Parkinson’s Laws
Cyril Northcote Parkinson was a British civil servant, Royal Navy historian, and popular author of the short collection Parkinson’s Law that was a hit at publication in 1957. It was a book of the tongue-in-cheek management-science genre popular in the 20th century, including works like Gamesmanship (1947) and The Peter Principle (1969). British writers were particularly good at the requisite dry wit.
The first of Parkinson’s laws in the book was that of ever-expanding bureaucracy—even when the object of a bureaucracy’s oversight itself shrinks. Over the course of the early 20th century, Parkinson noted that the British government’s Admiralty Office, which oversaw the Royal Navy, continued to see its (dry land) workforce in London grow, even as the number of ships in the fleet declined. Similarly, the Colonial Office, managing the component parts of an empire undergoing devolution, persisted in adding staff as the number of their charges decreased.
Parkinson presented simple statistics showing how many registered Royal Navy ships were in service and how many staff worked at the Admiralty. A basic pattern was inescapable, even if truncated between 1914 and 1928, due to the numerical effects of war and peace and military rearrangement when the Royal Air Force became a separate agency: The number of capital ships had gone from 62 in 1914 to 20 in 1928: a decrease of 68 percent. But the number of Admiralty staff had increased by 78 percent from 2000 to 3569 over the same period.
Similarly, the countries overseen by the Colonial Office tended towards zero in the 20th century, but the bureaucracy continued to grow all the while, until its staff were eventually folded into the Foreign Office.
A copy of Parkinson’s original article can be found at various sites on the web, of which this is one. The version published in the book is slightly longer.
The recent discussion here involving the U.S. government’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) reminded me of Parkinson’s Law. The agency might have been established for the sole purpose of proving Parkinson’s Law, in fact, so remarkable are the results. The NRC was created in 1975 and—since inception—has witnessed growing budgets and growing staff, whereas the total number of permits it has issued for building nuclear power plants has been stuck firmly at around 180. NRC was created in 1975 to replace the Atomic Energy Commission, accused of being in cahoots with the industry.
Wikipedia provides the handy chart above showing that nuclear power plant permits and construction ran mainly from the 1970s to the 1980s, but hardly anything new has come online since. The licensing body appears to have discovered its new purpose lies in administering its own growing bureaucracy that prevents the expansion of nuclear power.
NRC oversight has been effective, if its purpose had been to end nuclear power development in the United States. This has been a loss for lower-carbon electricity, but undoubtedly a gain for technological advancement pursued by America’s rivals, whether friendly or hostile.
Parkinson’s Law has not received the recognition it deserves. Its effects seem to be nearly everywhere you choose to look where there is bureaucracy. Cyril Northcote Parkinson had an amusing explanation for the mechanisms at work that may or may not be accurate, while the phenomenon itself is in evidence all around us.
Update: Commenter Optimum writes in offering a betting pool on possible causes of Prigozhin’s demise:
Void where prohibited.
Good evening!
I saw a production of Little Shop of Horrors last night. It was good.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12247271/Vice-president-Russian-bank-falls-death-Moscow-apartment-latest-mysterious-fatality.html
Sudden Russian Death Syndrome strikes again! They keep going into rooms with windows.