The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to "The Office"

See the Scott Alexander review: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-pri...

This is the first blog post that's ever been good enough that I donated to the author merely for having written it. Both brilliant textual analysis and insightful social commentary - definitely worth the read. Or maybe I'm just constructing my delusional world to justify having spent $3 on a public blog post!

I hadn't realized it before today, but Jerry Pournelle (a science fiction writer) pioneered here (with two groups, not three, which is an advance in understanding.) "Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people": First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some…

> Today, any time an organization grows too brittle, bureaucratic and disconnected from reality, it is simply killed, torn apart and cannibalized, rather than reformed. I actually think the overall argument of the essay makes more sense when you realize the above comment actually isn't true for the large majority of organizations. Universities, government agencies, big tech monopolies, public sector unions, complacent companies in industries that haven't changed in 50 years, etc. Most sectors of the economy just…