The Law of Systemic Incompetence
Why the systemic incompetence in our society is intentional, who profits from it, and what to do about it
The Law Stated
The Law of Systemic Incompetence is succinctly stated as follows:
Systemic incompetence is never random but intentionally designed to advance agendas motivated by greed and/or power.
In The Peter Principle (1969), Laurence J. Peter formulated his well known principle, which states that people working in organizations tend to rise to their level of incompetence. His point was that people keep getting promoted until they reach a position where they are no longer able to competently handle their work. Peter made an interesting argument and supported it with case studies. Many readers at the time (I read it as a teenager in the 1970s) thought his principle contained valuable insights even if it didn’t quite merit a Nobel Prize.
Yet, readers of The Peter Principle tended not to think that the sky was falling because incompetence had become so widespread in organizations that it threatened to ruin the economy and our way of life. Fortunately, at the time, even if some people were getting promoted past their level of competence, many were not there yet (still awaiting that last promotion to incompetence). And even those promoted to a level of incompetence could often fake competence or delegate tasks at which they were incompetent to underlings who could handle them competently.
Yes, incompetence might back then have been widespread. But it’s distribution was sparse enough so that talent, industry, and merit could still be rewarded and make a difference. And perhaps most shockingly, from the vantage of our present age, incompetence was considered a vice rather than a virtue, something to be removed if possible, concealed if necessary, and best left uncelebrated.
Not anymore. Incompetence has become pervasive, entrenched, and systemic. Indolence, apathy, and ineptitude are now applauded in the guise of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Today politicians in Washington would have Emma Lazarus write a different inscription for the Statue of Liberty:
Give me your mediocre, your underperforming,
Your self-indulgent masses yearning for a free lunch,
The lackluster rejects of your teeming shore.
Send these, the entitled and spoiled, to me,
I lift my lamp beside the door to perdition!”
A Culture of Incompetence
We presently have a commander in chief who has difficulty thinking on his feet and putting words together to form coherent sentences. The debate on Thursday (6/27/24) with his Republican challenger made this clear if previously there had been any doubt:
And even when he does put words together that make sense, President Biden is often making outrageous claims, as when he recently stated that his uncle, when shot down over Papua New Guinea in WW2, was eaten by cannibals. Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister James Marape wasn’t having it: “President Biden’s remarks may have been a slip of the tongue; however, my country does not deserve to be labeled as such.” Not content to embarrass himself nationally, he does so also internationally.
Until the Thursday debate, I would have said, “No worries, President Biden has an army of enablers in the White House and a press corps to cover for him at every turn, cheering him on and keeping him secure.” That may now be changing, with many former supporters now calling for him to step down from seeking reelection. But even leaving aside the Thursday debacle, the low bar that President Biden sets for his own performance is a feature of his administration.
Consider his appointee Jared Bernstein, whose degrees in music and social work have left him ill-prepared to chair the White House Council of Economic Advisors. Here he is hemming and hawing his way through explaining the role of debt in money creation. You’ve likely seen this clip, but it’s worth watching a second time. If your reaction is anything short of “we’re all doomed,” you’re not listening.
It is embarrassing to watch such a performance. It’s also troubling to think that what responsible citizens have saved and worked for over the years is in jeopardy at the hands of appointees like this. Unfortunately, this level of incompetence has become the norm. Despite the jaw-dropping inanity of Bernstein’s response, who among us thinks that this performance will be grounds for firing him? No, we all know that his job remains secure. Unlike in the old Peter Principle days, when incompetence was considered poor form, and might even get you canned if it became too obvious, we now indulge and condone it. The question is why.
Because It Pays!
No small business owners can allow this level of incompetence—they’ll be out of business before you can say Jack Robinson. To put the point more sharply, if you’re in a highly competitive business where anything except top performance means failure, you’ll ensure that incompetence like this is rigorously rooted out. Can you imagine a professional sports team drafting the equivalent of a Jared Bernstein to play for them? And yet here is Bernstein safely ensconced in the White House, given influence and authority in an area where he displays breathtaking ignorance.
