Decline in 1 Picture

Ian Welsh may have found the problem, the tail to tooth ratio has exploded.

The graph just describes healthcare, but it applies to most other areas as well, whether it's healthcare, education, social services, law enforcement, and a whole host of other parts of our society.

US society is increasingly dystopian, and the late Dave Graeber's book Bullsh%$ Jobs.

Even with the growth of computers in the workplace, or perhaps because of the growth of computers in the workplace, the growth of useless management continues apace:

Similar numbers can be found in most fields.

This is related to the computer productivity paradox: computers and the telecom revolution have not noticeably increased productivity.

The reason is simple enough: they weren’t used to create productivity, they were used to create control, to allow managers to micro-manage employees without actually being in the presence of the employee all the time.

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In my personal life at my last megacorp job I saw multiple waves of computer “improvements”. Every single one of them increased control and reduced the workload employees could handle. I know this for a fact because I measured it, in part because it was my job, in part because management refused to admit that their shiny new programs were actually making the job slower, and until I forced them to admit it, they wouldn’t hire more people.

Furthermore each wave of “upgrades” deskilled the job further, making the employees do what the computer said, and removing their discretion. All of this was intended to raise the bottom, but what it mostly did was lower the top: the most productive, most highly-skilled employees suffered the greatest productivity losses, were the most unhappy, and tended to leave, because the job had become feeding the computer, not actually doing the job.

As a general rule no one should run something like a hospital who is not still involved in hands-on client care: probably a nurse or doctor. No one should run a university who is not either still teaching or an active student. This principle can be applied more generally, in that no one can manage anything they still don’t do properly. This is often recognized in the business literature, but understandably CEOs and executives almost never want to actually do the real work of the business, nor will they excuse themselves from interfering with those who do and thus actually understand what is needed.

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One issue is that front line workers often really want to do front line work: profs don’t want to administer, they want to teach or research; doctors want to treat patients, etc, etc…

But if you give administrators power over you, you never get it back. University Senates hired administrators, and a few decades later discovered the administrators were running the show, were able to order profs around, and were the highest paid people in the university, outside of the football coach, while doing no actual teaching or research, and understanding little to nothing.

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Bottom line: we can’t afford to let anything important be run by people who aren’t actually practitioners: they don’t know what they’re doing, and they spend most of their time building bureaucratic empires that do nothing but act as modern courtiers. In the best case they do no harm other than sucking up resources, but in most cases they try to justify their existence by trying to tell the front lines how to do their jobs, and make things worse.

The professional-managerial class, (PMC) largely perform tasks (that Graeber so colorfully named) which have a negative utility:  It's not just that they divert resources from the task, it's that they actually impede actual productive work.

I'm not sure how you fix this, though Welsh's suggestion of, "Some form of societal collapse, which strips out administrators in a more brutal and effective fashion," seems increasingly likely.