Ever call a government agency for an inquiry? Wonderful experience, right? “NO, I said, ‘New Mexico.’ NEW MEXICO. I don’t need the Mexican embassy’s number. New Mexico is a state!”
I’ve had experiences like that. Exempli gratia: I once received a letter from the IRS saying “We are trying to contact you, but cannot find your address.” Duh! How does someone get into a position with that level of incompetence?
It’s the Peter Principle at work, and it is pervasive. The LA fires. The broken border. The national debt. The NY ban on fracking and the NYC congestion toll. DEI. Every new public school educational methodology. Journalists repeating “Joe’s as sharp as a tack.” Men in women’s bathrooms and locker rooms—and in sports. No face masks, er, face masks, er, two face masks. We’re living in a Gary Larson world, maybe best represented by his drawing of cows busily munching on grass as one cow standing says, “Hey! This is grass; we’re eating grass.”
Hey! We’ve put incompetent people in charge of our lives.
The Principle Reviewed
In 1969 Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull published The Peter Principle, a book detailing the mechanism by which hierarchical systems are topped by incompetent leaders. * I’ve mentioned it before: Someone relatively good at a job gets promoted to a position for which he or she has no skills. Think many high school principals who rise to their positions—not all of them, mind you—from within the teaching ranks. Leaving a classroom where they might have been highly successful, they now have to become administrators and problem solvers on a grander scale, enforcing rules for both staff and students, troubleshooting, overseeing events like football games, cooperating with police on drug enforcement, seeing to the overall safety of the school, managing relationships with school boards, labor unions, and parent groups…Tasks for which their admittedly competent classroom prowess might be irrelevant or too small scale. Basically, bureaucrats rise to the level of their incompetence. Elected officials, also.
Elected Officials
Nowhere in our society does the principle manifest itself better than in elected officials. Most elected officials encounter problems and situations that exceed their expertise (if they have any beyond garnering votes or towing the party line). They find themselves inundated by problems arising from a breakdown of infrastructure, union demands, special interest group agendas, social problems, and even disasters both manmade and natural.
Take the latter, for example. Remember Hurricane Katrina and the failure of Mayor Nagin to mobilize school buses to transport people from the danger zone? Here’s how Wikipedia frames it: “In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina entered the Gulf of Mexico. Early on Friday, August 26, Mayor Nagin advised New Orleanians to keep a close eye on the storm and prepare for evacuation. He then made several public statements encouraging people to leave but promising that if they did not evacuate, "[w]e will take care of you.” By 10:00 a.m. Saturday, a mandatory evacuation was called for low-lying areas in the surrounding parishes. Nagin had, however, ignored federal and state offers of help and a recommendation to evacuate the entire city. He had ordered an evacuation as he should have, but did so only a short time before the hurricane hit the city. NOLA’s mayor was also criticized for failing to implement his flood plan and for ordering residents to a shelter of last resort without any provisions for food, water, security, or sanitary conditions. Perhaps the most important criticism of Nagin is that he delayed his emergency evacuation order until less than a day before landfall, which led to hundreds of deaths of people who (by that time) could not find any way out of the city. Hundreds of people died while buses remained in parking lots, supposedly because there was no liability insurance (NOLA Choice: worry about liability or save hundreds from drowning with no obvious attempt to resolve that problem with FEMA) and a shortage of drivers. Surely, there were some drivers in a city that uses the buses daily to transport thousands of kids. In addition, little to no preparation was made for people told to shelter in places like the New Orleans Convention Center or the Louisiana Superdome sans survival provisions or security.
Take Karen Bass during the January, 2025, fires destroying homes and business in Los Angeles as another example of an incompetent mayor. This is how the NY Post puts it; “Embattled Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has been ripped as the most ‘incompetent politician in America’ after she managed to botch a fire emergency information website address by pointlessly telling locals to just visit ‘URL’ — even while admitting the deadly firestorm is ‘the big one.’” *** Well, let’s see. What Los Angeles mayor was it who was in Africa as the fires were expanding? Oh! Yes, it was Mayor Karen Bass, the same major who had just cut $17.6 million from the city’s fire department’s budget, but who found the funds to go to Ghana. Insightful leadership. Competence on display—not!
And then there’s Kamala Harris, border tzar, AI tzar (in case you’re wondering, AI is, as she explained, two letters), space tzar, and… who knows what she was? Whatever, she might have been the perfect manifestation of the Peter Principle during her four years as cackling, word-salad VP—unless Joe Biden deserves that appellation.
Am I being too harsh? Surely there are competent people among both bureaucracies and elected positions.
*Peter, Laurence J. and Hull, Raymond. 1969. The Peter Principle. William Morrow & Co Inc. (Pan Books ed., 1970).