DIGRESSION: It may seem that I’m being unduly harsh on Bernstein. He is just doing his job as best he can, and it’s no fault of his that he’s been given a job for which he is unqualified. And yet, as unqualified as he is, he must have enough self-awareness to realize that he is unqualified. He is in a position of public trust. His decisions and policies will affect the well-being of people. So the fault is not just that he is unqualified, but that he is willfully remaining in a position where he is unqualified. When Isaac Barrow realized how much greater Isaac Newton’s genius was than his own, he relinquished his Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University and ceded it to Newton. Nothing like that here.
When we see absurdities like this, we are apt to think that the world has gone crazy, leaving reason behind. But in fact, reason is still in play. Reason is always in play. It’s a question of what reason is doing—what’s the underlying rationale for the craziness we’re seeing. Often to uncover the underlying rationale is a matter of following the money or tracking who benefits (qui bono?). Sometimes the truth of the underlying rationale bleeds through in public pronouncements. Here is President Biden justifying his appointment of Bernstein:
Jared is a brilliant thinker and one of my closest and longest serving economic advisers. He is an expert on worker empowerment and a worker-centric economic policy, which has long been the heart of my economic vision. A former social worker, Jared was in the foxhole with me while I was Vice President, and he understands that a job is about far more than a paycheck, it's about the dignity of work.
We might think that as chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, Bernstein should have expertise in formulating sound and comprehensive economic policy. But clearly that was not front and center in the Biden Administration’s job description for Bernstein. Bernstein was hired to advance an agenda of “worker empowerment and a worker-centric economic policy.” He’s there to address a certain subset of economic theory, so forget about the rest.
Presumably, he is competent at the things about which President Biden’s administration wants him to be competent. And if he’s bad at economic theory as a whole, well, that’s just unfortunate. The worry, of course, is that as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, he may be called to shape economic policy quite generally, such as deciding whether to implement Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which puts fiat money on steroids by removing the constraint of debt on money creation. If what we’re seeing now is merely inflation, MMT would unleash hyperinflation. Given how little Bernstein seems to comprehend about basic economic theory, it’s easy to imagine that with regard to MMT, he might just say, “Sure, let’s give it a try.”
Sigmund Freud once remarked that a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, his point being that not everything needs to have a deeper, symbolic meaning. So too with Bernstein, it may be that there is no deeper, malevolent meaning to his incompetence. Incompetence sometimes is just incompetence. Cronyism and nepotism have a long history, and they are known to encourage incompetence by valuing ties of friendship and obligation over merit. But the greater question that the Bernstein episode raises is why, after his abysmal interview, he did not resign or get shown the door.
The reason the he remains at his job in the White House is that we now have a culture of systemic incompetence that is only too happy to give incompetence a pass. What sustains systemic incompetence? The short answer is that systemic incompetence is able to pay for itself many times over because of the waste it creates, allowing parasites and scavengers to cash in and luxuriate. With systemic incompetence, market forces have been short-circuited, failing to discourage incompetence. In play is a kind of prisoner’s dilemma paradox where incompetence create a race to the bottom rewarding the bottom feeders.
A Dozen Brief Case Studies
To see how pervasive systemic incompetence has become in our society, consider the following brief case studies that underscore how incompetence is able to thrive in spite of itself.
Failed Wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine): The U.S. involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine exemplifies how incompetence in war strategy and execution can be perpetuated. These wars lack clear objectives, resulting in prolonged conflicts with no definitive victory. Politicians leverage these conflicts to assert power, while the military-industrial complex benefits financially. Taxpayer dollars flow into armament manufacturing, perpetuating a cycle of wasteful spending on unwinnable wars. The incompetence in handling these conflicts ironically sustains the careers and profits of those who benefit from the chaos and instability.
