I don’t like government bureaucrats.
Actually, let me re-phrase that statement. I know lots of people who work for different agencies in Washington and most of them seem like decent people.
So maybe what I really want to say is that I’m not a big fan of government bureaucracies and the results they generate. Why?
Because a bloated government means overpaid bureaucrats, both at the federal level and state level (and in other nations as well).
Because inefficient bureaucracies enable loafing and bad work habits.
Because being part of the government workforceeven encourages laziness!
And it may even be the case that government bureaucracies attract dishonest people. A story in theL.A. Times reveals that there’s a correlation between cheating and a desire to work for the government.
Here are some excerpts.
College students who cheated on a simple task were more likely to want government jobs, researchers from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania found in a study of hundreds of students in Bangalore, India. Their results, recently released as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, suggest that one of the contributing forces behind government corruption could be who gets into government work in the first place. …Researchers ran a series of experiments with more than 600 students finishing up college in India. In one task, students had to privately roll a die and report what number they got. The higher the number, the more they would get paid. Each student rolled the die 42 times. …Cheating seemed to be rampant: More than a third of students had scores that fell in the top 1% of the predicted distribution, researchers found. Students who apparently cheated were 6.3% more likely to say they wanted to work in government, the researchers found.
I’m not surprised. Just as the wrong type of people often are attracted to politics, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that less-than-admirable folks sometimes are attracted to jobs in the bureaucracy.
But I don’t want to draw too many conclusions from this research.
The study looked at people in India and that nation’s government is infamous for rampant corruption.
However, if you look at how America scores in that regard (corruption measures are included in both Economic Freedom of the World and the Index of Economic Freedom), the problem is much less severe.
So even though I’m willing to believe that bureaucrats in America are more prone to bad habits than their private-sector counterparts, I don’t think many of them decide to get government jobs in the expectation that they can extract bribes.
Indeed, I would guess that the average American bureaucrat is far more honest than the average American politician.
That’s damning with faint praise, I realize, but it underscores an important point that the real problem is big government. That’s what enables massive corruption in Washington.
