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 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 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.