Sunday, November 30, 2014

Lazy Sunday Service

Another hectic week of running around to meetings, giving talks and trying to catch up on admin.  With regards to the latter, the ultimate irony of neoliberal attempts to undermine, hollow out, and hold to account bureaucracy is that it creates way more bureaucracy through audit and accountability trails.  What that means is a lot of time filling out forms about how I've spent my time filling out forms or attending meetings.  I suspect that we've never had so much bureaucracy and so many bureaucrats as at present.  Is that a good thing?  I guess that depends on whether you're a bureaucrat or not.  Personally, I'd prefer to spend my time doing something more productive, such as delivering on the core mission of the job.  Okay, rant over!  Back to compiling a list of bureaucratic tasks I still need to complete.

My posts this week

After the storm
Review of Bite Harder by Anonymous-9 ****
Review of Dataclysm by Christian Rudder **

6 comments:

Anonymous-9 said...

Hi Rob! The topic you raise is ruminating in a lot of people. With gov't so big, all these bureaucrats need to keep busy doing something. And often they keep busy trying to think of ways to control and change "the people." Oh it's all for a good cause. They're just trying to help out. But I think at some point it becomes overkill. People are fleeing my home of California because even the government admits they've strangled new job creation and business with over-regulation. All with the best of intentions, of course but people are suffering and jobless as a result. I heed the old saying, "A givernment big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have."
Anonymous-9/Elaine

Rob Kitchin said...

My point is that a lot of the bureaucracy is actually created through trying to demonstrate accountability, openness, value for money, and trying to identify ways to make more the system more efficient. To do these things you have to introduce a lot of auditing. For example, I fill out daily timesheets, do a three monthly financial audit, and a six monthly productivity audit to demonstrate that I am not a waste of tax payments. Someone then has to compile all these data and report on them. This is not bureaucrats looking to create work for bureaucrats, these have all been imposed by external pressures on the public sector by politicians, citizens and companies to account for what it does. And regulations placed on companies is nearly always because they have proven not to be trustworthy at regulating themselves leaving some scandal in their wake (like bankrupting a country or building shoddy houses, as has happened here). Again the pressure to regulate comes from citizens and politicians. In other words, the public sector does not exist independent of everyone else imposing things; people vote for policies. We agree though that there is too much bureaucracy!

Anonymous-9 said...

The company that built those shoddy houses has most likely been run out of Ireland on a rail by now. If it hasn't, it should be. But who awarded this company the bid? Have those gov't people who made this decision been publicly questioned? Has the media investigated to see if crony capitaism is involved? If not here's what now happens: all builders get tarred with the same brush as the shoddy company. All private enterprise becomes suspect and gov't skates away free as a bird for any responsibility in bad decision-making. With the people now suspicious and angy at only one party (private business), government rakes in still more power, control and $$ from citizens. With companies the only ones culpable when things go wrong, and gov't never held accountable for backroom deals and bad decisions, things do not end well.

Rob Kitchin said...

Elaine, I doubt we will ever agree on this. We hold completely different political views. We also live in completely different political systems. But for what it's worth, the company was probably awarding itself the contract. It will have bought the land and then built the houses and sold them on to individual households. No govt people will have been involved as building oversight was de-regulated in the early 1990s. This was simple free market capitalism at work and almost entirely self-regulated or overseen by a tightly interconnected set of related private parties. And this was not one or two builders but concerns thousands of houses, and no they have not been run out of Ireland but simply disolved hiding behind their company limited status and then formed new companies. And yes, everyone gets tarred with the same brush, but then large sections of the industry were caught up in it. Same with banking that costs billions of dollars to bail out because they are too large to fail, who have systematically set up all kinds of wonderful schemes such as CDOs and taken risky bets with their assets and systematically dismantled regulation over the last couple of decades. Regulation is usually very difficult to introduce as it is blocked by all kinds of vested interests with political connections. The power to pass it does not rest with civil servants but politicians (who are elected) and the electorate, and it has to work its way through various legislature. If it does get passed it is usually needed and not just for a few bad eggs but because of systematic abuses. Government isn't some kind of amorphous entity - what it does is shaped by voting, campaigning and political decisions. Governments are held accountable and so are politicians - they are voted out. That's not to say that there is not bad policy or crappy regulation - there is, as my post was pointing out. But it is to say that there is a reason why policy and regulation exist and for the work that the public sector does.

Anonymous-9 said...

What has my jaw hanging is that these shoddy builders are not accountable. In North America local governments must approve building projects and land use. On a 3-day trip back to my home in Nova Scotia a few years back I got wind of a huge and ugly high-rise planned for a beautiful street, right across from the graveyard where many Titanic victims are buried (a popular tourist spot, if slightly ghoulish. But I digress.) With the help of my old History teacher, a telephone tree was organized, hundred of phone calls went out, and a hundred or so people showed up at the town council approval meeting. We all went on record, at a microphone, with our comments recorded, to express our disapproval of the project. Council unanimously rejected the project and almost immediately plans for a smaller lovelier development were submitted, approved and built. Win/win for everyone.

It sounds to me, Rob, that in the Irish case, community input was missing, transparency was missing, there was a glitch somewhere in the Irish system that this was allowed to happen. Pehaps you can study places where the system has worked (like Canada?) and recommend changes. To sum up, all I know is that when gov't takes on 100% of the task of planning and building housing, it usually ends up an expensive, unmitigated disaster. Without regulation and oversight, free market building is a crapshoot and it's obviously been a disaster in Ireland. There's a better way. I hope you find it.
Love you, Rob. I think we see more eye to eye than you realize.
Anonymous-9

Rob Kitchin said...

Oh, for Canadian regulation (before Steve Harper's government dismantles it all!) - there's a reason why Canadian banks have been robust through various financial crises. We had a builder who'd moved from Canada to Ireland and he could not get his head around our construction sector!