Brown University Medical School…more specifically, the Department of Medicine within that school, whose divisions include cardiology, oncology, and primary care–now gives “diversity, equity, and inclusion” more weight than “excellent clinical skills” in its promotion criteria for faculty.
And, as has frequently been alluded to in recent days, the FAA in 2013 made some radical changes to its sourcing program for air traffic controllers…changes which surely had long-term impact, and not a positive one, on controller staffing. (A very good article at the link, well worth reading.)
About a week ago, in a comment somewhere, I said:
It strikes me that jobs are increasingly viewed as sinecures…something that is given to someone to reward them with money and status. The idea that jobs actually involve work that actually needs to be done seems to play less and less of a part.
One might have thought that jobs like physician and air traffic controller would be reasonably exempt from this kind of thinking…but then one would have been wrong.
I suspect that the reason a lot of people view jobs as something where the incumbent receives value…but not where the incumbent necessarily adds value…is because their own jobs are like that.
John Konrad, who publishes the maritime site gGaptain, recently featured the S-word in a post:
This all relates to something I’ve posted about in the past: the analogy of the prince-electors. In the Holy Roman Empire, the prince-electors were those men who, in addition to their individual rule of specific territories, shared the collective power to choose the next Emperor. As I said in my post The Rage of the Prince-Electors, we have something kind of similar in America today. There is a cluster of influential and would-be-influential people who fervently believe that–while they might not get to actually selected the next President–they should have the authority to decide who may and who may not be considered for the Presidential role. These Prince-Electors include national journalists, Ivy League professors and administrators, and high-level government officials. Their primary means of action is via the control of communications channels. (To which should be added, control of the details of budget allocation.)
Part of the fury at the activities of Musk’s DOGE team is driven by a feeling of loss by people who fear losing the influence over public policy which is essential to their self-concepts. And part of it, as John Konrad argued at the link above, is that a lot of people feel they are losing profitable sinecures. And I think those factors explain most of the fury being directed at DOGE, most of that fury by people who never found anything to criticize in the armies of consultants that have operated for decades within every government agency. The criticism is frequently made that ‘nobody ever voted for the kids on Musk’s team’…well, nobody ever voted for McKinsey (for example) either. The difference in reactions in the two cases is accounted for by the differing perceptions of impact on potential influence, status, and income.
Now, some criticisms of DOGE may well be valid and sincere. It may indeed turn out that some valuable babies are being metaphorically thrown out with the bathwater. Nor does pointing out the harm done by the DEI policies implemented mean that there is anything wrong with conducting outreach programs to broaden the set of people who are potentially recruitable into particular jobs: like the work being done by Moranda Reilly, who was treated very unfairly as a result of the way the FAA’s DEI program was conducted and who now spends time volunteering on youth outreach programs. Last year, she organized an event at the Reagan airport in DC, busing in 150 girls from a Title 1 school. Many, she said, had never seen an airplane up close before.
But much of the criticism of DOGE, and especially the level of fury that it often involves, is driven by the desires to maintain the influence of the prince-electors and to hold on to the profitable sinecures. The too-frequent separation of compensation and status from useful work performed explains a lot of the problems in our society.
Having achieved a certain age (I mean experience), worked in both public and private sector, and sort of been through all the theoretical wars in both my academic and professional life I’m starting to rethink some of my approaches to bureaucracy from something less theoretical to the more experiential and inductive.
I like your idea of sinecure but I will take it a step further in an informal sense
From my experience as a manager and brought in to lead groups and change cultures, there are very few people are 100% intrinsically motivated and most of them have some serious screws loose. Those are the people we like to look as heroes, the leaders as opposed to sheep but in reality we are on some continuum as social creatures and we just want to get along.
People would like to do a good job, if it’s not too much trouble. I’ve come into situations where my supposed top performers only wanted to be the “best” in the sense that they wanted to be “better” not to their current selves but to everyone else and honestly were a cancer on the organization. They worked below their potential and to be honest while high performers vs. others, they saw their jobs as sinecures. Note this is private sector, with specific P&L, quarterly KPI.
Cannot blame them, life is complicated enough so for most people if you can get them an uncomplicated paycheck so much the better, We call it hacking the system and in another context we call these people heroes.
We can slam DEI and bureaucrats and all of that but it’s not much different than it was say 60 years ago in GM or IBM or now. I know VPs who have bonuses tied to P&L but to be honest if you don’t make numbers you get slack for a number of years. What will get you fired in a heartbeat is trying to change things too much to meet those numbers. So you “learn” to get along and move up the ladder.. and when the company hits a wall you find your leadership class is just a bunch of “sinecures” and your culture is just a slide deck of crap
We as humans gravitate toward safety and comfort and if I give you a $150,000+ so you can focus your time and emotional energy on things that are most important in life like family, faith, and European travel why wouldn’t you take it? As opposed to making less than that to work for someone like Mike who is asking you “So what do you do here?”
