Bureaucracy + Time = Vetocracy
All simple, legible processes eventually transform into a complex, illegible mess
In a recent essay, Scott Alexander asks why we seem to live in a “vetocracy” where it appears that the government can longer get anything done as it could in the past.
Vetocracy is a term introduced by Francis Fukuyama to describe the American political system and the fact that it has more “veto players” than most democracies. He makes the obvious comparison to the British political system, which has been called a “democratic dictatorship”. But as even Fukuyama admits, there are vast swathes of the government where decision-making is delegated to “highly autonomous bureaucracies” as they are in every country today. And neither Britain nor these autonomous bureaucracies are at all immune to the problems described by Scott Alexander. They all seem to suffer from an inability to get anything done within a reasonable period of time at a reasonable cost, e.g. Crossrail or the Berlin Airport.
This focus on political inaction is misguided. Most of our “inability to build” arises not from the inability to pass new legislation but from the accretion of cruft over time in all “legible” (in the James Scott sense) constructs, whether it be code, regulations or just procedures/processes themselves. This sclerosis is not unique to the United States and it is not even unique to governments. It is the eventual fate of all large, old bureaucratic organisations - private or public. Bureaucracy + time = Vetocracy.
Most of this buildup occurs due to the natural need to deal with more and more scenarios and prevent gaming/abuse of the process (e.g. contractors gaming a bidding process). What starts out as a simple, legible process eventually transforms into a complex, illegible mess. Anything legible follows this pattern unless explicitly fought against - refactoring is an example of a practise that expressly tries to fight this decay. In larger, older organisations it is not realistic to expect much refactoring. No one ever gets promoted for doing “maintenance” work like refactoring.
This phenomenon isn’t even unique to capitalism. The Soviet Union was a great example of this evolution - by the 70s it was completely unable to evolve. As Robert Service pointed out, “the number of ‘normative acts’ of legislation in force across the USSR had risen to 600,000” by then. All that was possible was Brezhnevian “stability” and any attempt at true reform was more likely to trigger collapse (as Gorbachev found out).
You can’t solve this problem by making things more legible. Therefore crypto or “smart contracts” do nothing to solve this problem and may make it worse. Having an increasingly complex, arcane process enforced by crypto may make it worse as it becomes literally impossible to avoid the constraints enforced by the machine (as I described in a previous essay).