Fukuyama: On Building Better Bureaucracies

[Valin]

Via Meadia:

Walter Russell Mead

10/14/12

 

Co-AI online blogger Francis Fukuyama has been hitting some out of the park lately. In a recent post he opened an important question: how do we measure bureaucratic performance?

 

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Nobody likes bureaucracy, but developing countries are often crippled by bureaucratic incompetence and corruption. Rogue bureaucracies, no-show bureaucracies, sticky fingered bureaucracies: there are many types and degrees of bureaucratic failure. Trying to figure out how developing countries can build the kind of reasonably honest and professional bureaucracies that the British, French and Prussians built in the 19th century, and that the Americans and Singaporeans did in the 20th is an important — and, Frank points out — understudied subject for people trying to promote economic development to study today.

 

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What we need to do now in places like the United States is to rethink government so that it can do what we need it to do with as little cost and delay but as much competence and wisdom as possible. In part that involves the use of IT to reduce the number of personnel and accelerate the speed of decision making. It involves streamlining the court procedures that now tie up all projects in years of complex, expensive litigation. It involves a systematic review of regulatory rules and statutes that have over time become complicated and onerous, simplifying and modernizing them so that the rules focus on real needs without becoming unnecessarily burdensome. As AI editor Adam Garfinkle has suggested, we also need to think about reviewing bureaucratic rule making procedures. Paper pushers can always think of more reasons why more paper needs to get pushed — and somewhere inside the system we need to develop a capacity to push back.

 

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