If I was extrinsically motivated and had to deal with me in an organizational environment the equilibrium position would be to find ways to stiff arm me and cannot say I blame them…. and if I had special in with HR because of my DEI status or could otherwise raise a ruckus so much the better
That’s just life.
I saw a comment someplace that I think is tangentially related to this topic. I think it was more directed at the DIE explosion but is applicable here. I’ll paraphrase it as explaining what you’re describing as a sinecure as an outgrowth of excessive reliance on credentials. Similar to the remark that thinking a job doesn’t involve any actual effort, this is a view that being qualified for a job doesn’t involve having any particular skills but is simply the result of someone granting you the job title as a credential. People who inhabit spheres where their results are almost solely evaluated in terms of pleasing the right people with little if any reference to real world events start to think anyone can do anything so long as you’ve been anointed with the words on a business card.
I think theyll be back to leeches and bleeding before long
“Part of the fury at the activities of Musk’s DOGE team is driven by a feeling of loss by people who fear losing the influence over public policy”
It’s a lot more real and immediate than loss of face or influence. It’s loss of the next pay check, or in the case of Politico, this weeks pay check. And then there’s prison.
We can slam DEI and bureaucrats and all of that but it’s not much different than it was say 60 years ago in GM or IBM or now.
I suppose, but if you’re an idiot and you somehow bootlick your way into becoming CEO of IBM you can destroy that company but not too much else.
If you’re similarly an idiot and you somehow become President of the United States, you can do much more damage.
We’re ruled by idiots who don’t understand that “doctor” or “air traffic controller” aren’t just titles like those given out for the usual make-work jobs commonly found in academia or most of government.
Worse, we have myriad idiots who imagine themselves to be elite because they have managed to obtain what the idiots in charge effectively regard as a minor patent of nobility- a four-year degree- and they expect and demand a high-paying and high-status job just because of who they are. Amazingly, despite such insanities as universities with one administrator for every student, there still aren’t enough phony-baloney jobs in government or academia to satisfy them, so real jobs in fields that matter have to be carved open for them to infect.
But it’s even worse. I’ve listened to tech guy Mark Andreessen on various podcasts lately. He made the interesting observation that the Americans who turned the US into a world power have essentially been shut out of tech world and elite universities in favor of foreigners.
To sum up, we’ve got the idiots in charge who think they’re owed a fat easy living going up against the people they’ve been discriminating against for decades.
I’d put my money on DOGE and not DEI.
Xennady…”if you’re an idiot and you somehow bootlick your way into becoming CEO of IBM you can destroy that company but not too much else” Indeed, this limitation of damage is a major difference between businesses and governments.
Relatedly, if you really hate hate hate working at a company, you can go find another job. If you’re unhappy as an investor, you can sell your stock. It’s much more problematic to leave one’s country.
Curtis Yarvin apparently said that countries would be better run as monarchies, to which @RuxandraTeslo responded:
“It’s true that most successful orgs (eg top companies) are run like monarchies. But should a country be run like a company? I mean, the key thing with companies is that you can *choose* which one to join. You’re not moving country every 2 yrs. I don’t want my country to provide me with excitement and meaning and whatnot, I want it to be ok and in the background, so I can get those things by joining other organisation”
This all ties to Peter Drucker’s comments on bureaucracy:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/36645.html
A less-bureaucratic and even more authoritarian approach is more tolerable in companies than in governments, for the reason that you’re not forced to work for or invest in any particular company and you can always choose to leave.
Definition #2 caught my attention. That’s how I feel about your average churchman these days. They want to make the world a better place by telling it how it should be arranging its affairs. But care of souls? They never heard of it. Sinecures.
Some more details about the questionnaire that was introduced in 2013 in place of the previous and validated procedures for hiring air traffic controllers:
https://frank-hood.com/2025/02/08/do-you-expect-me-to-fly-no-mr-bond-i-expect-you-to-dei/
Specifically regarding the recent disaster at DCA, I think it’s most unlikely that this was caused by an unqualified controller being in the tower. There’s a long road from the time when a candidate controller is hired and the time he’s actually allowed to control live traffic on is own, and the sharpest controllers are generally assigned to the busiest facilities. It does seem possible, though, that staffing issues played a part in the accident, and the FAA’s persistent understaffing has certainly been influenced by the long shadown of the Obama-administration hiring policy. We’ll have to wait to see what the NTSB has to say about this specific accident. But it is certainly true that rejecting large numbers of candidates who likely would have worked out well, based on past experience, reduces the amount of traffic that can be handled with a given safety level…or reduces the safety level that can be achieved with a given amount of traffic.
Great article, David.
But one piece you are missing which Mike and Christopher both hinted at is the missing key to the whole thing: a paradigm known as the “fungible human unit.”
