Hacker News Reader

Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

Not knowing much about India, but excessive gov. bureaucracy is often a just side effect of rampant corruption.

It goes both ways:

- people wanting to fix the corruption problem through technical means will make it more difficult for individual clerks to make decisions alone, and push for more paper trails.

- the harder the system is to navigate, the easier it is for clerks to get bribes and quid for pro. At some point it can become impossible to get anything done without bribing to accelerate or bypass the checks.

View on HN

Not always. Bureaucracy can also result from a risk-averse culture.

The impulse to increase bureaucracy comes from risk-aversion, but you always have other forces to balance. For instance cash transporters are risk averse, but they haven't build secure underground tunnels under every shop and ATM.

Ever increasing bureaucracy probably doesn't come from ever increasing risk-aversion, and more from a dysfunctionning in the balancing mechanisms. Basically it needs to benefit a large portion of the system to keep creeping up.

That's almost always the case. Most corporates are risk-averse and thus bureaucratic.

I'm talking more about people who like rules, regulations, organization and order as part of their nature. People who keep their ducks in a row.

I find it pretty funny that you would attribute something to the nature of a people after getting a well reasoned explanation of why people act that way and what the effect is, without even going into the argument.

You are right, I didn't even get involved in the corruption argument. If you think I said something about it, I didn't. It's not interesting to me. You say it's well reasoned but I have no opinion it. The commenter is probably right about corruption and bureaucracies. I was talking about Microsoft. There isn't any corruption of that sort at Microsoft. Maybe in India, I don't know. I was comparing them as organizations that are bureaucratic in nature. I find it interesting that some people like that kind of system and create it, because I don't. To me it seems stifling of creativity and discovery. But maybe I'm missing something and could use more rules and order in my life. I'll keep studying it. I'm glad you pointed out that I was misunderstood.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com