Subject: Book Review

From: [email-masked] (Fred Hapgood)
Date: Mon, 24 Jun 1996 16:44:11 GMT

Mark Kramer's _Travels with a Hungry Bear_ (Houghton Mifflin) is
the first work known to me that captures in closeup, in slow
motion, the self-destructiveness of large bureaucracies.

Hitherto I had read about these dynamics on a pretty general
level. Hayek said that living without the information carried by
price condemns an organization to slip ever deeper into the swamp
of waste.  Other theorists have argued that all monopolies,
public or private, are inevitably hijacked by internal politics.
(Perhaps another way of putting Hayek's point.) A third theory is
that bureaucracies by their nature worship precedent, a fatally
maladaptive religion in this innovative world.

All true no doubt, but vague. _Bear_, which is a tour of the
world of Soviet/Russian agriculture, shows exactly how the
pathology works, and at the highest levels of resolution. Over
the late 80's and early 90's Kramer spent several trips poking
around in European Russia, comparing the tools and processes of
Soviet, and then post-Soviet, agriculture with their Western
counterparts. Kramer is a onetime farmer and longtime agriculture
writer. He knows how milking sheds should work and when they
don't work, he knows why and how he would fix them, given a free
hand.

Local farm directors could make these comparisons themselves and
often tried to launch 'reforms' that were a gesture to
well-established Western practices, like low-till plowing. Kramer
writes about several of these interactions -- moments when native
reformers, armed with about as solid a case for change as you
ever get in life (ie: the changes they wanted to make were not
'new' in any sense but already deployed _everywhere else in the
modern world_ and working well) were beaten back by the system
anyway, despite the tremendous expense of the USSR's agricultural
imports.  And he shows why.

Kramer is not interested in 'cultural' explanations of the
collapse of Russian agriculture -- the distress at the success of
others that play through so many other traveller's accounts.
This makes sense since only a hundred years ago Russia was an
agriculture powerhouse, producing more wheat (for instance) than
the United States.  (If the culture of envy existed then it is
obviously compatible with high production.)

Instead he emphasizes the role of the *system*, and in particular
the third theory listed above: that controllers and planners just
cannot do their job and tolerate innovation at the same time.
Innovation destroys the meaning of baselines and goals; it erodes
the value of precedent, which is the basic unit of legitimacy
(since past procedures and arrangements have all been endorsed by
the hierarchy, at least by implication); it forces all the
players to renegotiate all the elements of the plan, over and
over and over.

This is intolerable; yet the difference between the productivity
levels of Russian farms and those of every other modern country
cannot be denied either.  So managers developed a culture of
Potemkin reformism that bred 'experiments' just big enough to
talk about in committees but not so big that they raised
practical difficulties. Kramer is quite good at showing the
ingenuity of the bureaucracy at coming up with a parade of
superficial fixes that changed nothing, but that allowed managers
to argue that *this* time they were finally getting a handle on
the problem.

For the most part this charade was not even conscious.  The
managers he writes about often thought they wanted a little bit
of change, but not too much, and were baffled by their continuous
defeats in making these small changes happen.  The implicit moral
is that system was and is one in which the only possible change
was the largest possible change.  It has been five years since the
coup and that change has not happened yet.

A person reading _Bear_ will see all kinds of parallels to the
rhetoric of melioristic reform and the state bureaucracies of our
own country, from highways to education to health care.  Kramer
does not draw these parallels explicitly but he doesn't have to...

Fred Hapgood

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