Garbage In....

Dr. Max Gammon is a British physician and researcher who did a study on the British national health care system in the '70s and his results were quite disheartening. From 1965 to 1973, he found that hospital staffing went up by 28%, that administrative staffing went up by 41%, but that the outcomes, as measured by the average number of beds per day, actually WENT DOWN by 11%. He also pointed out that this reduction in outputs had absolutely nothing to do with a reduction in demand (as was markedly evident by a huge increase in wait times)..............................................................................Gammon's theory as to why this was happening was something that he ultimately referred to as the Theory of Bureaucratic Displacement (a theory that received additional notoriety in large part thanks to Milton Friedman's bringing Gammon's theory to the fore); the more that an organization institutes inputs (especially if these are hierarchical), the more that the outputs go down. Friedman kind of saw it as an extension of Parkinson's Law (and I concur) and damned if it doesn't go a long way in explaining just exactly why governments and larger businesses tend to fail so much (the former obviously failing more so in that those folks aren't spending their own cash).