Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Carnival of the Bureaucrats!
The best entry in this edition has been unanimously judged to be Foreign Policy’s photo essay, The State at Work. An appropriately selective quotation from its first page:
Civil servants are asked to do the people’s work with very little, sometimes with nothing at all. They see to it that the job gets done ….. Meet the bureaucrats.
My personal favorite: Josephine George-Francis, governor of Montserrado County, Liberia. According to the photo essay, she “sewed the Liberian flag that hangs in her office.” That’s exactly the kind of resourcefulness and dedication that characterizes many bureaucrats in much lower positions in countries all across the spectrum of per capita income.
Honorable Mention for appreciation of bureaucrats by a non-bureaucrat goes to Stowe Boyd at /message, for declaring, “the only answer to the Cold War is government intervention.” A few decades ago this insight could have saved googols of rubles and dollars.
The heart and soul of bureaucracy is editing. Editing is what makes bureaucracy great. The New York Times recently showed considerable bureaucratic mettle in editing a letter to the editor. The letter was eventual withdrawn, with the decisive issue being the use of “rubbish”. Outstanding! Even better, this matter produced 14 emails over five days of pondering the issues. Read the emails (pdf file) for yourself and cheer!
Jon Swift presents Homeland Security Thinks Outside the Box posted at Jon Swift. Swift observes, “Homeland Security Department stays one step ahead of the terrorists by not only anticipating likely terrorist targets but even anticipating the terrorists’ anticipation of our anticipating them.” This work appears to draw insights from the scholarly field of game theory. It undoubtedly can generate many additional papers and results. Swift apparently is a federal bureaucrat stationed in Alaska. Perhaps the exceptional quality of his blogging will win him enough friends to get a position in DC.
Nedra Weinreich presents The Insider’s Guide to Writing a Winning Proposal posted at Spare Change. This submission was filed after the deadline for the Carnival. Moreover, it did not include a request for a waiver of the Carnival rules. Hence this entry has been rejected. We do not reach the issue of whether, if a properly prepared waiver request had been filed, that waiver request would have been granted.
That concludes this edition of the Carnival of the Bureaucrats. Submit your blog article to the next edition using our carnival submission form. Submissions should conform to the Carnival regulations. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.