectancy and wealth"

The big problem with this is that it's assuming the government has significant control over literacy, wealth and life expectancy. Literacy and life expectancy are strongly related to wealth, and wealth is related to a bunch of geographical factors. I didn't read the study, but did it compare a country only to its neighbors/other countries on its continent? Because it should have. Also, is there any way to separate causation and correlation here?

Perhaps Weak Country -> Weak Government -> Political Mayhem -> Large Committees of People With Divergent Opinions.

P.S. Be suspicious of any political/social science research done by physicists.

sounds like something I should model

[cliffski]

sounds like something I should model in the next version of this:

http://www.democracygame.com/

It already represents ministers as nodes in a neural network.
Can't say it surprises me in the least tbh.

Government inefficiency is good.

[WK2]

Government inefficiency is a good thing. Bureaucracies (attempt to) keep the government slow and sane. The extreme alternative is a dictatorship, which is much more efficient.

Re:Government inefficiency is good.

[Chuck Chunder]

Efficient in the sense that they don't bother working much on a whole heap of areas and just concentrate on oppression.

Dictatorships don't tend to get more done, they just try to do less. Perhaps that is efficient in some sense but not, I think, in a particularly useful one.

You are right though, for governmental systems that are somewhat more answerable to the public inefficiency is one thing that stops governments doing too many things the people aren't interested in as there tend to be enough things the people are interested in to keep them fairly occupied.

Re:Government inefficiency is good.

[n dot l]

Efficient in the sense that they don't bother working much on a whole heap of areas and just concentrate on oppression. Well, yes and no. Stalin, for example, built Russia back up from the brink of disaster (Soviet losses were staggeringly large during WWII) and into a nation the rest of the world feared for nearly half a century. This was no small task - it involved the reconstruction of the cities the Germans had razed, modernizing many others, rebuilding his military, development of the USSR's nuclear weapons program, etc. That was no small task. He did that and he oppressed the people he ruled over.

I don't think the number of priorities has much to do with efficiency (by any measure) in the long run. Authoritarian regimes can get a lot done in a very short period, and history has proven that time and again (I think we all remember reading about all the kings that inherited a disaster and had built an empire by the time they died in school). The trouble is that they're extremely sensitive to corruption, internal power struggles, and simple human vanity. When the strong leader dies, those who inherit his power often do tremendous damage simply bickering with each other over who gets to rule exactly what. And then when the next great ruler steps up and takes control we find that they first go throughout the country destroying a great many things in order to rebuild them in their own likeness. And in both cases we find that the bottom rung officials are corrupt as all hell since they're not accountable to anyone but their own superiors, who are often at great distance and too indifferent to bother listening to the people's complaints.

Re:Government inefficiency is good.

[Thanshin]

Isn't everything the opposite in Soviet Russia? Yes, in soviet Russia, when women say "No", they mean "No".

Wait, no, it's the opposite, when they say "Yes", they mean "No".

No, wait, it's "Yes" when they say "Yes".

Anyway, in soviet Russia, unlike you, we men do perfectly understand women.

Re:Government inefficiency is good.

[RiotingPacifist]

You have to consider that there were 4 countries that got trashed in the war:
france, germany -> both given lots of money to rebuild
japan -> given even more money because somebody made them glow
russia -> not given any money, in fact some historians think that America wanted to stay out of WWII as long as possible as they liked the fact that Russia was getting crushed.

Russia was almost ruined by the end of WWII to turn it round and become a supper power isnt easy (irrespective of their failures as a supper power).

Re:Government inefficiency is good.

[Thuktun]

Russia was almost ruined by the end of WWII to turn it round and become a supper power ...whose cuisine was feared and envied by the world.

Re:Government inefficiency is good.

[Stradivarius]

I disagree on several counts:

1. I don't believe the alternative to poor government (inefficiency) need be worse government (such as dictatorship). Also, dictatorships traditionally have not been terribly efficient at much other than enriching the dictator and his friends.

2. While well-considered policies take time to figure out, I see little evidence that the slowness that bureaucracies promote has had any corresponding positive effect on quality or sanity. On the contrary - these bloated organizations seem both slow and stupid. This is hardly what we should be striving for.

3. An inefficient government wastes huge sums of money, which means it taxes citizens more heavily to do things that are not only wasteful but can actually be worse than doing nothing.

4. There are some things which only the government can do (e.g. national defense and certain other public infrastructure). Inefficiency at these things is dangerous because there is no feasible alternative mechanism to get necessary tasks done.

Thus government inefficiency is absolutely NOT a good thing. It's not even the least of the available evils - we would be better off with less government than inefficient government. Either way the problems don't get solved, but at least in the "less government" case we're not spending money in the process.

Yes but it's confounded.

[red_crayon]

We don't have a randomized experiment here, with cabinet size
being manipulated... countries get the cabinets they choose
(sort of).

More complex problems (to begin with) -?-> larger cabinet.

Parkinson's Cutoff?

[SpeedyDX]

I don't know about the Parkinson's Cutoff, but I think at least one former member of the cabinet surpassed the Alzheimer's Threshold.

I hope my karma is high enough to withstand this beating. Hmm, I don't recall.