Social Media (Facebook): Social media platforms like Facebook are designed to foster connections, but their business model incentivizes maximizing user engagement through sensationalizing content. By appealing to primal emotions like fear and greed, these platforms keep users hooked, often leading to increased stress and mental health problems. While these companies are adept at generating revenue and maintaining high user engagement, their success comes at the expense of users’ well-being. Competence and incompetence thus run in parallel at Facebook: competence at maintaining user attention, and thus profits, running side by side with incompetence at facilitating user well-being, despite that being the company’s advertised objective.
Big Pharma: The pharmaceutical industry is expected to improve public health, yet it often profits more from inducing and managing chronic illnesses than curing them. A significant portion of Americans suffer from chronic diseases like obesity and diabetes, partly due to ineffective or counterproductive drug treatments as well as an unwillingness to promote healthy lifestyle changes. Many drugs treat symptoms rather than root causes, leading to additional medications to manage side effects. This cycle of dependency enriches pharmaceutical companies while public health deteriorates, underscoring how incompetence in healthcare delivery can be financially rewarding for the industry.
Teachers Unions: Teachers unions prioritize the interests of educators over students, often by safeguarding job security for underperforming teachers and administrators. This protection can lead to a decline in educational quality, necessitating costly remedial education to address deficiencies. Rather than fostering an environment where student success is paramount, these unions perpetuate a system where incompetence is tolerated and even rewarded. The increased need for additional educational resources due to poor instruction exemplifies how inefficiency can generate further expenditure and job security for incompetent educators.
Food Industry: The food industry prioritizes profit over health by producing highly processed, addictive foods that encourage overeating. These products disrupt natural satiety signals, leading to widespread health issues like obesity and diabetes. While these foods generate significant profits, they undermine public health, creating a market for diet-related medications and treatments. This interconnectedness of the food and pharmaceutical industries highlights how incompetence in producing healthy food can lead to financial gain, as poor diet leads to increased demand for medical intervention.
Environmental Policies: Governments and corporations often implement ineffective environmental policies that fail to address the root causes of ecological damage. Instead of investing in sustainable practices, short-term fixes or superficial measures are prioritized, leading to continued environmental degradation. This incompetence benefits industries reliant on exploiting natural resources, while the cost of environmental damage is borne by society. Efforts to mitigate the damage, such as cleanup projects and healthcare for pollution-related illnesses, generate further economic activity, perversely rewarding the initial incompetence.
Healthcare System: The US healthcare system is notorious for its inefficiency and high costs (e.g., with only 4 percent of the world’s population, the US had 16 percent of the world’s covid deaths—and yet the CDC, FDA, and NIH boast about their performance in the pandemic). Incompetent management and lack of preventive care lead to exorbitant medical expenses and poor health outcomes. Hospitals and insurance companies profit from treating chronic and preventable conditions rather than focusing on effective prevention and holistic care. This system perpetuates a cycle where inefficiency and poor management are rewarded through higher healthcare spending and increased demand for medical services. This point obviously connects with points 3. and 5. above, making for a cozy incestuous circle of incompetence.
Corporate Bailouts: During economic crises, our government has now gotten in the habit of bailing out large corporations deemed “too big to fail,” despite their role in causing the crisis through mismanagement and risky practices. These bailouts reward incompetence by providing financial safety nets, allowing companies to continue operating without addressing and reversing their misguided policies. The financial burden of these bailouts falls on taxpayers, while the corporations benefit from the absence of accountability, encouraging similar behavior in the future. Moreover, to add insult to injury, these same corporations will reward their executives with big fat bonuses for a job badly done.
Public Infrastructure Projects: Many public infrastructure projects suffer from mismanagement, delays, and cost overruns (whatever happened to “shovel ready” projects?). Incompetent planning and execution lead to wasted resources and subpar deliverables—if they ever do get delivered. Contractors and consultants involved in these projects often benefit from the inefficiencies, as extended timelines and cost overruns increase their earnings. This endless repetition of poorly managed government infrastructure projects underscores how incompetence can result in financial gain for government agencies and private subcontractors engaged in subpar work despite its negative impact on the public at large.