This is especially a key part in communist theory, but basically humans are all alike. Therefore any human can do any thing given sufficient time and training.
Now they don’t phrase it that way because it’s problems will be apparent immediately, hence why they coach it instead of terms like “equality” and “equity” and “systemic [racism/sexism/whatever-ism]”. But listen to them and you’ll realize they really do believe this. Since anybody will sufficient time and training can be an air traffic controller – a lack of air traffic controllers with certain characteristics must ergo be because of discrimination. They are receiving insufficient training or else being ignored.
Of course the reality-based community gets tripped up on this because we know everybody is replaceable – but not by anybody. We assume the limits of the idea are known by the other side when they really aren’t. (There’s also an important thing about mentorship that seems to have been forgotten.)
The information revolution (which is about to be exacerbated by A.I.) has convinced a lot of people that expertise is one click/download away. And there’s going to be a lot more fires, plane crashes, and surgical mishaps as people relearn the lesson that there is a big gap between data and application. Or as our ancestors used to say: “A big difference between knowledge and wisdom.”
How’s that working out for North Korea and China? To which when I’m sure the reply is “that’s not real monarchy.”
The problem with monarchy is the problem of all systems. 1) How do you filter for unqualified or bad actors? and 2) What is your fix/solution for when a bad actor does get in?
You’re a trend setter!
Mollie Hemingway in the latest episode of her podcast used the term sinecure several times.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/53-youre-wrong-w-mollie-heming-110018590/
I’m betting the staffing issues for ATC are from attrition, probably both in training and early career. I’m also betting that the real numbers are only something Musk can find out. There are only so many training slots, when you fill them with people that can’t cope you quickly cut into the number of people that can. Until the last year, I’d have thought that even the most diehard DEI’er would have realized that if planes started running into each other, the jig was going to be up. Apparently, another case of unfounded optimism.
By now the supply chain for ATC is so poisoned that it will be years before it can be fixed.
maybe unrelated, but an outfit with a very healthy balance sheet, headed by a parliament member, son of a British Marxist, who is at the forefront of the immigrant invasion,
https://x.com/Oilfield_Rando/status/1890087822607982759
Nate Winchester…”The information revolution (which is about to be exacerbated by A.I.) has convinced a lot of people that expertise is one click/download away.”
Indeed.Following the DCA midair, I saw a lot of comments from people along the lines of ‘How could this happen in 2025?”, as if there were magic systems to prevent all bad things from happening
I don’t see how the 2013 change in FAA controller hiring procedures–driven, I’m sure, by an Obama appointee–could have NOT cast a long shadow on future staffing. Apparently the earlier tests had a very good track record at identifying people who could actually do the job, when you throw that away, there are surely a lot of people who fail to make it either through the Academy in Oklahoma City or the apprenticeship in live facilities.
Until the last year, I’d have thought that even the most diehard DEI’er would have realized that if planes started running into each other, the jig was going to be up.
This is a reasonable assumption.
I’d have also thought that the US Navy would take action after a series of embarrassing and fatal collisions at sea but nope.
My guess is that the average DEI’er is just too incompetent to worry about about planes crashing or ships sinking. That’s always going to be someone else’s problem, because they are in place because they’re owed, not because a job needs to be done. Sinecure, etc.
I’ve been wondering just exactly why the US government tolerates such incompetence and disaster. My conclusion is that the United States isn’t ruled by people who have our best interests at heart. Planes crashing and ships colliding aren’t bugs, they’re features. The people with the power to fix all this are the very people who want it to happen.
Hence, the election of Donald Trump despite the endless shrieking of the regime, along with Elon Musk signing up to eviscerate the Deep State. The public got fed up with the endless incompetence and wanted it to end badly enough that all the propaganda and vote fraud wasn’t enough to keep the DEI’ing alive.
I suspect there are going to be quite a lot folks very regretful that they didn’t just let Elon build rockets in peace.
I have been curious of late why, if people hate Elon so much, they are rooting for SpaceX to fail? Shouldn’t they be wanting the man to leave the planet?
(Also I was reminded the other day that it was a judge which forced Elon to buy twitter when he wanted to back out.)
I don’t always agree with James Lindsay, but when the man cooks, he cooks! And one of those was about why communism always turns deadly.
https://newdiscourses.com/2024/12/why-communism-is-so-deadly/
And I think it applies here too. Why does it?
They let it happen because to try and fix the problem, they first have to admit they were wrong. And they would rather let people die than do that.
Like the transformers film (dont judge) where they explain they bought off the soviet and american space programs
If competence has been pushed aside to make room for the MUCH more important DEI priorities, then disasters from incompetence will also no longer be worthy of consideration.
The patient may have died, but the operation was still a success.
Might explain some things
https://x.com/pepesgrandma/status/1889686063490183231