**Wikipedia
***https://nypost.com/2025/01/09/us-news/la-mayor-karen-bass-blunders-way-through-warnings-on-the-big-one/
I’ve had experiences like that. Exempli gratia: I once received a letter from the IRS saying “We are trying to contact you, but cannot find your address.” Duh! How does someone get into a position with that level of incompetence?
It’s the Peter Principle at work, and it is pervasive. The LA fires. The broken border. The national debt. The NY ban on fracking and the NYC congestion toll. DEI. Every new public school educational methodology. Journalists repeating “Joe’s as sharp as a tack.” Men in women’s bathrooms and locker rooms—and in sports. No face masks, er, face masks, er, two face masks. We’re living in a Gary Larson world, maybe best represented by his drawing of cows busily munching on grass as one cow standing says, “Hey! This is grass; we’re eating grass.”
Hey! We’ve put incompetent people in charge of our lives.
The Principle Reviewed
In 1969 Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull published The Peter Principle, a book detailing the mechanism by which hierarchical systems are topped by incompetent leaders. * I’ve mentioned it before: Someone relatively good at a job gets promoted to a position for which he or she has no skills. Think many high school principals who rise to their positions—not all of them, mind you—from within the teaching ranks. Leaving a classroom where they might have been highly successful, they now have to become administrators and problem solvers on a grander scale, enforcing rules for both staff and students, troubleshooting, overseeing events like football games, cooperating with police on drug enforcement, seeing to the overall safety of the school, managing relationships with school boards, labor unions, and parent groups…Tasks for which their admittedly competent classroom prowess might be irrelevant or too small scale. Basically, bureaucrats rise to the level of their incompetence. Elected officials, also.
Elected Officials
Nowhere in our society does the principle manifest itself better than in elected officials. Most elected officials encounter problems and situations that exceed their expertise (if they have any beyond garnering votes or towing the party line). They find themselves inundated by problems arising from a breakdown of infrastructure, union demands, special interest group agendas, social problems, and even disasters both manmade and natural.
Take the latter, for example. Remember Hurricane Katrina and the failure of Mayor Nagin to mobilize school buses to transport people from the danger zone? Here’s how Wikipedia frames it: “In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina entered the Gulf of Mexico. Early on Friday, August 26, Mayor Nagin advised New Orleanians to keep a close eye on the storm and prepare for evacuation. He then made several public statements encouraging people to leave but promising that if they did not evacuate, "[w]e will take care of you.” By 10:00 a.m. Saturday, a mandatory evacuation was called for low-lying areas in the surrounding parishes. Nagin had, however, ignored federal and state offers of help and a recommendation to evacuate the entire city. He had ordered an evacuation as he should have, but did so only a short time before the hurricane hit the city. NOLA’s mayor was also criticized for failing to implement his flood plan and for ordering residents to a shelter of last resort without any provisions for food, water, security, or sanitary conditions. Perhaps the most important criticism of Nagin is that he delayed his emergency evacuation order until less than a day before landfall, which led to hundreds of deaths of people who (by that time) could not find any way out of the city. Hundreds of people died while buses remained in parking lots, supposedly because there was no liability insurance (NOLA Choice: worry about liability or save hundreds from drowning with no obvious attempt to resolve that problem with FEMA) and a shortage of drivers. Surely, there were some drivers in a city that uses the buses daily to transport thousands of kids. In addition, little to no preparation was made for people told to shelter in places like the New Orleans Convention Center or the Louisiana Superdome sans survival provisions or security.
Take Karen Bass during the January, 2025, fires destroying homes and business in Los Angeles as another example of an incompetent mayor. This is how the NY Post puts it; “Embattled Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has been ripped as the most ‘incompetent politician in America’ after she managed to botch a fire emergency information website address by pointlessly telling locals to just visit ‘URL’ — even while admitting the deadly firestorm is ‘the big one.’” *** Well, let’s see. What Los Angeles mayor was it who was in Africa as the fires were expanding? Oh! Yes, it was Mayor Karen Bass, the same major who had just cut $17.6 million from the city’s fire department’s budget, but who found the funds to go to Ghana. Insightful leadership. Competence on display—not!
And then there’s Kamala Harris, border tzar, AI tzar (in case you’re wondering, AI is, as she explained, two letters), space tzar, and… who knows what she was? Whatever, she might have been the perfect manifestation of the Peter Principle during her four years as cackling, word-salad VP—unless Joe Biden deserves that appellation.
Am I being too harsh? Surely there are competent people among both bureaucracies and elected positions.
*Peter, Laurence J. and Hull, Raymond. 1969. The Peter Principle. William Morrow & Co Inc. (Pan Books ed., 1970).
**Wikipedia
***https://nypost.com/2025/01/09/us-news/la-mayor-karen-bass-blunders-way-through-warnings-on-the-big-one/
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