Power shift

[ChrisMaple]

Parkinson also noted that when the cabinet exceeded 20 persons it merely indicated that power had shifted away from the cabinet as a unit. Power might be in another group, or in a subset of the group and meets separately to get the real work done.

Around 20 members, people start making prepared statements rather than using meetings as think tanks. Real work is no longer done in cabinet meetings.

Since this new study indicates that the government and the nation is less efficient if the cabinet is large, it's an interesting extension of Parkinson's work.

Many of Parkinson's articles were humorous and he strongly hinted that he had no actual numbers to back up his claims. It's a little surprising to see that the real world aligns with his claims.

Re:Power shift

[arth1]

In addition to Parkinson's, the law of recursive bureaucracy also comes into play.
Simplified, for every two or three productive persons, you need an additional non-productive person for bureaucratic purposes. This is also true for the bureaucrats themselves, so the more the bureaucracy grows, the more bureaucracy is needed to govern it.

This rule also appears to apply to efficiency, because efficiency will drop with added bureaucracy.

Re:Power shift

[dotancohen]

Many of Parkinson's articles were humorous and he strongly hinted that he had no actual numbers to back up his claims. It's a little surprising to see that the real world aligns with his claims http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/00000/5000/500/5652/5652.strip.print.gif

Re:Correlation does not imply causation

[jayveekay]

"But... I think it is interesting to consider WHY certain posts are created."

Some posts are created to amuse, some to inform, some to troll, and some posts are created to designate a 'goal' area in a sporting competition. I hope that you think this post belongs in the first category. :)

More seriously, I expect that politicians will always create sufficient jobs (of which cabinet posts are just one type) to give their friends the money/power that they want, without much concern for efficiency or effectiveness. How do you think "Brownie" got his job as head of FEMA?

Government efficiency?

[kmarshallbanana]

The study actually finds a correlation between a countries HDI (human development index) and the size of its cabinet.

Umm...HISTORIAN..????

[Anonymous Coward]

I have several of C N Parkinson's books, including a signed first edition of 'Parkinson's Law', from which this example is taken.

Though he was a history professor, and did some studies, Parkinson's primary claim to fame is not as a historian. He was a writer who wrote historical fiction with a sideline in humorous articles and books.

This whole study sounds as if it has been taken completely from the (comic) Parkinson proposal which is wiki'ed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_Inefficiency

News just in

[edittard]

News just in - the quality of soup can suffer when an excessive number of culinary technicians are involved in the preparation. Film at 11.

Better coverage

[durval]

This article cover the news better: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/33926

It also contains a link to the original paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.2202

Hold on a second!

[cynagh0st]

Wait.

You mean more politicians ='s LESS efficiency!?

Let's just replace the politicians with scientists. Problem SOLVED.

Re:Network Theory?

[jayveekay]

"In that case the US congress uses CSMA/CD."

Where that stands for "Carry Sufficent Money for Access / Complete Debacle".

Re:Correlation does not imply causation

[Anonymous Coward]

Does a separate, cabinet level post really need to exist for homeland security?

No. The department itself should not exist at all, nor the rest of the alphabet soup it finds itself in. "Home Security" as it should be done is provided for in the Second Amendment with local training programs for handling, markmanship, gunsmithing and martial arts would be as much "organizing" as needed and that by the members of the local community.

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."
Thomas Jefferson

And for those who actually believe such a thing as our alphabet soup morass of false security should exist, Jefferson had remarks that described them well too.

"Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty."
Thomas Jefferson

There is the excellent Franklin quote that applies here well too, but I think most here at least know the words even if they don't always think and live that way. Let's not destroy or allow to die what so many have fought and died for.

"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual."
Thomas Jefferson

A Cabinet in name only (US)

[abbamouse]

The number of Cabinet members and Cabinet-level departments is much less important in the US than in parliamentary systems.

Our Cabinet is one in name only. The President has authority over all executive branch decisions, and no Cabinet head can go against his wishes. He can remove them at his leisure and appoint new ones. Although the Senate confirms appointments, it usually does so regardless of whether Senators agree with the policies of the nominee. Instead, it is expected that as long as the nominee isn't scandalous or completely incompetent, he or she will be confirmed.

Moreover, our Cabinet doesn't really have meetings anymore. It just isn't the case that the heads of the Departments of Veterans Affairs, the Treasury, and the Interor sit around with the President and discuss policy. The executive branch really does its business in smaller groups, many of them wholly distinct form the Cabinet (the National Security Council, for example).

This is particularly true...

[patio11]

... as Japan does not have a president.

Eats, shoots and leaves.

[uhlume]

(I think we all remember reading about all the kings that inherited a disaster and had built an empire by the time they died in school).

Really? I can't seem to recall reading about any empire-building kings who died in school. And I think I'd remember a thing like that.

I, for one, welcome our new Libertarian overlords

[Alex Belits]

Oh, wait, I did that already -- in Russia in early 90's. And all they did was giving up control of everything government had and everything government didn't have, to domestic and foreign "businesses" that proceeded to loot the country...

I have an idea. Can I be the looting businessman this time, and you all will be cheerleading Libertarians?

Pretty please?

With sugar on top?

Rule of thumb

[debrain]

A fairly sage quote I remember from somewhere is:

The intelligence of a committee is equal to the intelligence of the dumbest member of the committee divided by the number of people on it.