In what he calls a pre-mortem for the Department of Homeland Security, Arnold Kling has a follow up to my column (and post) on "emergent stupidity."

He also names the law after me, though it's hard to believe that I'm the first person to document this obvious phenemenon. Or that it's well-enough refined to be useful in its present form. But I appreciate the thought, anyway.

This "emergent stupidity" theory has something in common with another observation about bureaucratic incompetence, the Peter Principle ("In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.") and its corollary ("Work is achieved by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.").

Dr. Lawrence J. Peter (1919-1990), a Canadian psychologist, became a bestselling author in 1969 with "The Peter Principle," his observation that people eventually get promoted into jobs they cannot handle. Dr. Peter also published a pretty good (though inadequately sourced) collection of quotations in 1977.

I had a Captain once who liked to quote what he called "The Other Peter Principle:"

The more you play with it, the harder it gets.

Here's an entertaining dissenting view that Google turned up:

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Annotations/PETERPR.1.html

The site itself, "Principia Cybernetica" is pretty cool too.

And here's a "mathematical proof" to rival Rand's serial and parallel resistor analogy:

http://www.casact.org/pubs/actrev/aug97/peter.htm

(Of course to be true for the general case, this would imply that the National Education Association should have no complaints about teacher's salaries, particularly in our most underperforming public schools. I suspect that the authors have causality backwards, and that money actually creates stupidity.)

I like Simberg's law.

For about 15 years now I have had a similar law. I maintain that the effective I.Q. of any bureaucracy is equal to the I.Q. of the stupidest person in the bureaucracy divided by the number of administrative levels in said bureaucracy.

For example, if we say NASA has lots of smart people so the absolute stupidest person there has an I.Q. of 100, and it has 5 levels of management then we get an organization that can't find it's way out of a paper box... or a gravity well either.

How about this, Ken? We take Brendan's formula but further divide the result by the management portion of the organizational budget.

Throw in such other bureaucratic spending constants as firsthand observation can validate...

Actually it just looks like money creates stupidity.

What's really happening is due to the basic law of political economy that whatever you subsidize you get more of, and whatever you tax you get less of.

Once an organization's management reaches the point where their competency "Peters" out, further subsidy simply creates more (and greater) stupidity.

In the Blogosphere, unlike the legacy media, we have a market of opinion that is collectively more intelligent than its individual contributors, and in which money is scarce. If bloggers were actually able to make money from this (much less Make Money Fast!), stupidity would undoubtedly increase, though it would require many years to achieve the levels found at such venerable organizations as the New York Times.