until a moment ago; others that branched off ages ago, when the dinosaursbecame intelligent (for example). Crazy. The stuff of science fiction. Exceptthat it’s been discussed in the highest circles of theoreticalphysics. Science-fiction writers come up with all sorts of weird ideas. Manyof them—such as the negative income tax—they borrow from the “straight”

world. Others, such as an international struggle over the natural resourcesof the oceans, they make up out of whole cloth-only to have the “straight”

world borrow it from them. One science-fiction idea that seems definitely onits way to reality is the universal credit card, and the eventual eliminationof cash money. However, anyone who’s tried to argue with a computer-smugcredit card organization can testify that the day of the credit-card-economywon’t dawn until both the machines and the people get a lot smarter. It’schilling to hear a pleasant-voiced young lady ask, over the phone, for yourcard number so that she can check out the discrepancy in your bill thatyou’re complaining about, and then have her come back saying, “Ah yes, here’syour file, Mr. Pagropoulis…” In fact, one of the more frightening predictionsof science fiction‘ is that our society is moving toward more centralization,

more bureaucracy, more impersonal machine-dictated handling of mylife. There’s no fundamental reason why this should be so, except perhaps someof the ramifications of Parkinson’s Law. ========== Parkinson’s Law, simplyput, is: Work expands to fill the time allowed for it. And one of the subtler

results of this universal law is the burgeoning of bureaucracies. If one man

decides he can only get a raise by becoming the boss of two other men, hewill scheme and wheedle and cajole until he gets a couple of men to do the

work he originally did alone. His time will be spent “supervising” his twoassistants. And since they are now sharing the work their boss formerly did,

it stands to reason that neither of them can be as productive as their

boss. This kind of frightening built-in mediocrity can be found in .businessfirms, government agencies, universities, even churches: wherever largenumbers of people gather to work together. The fact, that they are frequentlyworking against each other helps to explain why the output of bureaucraciesis so low. What can be done about this? A science-fictionist’s , answer mightbe deceptively simple: replace the bureaucrats with computers, and leave onlya few brilliant and dedicated men and women at the top of the organization torun the computers. After all, the archetypical bureaucrat is simply a personwho “goes by the book” at all times—that is, he follows his originalprogramming. And he resists, with every ounce of passion he can muster, anyattempt to change the programming. “A computer can follow the program betterthan a human, and it can be reprogrammed rather simply. At worst, you’d haveto pull out some circuit boards and interior wiring, which is done much moreeasily to a machine than to a human being. But this kind of simplistic cureis one of those crazy ideas for which the world is not yet ready. For onething, the bureaucrats themselves would never allow it. Unless, of course,

things were arranged so that the number of computer routines a bureaucrat had

cognizance over was just as important—or more so—than the number of

assistants he or she could pile up. But bureaucracies are, by virtually everytest, a form of living organism. They eat, grow, breed, resist change. It maywell be that “the first—and only!—immortal creature on this planet is the.

bureaucracy that began in the ancient Roman Republic and survives todaywithin the Catholic Church. The only way a bureaucracy can continue to exist,

though, is if there is no way to measure its performance. How many souls hasthe Catholic Church brought salvation to? There is no way to tell; the Churchmay be doing a splendid job. But no one on this side of heaven can

objectively state that this is so. So—perhaps the only way to change amoribund bureaucracy into a dynamic force for human achievement is to find

some way to measure objectively the bureaucracy’s performance. How do youknow if your local school board is doing an effective job? It should be

possible to test the students on their reading skills, and compare the

results to the national average or some other agreed-upon standard of

excellence. If the kids don’t measure up, then neither do the members of the