Breaking Parkinson's Law

[Robert Baratheon]

Is Parkinson's Law immutable?

http://wp.me/p4yevN-5C

If not, how can we stop the natural growth of bureaucracies? Is there a policy solution?

[softwareNerd]

The first thing that comes to mind is an overall check on growth of budgets and personnel. If "work" truly expands to fit the personnel and budgets, then we can try to check the latter, making it difficult to grow the input regardless of the justification about the value of the output.

The Objectivist idea of limited functions of government is a good starting point. Within that framework, a balanced budget would be another. There could also be some types of percentage limits: e.g. max. number of people working for government agencies can be 5% of the overall population, or max. government outflows must be 10% of GDP.

Just rough brain-storm ideas here.

[Robert Baratheon]

I like the concept as a brute-force method of limiting the state, but as such I can see it breaking down very quickly due to its arbitrariness (e.g., because of special circumstance X, we need a 6% allowance this year instead of 5%). Or maybe it fails to the Washington Monument Syndrome strategy - agencies loading up on nonessentials first and then claiming a need for additional funding for the essential popular stuff afterward.

I was toying with the idea of removing the power incentive from the hiring process somehow, like giving hiring authority to some disinterested party. But the hiring manager would still have an informational advantage they could use to game the system, so I'm not sure how to totally remove them from the equation.