A Meretricious Meritocracy | 2 of 5

The Bureaucratization of Everything.

This is the second of five posts relating to the modern American meritocracy. The first examines the rise of the postwar meritocracy. The second considers ‘the bureaucratization of everything.’ The third reviews the class consciousness of the professional managerial elite. The fourth surveys the ongoing corruption of the professions. The final installment focuses on the reserve army of the over-credentialed that serves as the praetorian guard for our oligarchy. This series diagnoses American national challenges. Recommendations for reform will be presented in future installments.

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all else to enforce this claim. It is modest only on this point, however, because this officially nonexistent bureaucracy simultaneously attributes the crowning achievements of history to its own infallible leadership. Though its existence is everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy must be invisible as a class.

—Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

Our meritocracy is bound up in bureaucracy. The authority, power, prestige, and status of the professional managerial class is the result.

Government bureaucracy has grown to an astonishing extent. The federal government’s domestic, international, and military bureaucracies are well known. The rise of state and local public bureaucracies are at least as significant.

We encounter bureaucracies in highly regulated parts of the private sector. These include basic functions: utilities, transportation, education, health care, communication, insurance, and finance. They are also fixtures in the not-for-profit sector and the professions.

Precise measurements of bureaucracy are not easy to come by. Management analysts Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini reported in 2016, “The cost of excess bureaucracy in the U.S. economy amounts to more than $3 trillion in lost economic output, or about 17% of GDP.”

Writing in the Harvard Business Review they reported:

There were 23.8 million managers, first-line supervisors, and administrators in the American workforce in 2014. (This figure includes both the private and public sectors but does not include individuals in IT-related functions.) That works out to one manager and administrator for every 4.7 employees. Overall, managers and administrators made up 17.6% of the U.S. workforce and received nearly 30% of total compensation.

Hamel and Zanini found that bureaucracy more than doubled in the U.S. between 1983 and 2016, while other employment rose by 40%. There is no reason to suppose these trends are declining.

Bureaucratic norms extend beyond formal organizational arrangements. They may be unwritten yet transgressed at one’s peril. Such customs seep into the national culture.

Columnist David Brooks expresses concern at “the growing bureaucratization of American life.”

It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.

Under the banner of meritocracy, American higher education has become the hub of bureaucracy.

Emblems of Entitlement

The purpose of professional schools is to educate competent mediocrities. —Peter Drucker

The meritocracy cultivated by Harvard and other colleges and universities has strayed far from the aristocracy of talent and virtue envisioned by Adams and Jefferson. No longer a bridge to social mobility, it is becoming a barrier.

A Meretricious Meritocracy | 1 of 5

Our higher education system has been reengineered as a self-sustaining bureaucratic engine.