Comment by mattcwilson
4 years ago
I think there’s something to this comment and the one from zzbzq about Graeber’s “canonical bullshit job.” I’m also drawing some threads from Goedel Escher Bach.
Perhaps the growth in the administrative sector is a new class of job, that results from scale, coordination costs, Metcalfe’s law, and Goodhart’s law.
The job is to combat the diminishing returns on communication decay due to scale by measuring the system as a whole or in part and attempting to optimize that part.
There is no “product” other than the change in metric selected. There is no external or intrinsic value other than whatever 2nd, 3rd, nth order effects the measurement focus has on actual observable inputs and outputs of the system.
The job, in a GEB sense, is just a theorem that references some or all of the system itself, and which may not mean anything whatsoever outside the context of the system.
Scale increasingly becomes constrained by organizational interfaces. At a certain point, trying to add people to an organization actually makes it less productive unless their contributions can be abstracted globally.
At a certain extent, the system must become inhuman: metrics and interface contracts are needed to prevent overhead growth.