Corporate Tax Evasion: Many large corporations engage in complex tax evasion strategies to minimize their tax liabilities, often exploiting legal loopholes and offshore tax havens. This practice, while legally permissible, reflects a broader incompetence in the our tax regulatory system, which ensures that these entities don’t pay their fair share. The resulting tax revenue shortfall impacts public services and infrastructure, burdening ordinary citizens and smaller businesses, which must make up the difference. Meanwhile, the resources spent on intricate tax avoidance schemes enrich tax consultants and legal advisors, creating an industry that thrives on the systemic inefficiencies and loopholes in tax laws. Thus, incompetence in tax regulation leads to financial rewards for those exploiting the system, while society bears the costs.
Monsanto's Harmful Pesticides: Monsanto, a major player in the agricultural industry, markets its pesticides as essential for enhancing crop yields and ensuring food security. However, these pesticides often prove to be harmful to farmers and consumers. The overuse of these chemicals can lead to soil degradation, reduced biodiversity, and the emergence of pesticide-resistant pests, to say nothing about the direct harm these chemicals cause to humans and animals. Monsanto’s production of glyphosates led to a $13 billion dollar class action settlement. Yet its bottom line remains robust because the company profits from selling more pesticides to counteract the resistance developed by pests and because even with all the negative consequences of their pesticides, it’s more profitable to them to pay the fines and see people injured than to produce safer products. In this way, Monsanto’s incompetence at delivering safe and effective agricultural solutions feeds directly into its financial success.
Boeing's Substandard Manufacturing and Design: Boeing, once the gold standard in aviation engineering, has recently faced severe criticism for substandard manufacturing and design, notably with the 737 Max debacle. Driven by a corporate culture that prioritizes accounting and sales over competent engineering, Boeing has also succumbed to lowering its hiring standards due to DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) pressures. This has resulted in critical safety oversights and poorly designed aircraft, leading to accidents and a loss of public trust—to the point that travelers will now check whether the aircraft for a slated flight is manufactured by Boeing or Airbus, with travelers now preferring to travel using Airbus planes. Instead of committing itself to improving its engineering, Boeing now increasingly looks to quick fixes and public relations maneuvers, maintaining their profitability despite increasingly shoddy products.
These case studies illustrate how incompetence across many sectors of society can, paradoxically, be rewarded, creating environments where inefficiency and poor performance benefit certain individuals and entities at the expense of broader societal well-being.
What to Do About It?
What should you do when confronted with such an instance of systemic incompetence? Start by being brutally realistic. Unless you are one of the perpetrators cashing in on systemic incompetence, you might still be inclined to think that things may not be quite as bad as you fear. Okay, there’s waste, and so you have to pay more for that would otherwise be at a fair market value. Lay this rationalization firmly aside. Systemic incompetence is hopeless if you are on the receiving end. The problem is that with systemic incompetence the waste and inefficiency run so deep that you won’t get the value you desire regardless of how much you end up paying to try to redress the ill effects of incompetence.
Because the incompetence is systemic, it’s even worse than paying the mafia protection money. At least with the mafia, once you’ve paid the protection money, you are largely on your own recognizance. Systemic incompetence, on the other hand, offers no respite. If little Johnny isn’t learning to read using phonics in the first and second grade, then by the eighth and twelfth grade, bigger Johnny will still be functionally illiterate. And for teachers unions and many big city school systems, that’s just fine. Often this level of educational malpractice can be justified on the account of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), where to significantly boost performance of students might mean that some excel above others—cue to “white supremacy” and “victimization.” No matter that systemic incompetence guarantees that every student in such an education setting becomes a victim—at least here there’s victimological equality!
