Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die, Life Gets Faster | Hacker News Reader

Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die, Life Gets Faster

edge.org

76 pointswallflower12 comments

One thing that astounds me is that technology has reduced the need for human labour in manufacturing which deals with very physical problems, but hasn't done anything to reduce demand for bureaucratic labour which deals with information!

How can it be that information technology is so bad at making bureaucracy redundant?

I don't know if it's so much that information technology is bad at reducing bureaucracy. I think it just hasn't been applied to the same degree. In my former life as a manufacturing engineer, every company I worked for focused on making manufacturing more efficient, but few focused on improving the efficiency of indirect labor.

The ones that were efficient with indirect labor divided labor into core product teams that handled all operations from procurement to shipping. The ones that split the responsibilities into specialized departments typically added layers of overhead and bureaucracy to the organization.

Who do you think is in charge of those information systems? Non-bureaucrats?

It's inherent in (human) systems to encroach. Read this and the following five chapters and gain enlightenment: http://www.draftymanor.com/bart/systems1.htm

Or tl;dr: Humans in a system resist to lose power, instead they aim for making their position permanent by expansion (rising importance).

A bureaucracy doesn't have to make a profit. There is no incentive to use technology to make anything redundant.

The difference is that bureaucrats know how to work the system. They make sure that they aren't fired.

Haven't you ever noticed that management can stay the same at a company but it's the workers who are replaced (at least more frequently replaced)?

The amount of information doesn't remain constant - technology enables bureaucrats to invent yet more bizarre and arcane legislation.

For example,the U.S. tax code was 504 pages long in 1939, 8,200 pages in 1945, 67,000 in 2008 and 75.000 pages today.

http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2010/03/growing-co...

I work for an insurance company, and we spend far more time writing code to comply with regulations than we do writing code for our agents and customers.

Their comments about corporations reminded me of Steve Blank's definition: a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. (See http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-princ... for the full context.) And once you've found your model, then in scaling it you need a very different corporate structure.

This fits well with what they found.

Very interesting video. There is also a good Radiolab podcast about this research with respect to cities.

http://www.radiolab.org/2010/oct/08/

It would be nice if we collected this kind of data for social news sites so that we can put a pulse to the "xxx is dying" meme.

"one of the great things about cities is that it supports crazy people."..."Crazy people are fired."

In cities, "crazy" gets incarcerated or fined into oblivion. Each organization, city or company, as it grows defines "crazy" and implements ways to suppress it.

You may see diversity in cities. I see institutionalized intolerance.

Here's a recently popular video of a man licking his shoe on the NY subway and nobody nearby reacting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-1lao5UUac

I don't think I could easily imagine a more categorical example of tolerance and diversity. Have you lived in a big city? New York is possibly among the most the most tolerant places on earth- virtually nobody cares how crazy you or what you're doing are as long as you're not invading their personal space. This type of behavior is the "norm."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com