Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy and Government Dysfunction

ureaucracies had the strange habit of becoming “immune to their own mistakes,” historian Yuval Noah Harari once pointed out. The more power they accumulated, the more they could “change reality to fit their stories” instead of the other way around. But what makes government organisations so prone to mismanagement? Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy offers an explanation at the personal level. And few TV shows illustrate its dynamics better than the Australian political satire Utopia (2014). Here’s how happy and highly motivated people can turn an organisation into a breeding ground for inaction and dysfunction.

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy lays the government’s notorious inefficiency at the feet of bureaucrats who have abandoned their organisation’s mission. It was coined by Jerry Pournelle, an American scientist, writer and one of the first-ever bloggers. On his aptly-named blog The View from Chaos Manor, he explained the term as follows:

Jerry Pournelle

So it’s not that people stop working hard. It’s that they’re working hard towards opposing goals. And it’s the individuals who pursue the benefit of the bureaucracy itself who tend to win. We might even go as far as to speculate about this being the reason why governments rarely scale themselves back or abolish themselves entirely.

Pournelle’s Precursors

Jerry Pournelle made his observation in 2010. But he wasn’t the first one to notice the absurdity of governmental institutions:

• The Dead Horse Theory is a satirical meme about the government’s tendency to continue to ride a metaphorical dead horse. Since dismounting is not an option, they employed other “far more advanced strategies” such as “threatening the horse with termination” or “appointing a committee to study the horse”.
• The Permit A38 played a key role in the 1976 animated film Twelve Tasks of Asterix. The protagonists Asterix and Obelix are tasked with obtaining the infamous permit at the Place That Sends You Mad, a building full of incompetent and useless bureaucrats. The “small formality” almost drives the two heroes insane.
• Purposeful Stupidity goes back to a field manual created by the predecessor of the CIA in 1944. It suggests a variety of tactics to undermine an enemy’s society. This includes bringing up irrelevant issues at work or referring matters to committees so nothing ever gets done. If that doesn’t sound like features of modern bureaucracies…

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