Once you realize that systemic incompetence is your mortal enemy, your approach must as much as possible be to opt out of it. Some public schools do a good job teaching students the skills and knowledge they need to get into a good college. But even those who do a good job in this respect are often infected with leftist activism intent on indoctrinating students into woke ideology, which with its war on merit, its hatred of traditional gender roles, and its eagerness to displace parents can cause even more damage than an education whose incompetence is confined only to poorly teaching academic subjects and not also to washing students’ brains. This is why homeschooling and private schools are rapidly gaining in popularity.
But what if you can’t afford to pull your children away from a systemically incompetent school district? I would say, figure out a way to afford it—and yes, it will not be easy. But wringing your hands in the hope that the systemically incompetent will somehow see the light and straighten out spontaneously is a pipedream. Systemic incompetence is not self-correcting. It is hopeless. The entrance to Dante’s Inferno reads “Abandon all hope ye that enter here.” Systemic incompetence inhabits the circles of hell.
To deal effectively with the challenges of systemic incompetence means assuming the full burden of dealing with it. It means not looking to politicians to help you. It means not looking to institutions that are systemically incompetent to reform their ways. Yes, systemic incompetence may through concerted action be beaten back. One of my favorite organizations to redress systemic incompetence in higher education is ACTA (the American Council of Trustees and Alumni), which puts pressure on colleges and universities to embrace freedom of thought and expression, unseat pernicious ideologies (such as DEI), and put a premium on academic excellence. But before you take on that fight, you need to ask yourself how much of your lifeblood you want to spill in taking down systemic incompetence.
Most of us want to get on with our lives without being soldiers in the culture war. As it is, not everyone is called to be a soldier in this war. But if you’re not going to be a soldier in it, at least find ways to protect yourself from systemic incompetence. Make sure you know exactly what your kids are being taught and that their education is in competent trustworthy hands. Take charge of your health, informing yourself about how best to circumvent the systemic incompetence in big pharma, big medicine, and the food industry. In times past, when systemic incompetence was less an issue, many of us could sleep walk through life with little concern that our inattention would cause us irreparable harm. Those days are over.
One of my high school friends grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts. His dad was a medical doctor, and his family knew Timothy Leary, who was likewise from Springfield. My friend’s family remembered Leary fondly. Leary held a doctorate in clinical psychology from UC Berkeley. During the 1960s and 70s, when the fabric of American society seemed ready to tear apart, Leary was the guru of LSD. Arrested 36 times, he was branded by President Nixon as “the most dangerous man in America.” The quote for which he is best remembered is “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Yet the quote by him that I want to commend to you my readers is “think for yourself and question authority.” (Compare Einstein’s advice in my recent post about him.)
When confronted with systemic incompetence, which invariably comes to us in the guise of expert authority, we must question it. Unlike in a court of law, where people are presumed innocent until proven guilty, experts need to be regarded as guilty/incompetent until proven otherwise. Their authority needs to be questioned. We must determine whether they are systemically incompetent and, if so, how best to short-circuit their influence over our lives and communities (would that we had drawn such a conclusion about Anthony Fauci during the covid crisis).
Yes, there are top-down culture-war approaches to dealing with systemic incompetence. But what I’m proposing here applies to the majority of people, who must deal with systemic incompetence in their own backyard from the ground up. In effectively dealing with systemic incompetence not as a culture warrior but as an ordinary citizen, you will not save everyone. But you will save yourself and those close to you.
This is Dembski at his best. Rarely have I read such a carefully worded critique of such a huge variety of topics that directly or indirectly impact his life and mine.
I found this article very enlightening but a bit depressing. I would add the Democrat Party and it's control of most big cities over the past half century or more as another example of systemic incompetence. It goes along with the teachers' unions, which was on the list.
I never cease to be amazed at how so many people can keep voting in the same party that is ruining their standard of living -- and then blame their problems on the party that has been out of power in their city for 60 years!