It's Time to Stop Venerating Businesspeople and Start Venerating Bureaucrats

First, let me say that there is nothing wrong with businesspeople as a class. Most of us work in businesses and most of us happily work alongside businesspeople - people whose role is not necessarily to make or produce anything but do things like decide on strategy or convert higher ups strategy to meaningful actions, etc. There is nothing wrong with that kind of work or, as a class, with the people who do that kind of work. Frankly, in a modern corporate environment, those kinds of things tend to be at least an aspect of most people’s work. But there is nothing especially right with it either. Especially when we are talking about the highest earners, the CEOs and owners and entrepreneurs that we as a society have decided are worthy of veneration, are superheroes in Italian suits (is it Italian suits? I don’t know — I have arranged my life to be as suit free as possible). I would rather trust bureaucrats than such people and it is time we stop being shy about that preference.

The common right-wing idea that businesspeople are better than bureaucrats is based on a whole lot of nonsense. The idea is that since a company cannot force you to buy something you pay no penalty when they make mistakes, and the lack of sales will discipline them. Whereas a bureaucrat pays no penalty for making mistakes and will perpetuate their errors and force you to pay for them. Five seconds of thought demonstrates that this is not true.

Now, everything I am about to say applies in the general. Of course, you can find bureaucrats bad at their jobs or businesspeople who do not fall into these traps, who buck the incentives. But we are discussing the way society views these respective classes, so the general matters more here than the one offs.

First, businesspeople force costs onto you all of the time. Without government intervention, businesspeople can and do socialize the costs of the business. These are called externalities, the easiest to see being things like polluting Texas with your rockets. Since it is cheaper to pass those costs onto you than pay them themselves, the incentives are for businesspeople to do just that. Even people who are basically moral will face enormous pressure to do the wrong thing, because doing the right thing costs them, their firm, and their shareholders money compared to the competition. All the incentives line up to push a businessperson to doing the wrong thing.

Compare that to a government bureaucrat. They aren’t motivated by money — if they were, they could go find a private sector job that paid significantly better. They are motivated by desire to do the work. They are focused on the mission rather than the dollar and so their incentives are not to push off the costs onto society for their own benefit but to ensure that they are doing the best job possible in their domain. Since their motives are not financial, they are less incentivized to hurt the people they are supposed to be helping and more incentivized to help advance the cause they are working on. Now, sometimes that cause is not a cause we agree with, but that also demonstrates one of the great differences between businesspeople and bureaucrats: openness to reality.

Businesspeople at the highest levels tend to have the functional stupidity problem. Politicians have a version of this problem as well, but to a lesser extent. A politician must worry about his or seat, so there is usually more constraint on this tendency. It is not perfect, but it’s something. Really rich businesspeople can go years without anyone telling them “No” if they are not careful. Their money, the power to ruin lives that money brings, means that their underlings will have a tendency to tell them not the truth but what they want to hear. And since the CEO is personally insulated from the costs of their bad decisions until something really catastrophic happens, it is easy to continue to make bad decisions over and over again.

Mark Zuckerberg’s platform contributed to a genocide. He spent billions of dollars on a virtual world where the avatars look like a bad copy of preschool toys. Meta prioritized anger to drive engagement over the health and well being of its users. And he has faced no accountability for any of that. He is protected by his money and position in the company. No CEO is going to pay the price for forcing CoPilot and its additional cost into Office 365 without consent (so much for not being able to force people to buy from you ….). And even in the rare cases where CEOs are let go, they are given a severance package, regardless of the firm’s performance under them, that generally guarantees that they and their children and often their children’s children will never have to work again.

Compare that to a bureaucrat. They must answer to their bosses and to the politicians that established and/or fund their organization. The IRS stopped doing certain kinds of audits, mostly of rich people, after the GOP held some showy, if misleading, hearings and cut the budget. They stared doing more such audits when the Democrats increased the enforcement budget. Imagine if Facebook had been forced to stop using anger to mine for engagement after the public made it clear that such behavior was abhorrent. It did not happen — it could not happen. There is an enormous amount of accountability that a government bureaucrat faces compared to a business leader. Bluntly, the only way to argue that businesses are more accountable than bureaucrats is to completely discount the concept of democratic accountability.

Bureaucrats are also more likely to point resources to the general good than a business leader. Executives are incentivized to spend less on research and development and more on dividends and buybacks. GM is in the process of doing both, spending six billion dollars, despite the growing threat of Chinese electric cars. Pharma executives are incentivized to research what is best for business, not what is best for the health of the country. Those often line up — but not always. And when they do not, the incentives are for the business to do profitable research over beneficial research.

Bureaucrats face no such incentives. In fact, their incentives are the opposite — they more they help the greater good, the less likely they are to face pushback. Helping more people means more people approve of the job you are doing, means less pressure on the politicians that ultimately are responsible for your job.

Again, there is nothing wrong with being a businessperson — even a CEO. We live in a capitalist society. Until we get Luxury Space Communism for All, everyone has to make their way through that as best they can. And it is possible to buck the incentives and do the right things — as people have done and continue to do.

But if we are talking about people worth looking up to, I think it clear that under-paid people who go to work with only the value of the mission driving them are a better choice than a class of people whose motives and incentives push them toward, at best, disregarding the rest of society.

Bureaucrats are better, as a class, for society than business leaders. And we should start saying so.

Also, at no point in typing this up did I once ever spell bureaucrats correctly.