An explanation for our current institutional malaise
the Covid vaccine rollout and the dysfunctionality of institutions in the West
A couple of weeks ago on Twitter, Matthew Yglesias asked an important question:
The Covid vaccine rollout failures in so many countries highlight just how deep the rot is in the technocratic state in the West. It also tells us that many of these failures go well beyond superficial matters such as the ideology of the government in power today. For example, you could argue that the NHS in the United Kingdom has suffered from underfunding for the last decade, but how would you explain the French health system's almost comical performance so far?
One of the replies to Yglesias’ question hit upon an explanation that I think has some truth to it - Western institutions are simply too old.
But this still doesn’t answer the question. What is it about age that cripples a technocratic institution? In my opinion, what many Western countries are experiencing today are the downsides of the technocratic equivalent of a legacy codebase. Of course, many of the bureaucratic organisations, private and public, that we need to deal with on a day-to-day basis suffer quite literally from a legacy codebase. 40-year old COBOL programs still determine our fate today!
The field of software development has long understood this problem - software entropy, software bloat and software rot, to name a few adjacent problems. To quote a common law:
A computer program that is used will be modified. When a program is modified, its complexity will increase, provided that one does not actively work against this.
You can substitute ‘program’ in this definition with almost any legible construct (database, process, organisation structure etc.) and the conclusion still holds. Every act of control starts with simplifying an illegible, complex environment into something legible. This works for a while, but the changes required to maintain the system's efficiency, productivity, and stability eventually make the system complex and illegible again. The natural complexity of the environment is replaced in the long run by the complexity of the control process itself.
The seminal work on this phenomenon and the related failure mode in the modern era is James Scott’s Seeing Like a State. But a vaccine rollout is the sort of mission-based militaristic task that even a prototypical high-modernist state like the Soviet Union would have done a better job at. So why the failure?
One reason is that the bureaucratic sclerosis that has been a feature of our institutions for a long time has been exacerbated rather than alleviated by increased computerisation and automation over the last few decades. Some of the problems in the vaccine rollout illustrate this phenomenon. For example, getting a vaccine in New York requires filling out a 51-question form and uploading attachments. Becoming a vaccine volunteer in the United Kingdom requires completing onerous documentation requirements during the online application process.
Bureaucrats have always been sticklers for the process but in the era of paper forms, they had the option of fudging and ignoring the strict requirements of the process in an emergency or if they simply felt that some part of the process was not relevant to the case in question. But this is no longer possible when the process is enforced by data validation. An employee on the ground can fudge a paper form, but there is no getting around a ‘required’ field on an online form.
Any formal order depends on these informal hacks and fudges to function. In James Scott’s own words:
The more highly planned, regulated, and formal a social or economic order is, the more likely it is to be parasitic on informal processes that the formal scheme does not recognize and without which it could not continue to exist, informal processes that the formal order cannot alone create and maintain.
As control becomes more all-encompassing in the modern data-driven computerised era, these fudges, hacks and informal processes get squeezed out. The system becomes even less nimble and adaptable than it was in the era of paper bureaucracy. Hence why the vaccine rollout seems to be such a heroic struggle. However, the struggle is not against the disease itself but against the burden of the accumulated legacy codebase that our institutions carry.
All great points. I think there are some other complications with covid-related things, namely a lack of endgame and an inability to discussion many things honestly. But another big one that does not just affect covid-related matters is "turf war" stuff. Various groups---bureaucracies, consultants, whatever, are interested in having as much influence as possible, and guarding their own procedures, which is a myopic focus. There's no big picture view. It's not all that things just accumulate in an effort to keep the system stable, but that the government expands and forms more committees, who think mainly about protecting and expanding their own turf. The 51-question website probably resulted from consultants' desire to make it sophisticated, to prove their own value.